Martin McGuinness: Queen handshake was 'offer of friendship to unionists' Martin McGuinness saw the meeting with the Queen as part of 'the national reconciliation process'. The day after shaking hands with the Queen, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness has spoken about its "momentous and historical" significance. He argued that, despite the brevity of the meeting, it had the potential to define "a new relationship between Britain and Ireland and between the Irish people themselves." In a speech in Westminster on Thursday, he said the handshake "was in a very pointed, deliberate and symbolic way offering the hand of friendship to unionists through the person of Queen Elizabeth for which many unionists have a deep affinity." "It is an offer I hope many will accept in the same spirit it was offered," he said. McGuinness, who is deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, saw the meeting with the Queen as part of what he called "the national reconciliation process." But he called on the British government to do much more to advance that process, accusing it of dragging its heels over dealing with the "legacy of the conflict." He said many supporters of the peace process were hurt by the government's refusal to hold official high-level inquiries into two major incidents: the killing of 11 unarmed people in 1971, known as the Ballymurphy massacre and the murder of the human rights lawyer Pat Finucane. McGuinness referred to these as "damaging decisions" made by Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary. He said: "People may be shocked to discover that Peter Robinson and myself have met American president Barack Obama more times that we have met David Cameron in our role as first and deputy first ministers." He referred to Cameron's "lack of engagement" in the reconciliation process as "a serious mistake." McGuinness, who has previously admitted to having been a member of the IRA, spoke of a transformed Northern Ireland achieved "at a heavy price on all sides" with more than 3,000 deaths. "Every single violent act was evidence of a failure of politics and a failure of British policy in Ireland," he said. I genuinely regret every single life that was lost during that conflict and today I want every family who lost a loved one to know that your pain is not being ignored and I am willing to work with others to finding a way to deal with our past so that we can complete our journey to true reconciliation. McGuinness, who announced earlier this month that he would resign his Westminster seat to stop what his party calls "double jobbing," said: "The problems between Ireland and Britain have not yet been resolved. But we now operate in a new context of compromise, agreement and peace. Dialogue has replaced conflict. Respect has replaced mistrust. What I want to see develop now and in the time ahead is a relationship based on equality and respect between our two islands for the first time in our history. For that to happen we will need new thinking. We will need new ideas. We will need new political realities to dawn. That will not happen if the British government continues to cling to old certainties born from a different era and a different time.