Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese has revealed how her husband, Martin, spent two days in 2009 persuading Loyalist paramilitaries not to retaliate for the killings of two British soldiers.

Speaking in Edinburgh this week, Mrs McAleese said there had been fears the peace process “would crumble” in the wake of the Massarene Barracks killings by dissident Republicans.

"Martin spent 48 hours on the hour talking to every Loyalist paramilitary that he knew," she told the Royal Edinburgh Society. The then serving secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Shaun Woodward, "rang the following day to say thank you. The chief constable did so later," she said.

During a 90-minute interview, Mrs McAleese said: “There are people who because of their position can talk to people and there are people who can’t.”

The peace process is not something that will last years, but rather will take decades, she told the Edinburgh audience. “I won’t live to see the end of this process. It has been centuries in the incubation and the toxic spores of history have a very, very long shelflife. We are still talking Reformation politics.”

Repeatedly, she spoke with fondness of Queen Elizabeth II, revealing how she had made clear she would not curtsey to the monarch at their first meeting two years before she became president.

Then, Mrs McAleese was to introduce colleagues from Queen's University, Belfast, in 1995 during a London ceremony to mark the foundation of Ireland's main colleges during Queen Victoria's reign. "I was rather worried about the protocol because I was afraid that it was expected of me that I would genuflect, bow to Her Majesty, the queen, curtsey.

'I don't curtesy'
"I don't do that. I don't kiss bishops' rings, I don't curtsey to popes and I don't curtsey to monarchs. It is part and parcel of the make-up, the strong egalitarian sense that runs through me.

“On the other hand, I have great admiration for her and I would not have wished in any shape or form to embarrass her or indeed my university,” she told the Scottish audience on Monday night.

She said she went to see the master of the queen’s household, saying that “if this causes embarrassment we should get somebody else to do it”.

“He said, “Ah, curtsey, don’t curtsey, it has gone out of fashion, do whatever you like, they all do anyway, she’s a professional, it won’t bother her. Do whatever you like.” Shortly afterwards, she received an invitation to lunch with the queen “during which I was amazed to discover the great interest and the great depth of knowledge she had about Ireland”.

“She disclosed to me what a heartbreak it was to her that because of the political circumstances she could not visit Dublin, or [the Republic].”

Two years later, Queen Elizabeth wrote to congratulate her on her election, reminding her of the conversation they had had about relations between the two countries.

Reflecting on the queen’s 2011 visit, Mrs McAleese said the monarch “had been utterly amazing” over the four days, particularly at the Garden of Remembrance.

Reminding the Scottish audience that the memorial honoured those who “had used violence to get the British out of Ireland”, she described the moment: “People’s breaths are stopping. Then she did something that nobody expected. When she stepped back, she nodded. A simple thing, not a word, but a gesture of respect. It won over people almost instantly.”

'Generations of domination'
Speaking of Queen Elizabeth's use of the Irish language, Mrs McAleese said: "There was no word of, you know, 'sorry for all those generations of domination'. We weren't expecting that.

“Sometimes those words can get analysed. Gesture and iconic ways of dealing with things stay much, much longer in the heart and soul. Those five words of Irish were just extraordinary.”

She went on: “In those five words all of the anger, frustration and sense of injustice melt away. Why? Because she is showing such respect for the language, so brilliantly. Because she spoke with an Ulster blas, so much that I instantly knew who had coached her.”

Remembering criticisms voiced in the Republic after she held Twelfth of July celebrations in the Áras after her election, Mrs McAleese said: “The Dublin press didn’t have a clue what I was about. This was about making people welcome on their own island on their own terms.” Although she joked she had learned that a Lambeg drum is “an outdoor instrument”.

She praised Sinn Féin mayor of Cashel Michael Browne, who defied his party's orders not to attend her Rock of Cashel visit – though suffering from cancer that was to kill him just weeks later. He, she said, had been the only Sinn Féin figure to take part in the historic visit even though "I tried every which way to persuade them to be part of it," she said.

“[He] saw how the queen hadn’t come to lord it over the Irish, but with a heart that was broken for all the misery and all of the hurt and all of the unnecessary vanities of history and she was there to heal them if she could.”

Letter
Later, she said she had received a letter about the visit from an elderly woman who wrote: "I am a 90-year-old Irish republican and I don't like monarchs. And in particular I have no time for the monarch from that place next door and I thought that you shouldn't have asked her.

“But out of deference to you I thought I would watch the first five minutes on TV and then I watched for four days.

“And I cried sore, and when she left us I reflected back on those four days and I reckoned that they were choreographed by the angels.