Irish politician Martin McGuinness dies
Martin McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army commander who led his underground paramilitary movement toward reconciliation with Britain, died on Tuesday, 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. “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.
Irish President Michael D. Higgins said people across Ireland would miss “the leadership he gave, shown most clearly during the difficult times of the peace process, and his commitment to the values of genuine democracy that he demonstrated in the development of the institutions in Northern Ireland.”
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.”
“Whatever the past, the Martin I knew was a thoughtful, reflectiveandcommittedindividual,” Blair said.
But some who suffered at the hands of the IRA could not forgive. Former British government minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralysed by the IRA bombing of a hotel in Brighton in 1984, said he hoped McGuinness was “parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell for the rest of eternity.”
McGuinness’ transformation into a peacemaker was all the more remarkable because, as a senior IRA commander during the years of gravest CatholicProtestant violence, he insisted that Northern Ireland must be forced out of the United Kingdom against the wishes of Protestants.