SIR – Like many, I fail to understand the media furore over the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness lunching with the Queen at Windsor Castle recently, because such events are all about politics – without any personal input whatsoever.

In the past there have been some very strange people welcomed by her majesty at both Buckingham and Windsor on behalf of the British Government of the day.

When I was a small child in the late 1940s, for example, common topics of conversation by adults were ‘atrocities’ of the Second World War – such as the brutal treatment of POWs by Japan, or the horrors of Nazi concentration camps like Belsen – but it wasn’t very long before all that was forgotten and it was business as usual between former enemies.

At the Caden Memorial Museum to D Day in Normandy, there is now a plaque on its wall commemorating the reconciliation of France and Germany by President Chiraq and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Just as the people of the Republic of Ireland have had to forget the repression they suffered at the hands of the old British ‘Empire’ including the infamous ‘black and tan’ paramilitary police episode and the former B Specials of Northern Ireland, people have to live for today and tomorrow, not on hatred of the past because they are only history now.

D S Boyes, Upper Rodley Lane, Leeds