Irish rebel McGuinness led republicans to peace
• Martin McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army commander who led his underground paramilitary movement toward reconciliation with Britain, died Tuesday, his Sinn Fein party announced. He was 66.
Turning from rebel to peacemaker, McGuinness served as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister for a decade in a Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government.
The party said he died following a short illness.
McGuinness suffered from amyloidosis, a rare disease with a strain specific to Ireland’s northwest.
The chemotherapy required to combat the formation of organ-choking protein deposits quickly sapped him of strength and forced him to start missing government appointments.
“Throughout his life Martin showed great determination, dignity and humility and it was no different during his short illness,” Sinn Fein Leader Gerry Adams said.
“He was a passionate republican who worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation and for the re-unification of his country. But above all he loved his family and the people of Derry and he was immensely proud of both.”
Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who worked with McGuinness to forge Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord, expressed “immense gratitude for the part he played in the peace process.”
But some who suffered at the hands of the IRA could not forgive.
Former British government minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralyzed by the IRA bombing of a hotel in Brighton in 1984, said that he hoped McGuinness was “parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell for the rest of eternity.”
Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole argued in January 2017 that McGuinness was “a mass killer — during his period of membership and leadership the IRA killed 1,781 people, including 644 civilians — whose personal amiability has been essential to the peace process. If he were not a ruthless and unrepentant exponent of violence, he would never have become such a key figure in bringing violence to an end.”
In 1972, Northern Ireland’s bloodiest year, McGuinness joined Adams in a six-man IRA delegation flown by the British government to London for secret face-to-face negotiations during a brief truce.
Those talks got nowhere and McGuinness went back on the run until his arrest on New Year’s Eve in the Republic of Ireland near a car loaded with 110 kilograms of explosives and 4,750 rounds of ammunition.
Historians and security analysts agree that McGuinness was promoted to the IRA’s ruling army council following his November 1974 parole from prison and would have overseen many of the group’s attacks.
These included bombings at London tourist spots and the use of “human bombs” — civilian employees like cooks and cleaners at British security installations — who were forced to drive car bombs to their places of work and were detonated by remote control before they could raise the alarm.