Queen Elizabeth II: Lord Louis Mountbatten

www.immigrantscanada.comNorthern Ireland Dept: ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland - Queen Elizabeth II prayed together Tuesday with Catholic and Protestant leaders from across Northern Ireland as this long-divided land demonstrated its rising faith in a shared future and braced for a peacemaking milestone that has been a quarter-century in the making, according to Winnipeg Free Press. Their first-ever contact, long avoided by McGuinness' Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, follows the Provisional IRA's killing of some 1,775 people since 1970, including the queen's own cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten a 1979 assassination that IRA experts say McGuinness himself sanctioned. McGuinness today is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland's unity government, an institution forged following the Provisionals' 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm and a boy waits to catch a view of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II outside a Service of Thanksgiving in Saint Macartin's Cathedral in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, Tuesday, June 26, 2012. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in Northern Ireland for a two day visit to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. AP Photo/Peter Morrison The British monarch visited the lakeside town of Enniskillen, scene of one of the Irish Republican Army's most shocking atrocities, for events symbolizing how far Northern Ireland has come from its darkest days of bloodshed. On Wednesday she's expected to meet and shake hands with Martin McGuinness, former commander of the dominant Provisional IRA faction, in what many see as the symbolic conclusion to a four-decade conflict. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news. www.immigrantscanada.com    .  .