From paramilitary to peacemaker
The ruthless republican who won respect of his enemies
BY any reckoning, it was a remarkable turnaround. Martin McGuinness was an IRA commander who became friends with his most implacable enemy.
His partnership, at the top of Stormont’s power-sharing administration, with Ian Paisley would have been unthinkable in the days when republicans were at war with British soldiers in the North.
Former first minister Dr Paisley was the Dr No who vowed to smash Sinn Féin but eventually said Yes to sharing power with his enemy in an often jovial partnership which saw them dubbed the Chuckle Brothers.
Mr McGuinness was the hardliner who once defended the killing of RUC officers and British soldiers in his fight for a United Ireland but finally offered the hand of friendship to Britain and to unionists.
His partnership with the DUP leader as deputy first minister at Stormont was a shining example of peacemaking – of turning swords into plowshares – and in 2009 he dubbed dissident republicans who killed a police officer as traitors to Ireland.
Mr McGuinness’s patriotism evolved from gunboat diplomacy to a ballot box struggle which was to see Sinn Féin become pre-eminent among nationalists and demolish a century-old unionist majority at Stormont, following a vote surge for Mr McGuinness’s party this year.
The Saville Inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday atrocity said he ‘probably’ carried a sub-machine gun during the massacre of 13 unarmed civil rights protesters by British soldiers in Derry.
He has admitted to being the second-in-command of the Provisionals that day.
The steely-eyed and bluntly spoken young man was a ruthless proponent of republican violence, which caused more than half of the 3,600 killings between 1969 and 1998, in opposition to British rule in the North, but he was a senior member of Sinn Féin as they brought the conflict to an end.
And he was integral to nearly every major decision taken by the republican movement over the last 30 years.
The former butcher from the Bogside in Derry, who was a man of action during the street fighting of the 1970s and once defended the armed struggle, ended up toasting the British queen at Windsor Castle and shaking her hand in a remarkable gesture of reconciliation.
Mr McGuinness negotiated the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, secured IRA arms decommissioning in 2005 and shared government in Belfast with his former enemies, when he became deputy first minister.
He felt the 2012 handshake with the queen could help define ‘a new relationship between Britain and Ireland and between the Irish people themselves’.
Some critics argued that just as the IRA should have halted the violence a lot sooner, Mr McGuinness could have met the British head of state earlier.
His final significant act was to resign as deputy first minister and take first minister Arlene Foster with him, over the ‘cash for ash’ scandal, ending a testy coalition government with the DUP that failed to achieve the same rapport as that Mr McGuinness achieved with Dr Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
Mr McGuinness was born in 1950 in a terraced house in the Bogside housing estate, a one-time no-go area for British soldiers and hotbed of IRA planning and activity. He was educated at the local Christian Brothers school.
Unlike Gerry Adams, who came from a traditional hardline republican family, Mr McGuinness showed little interest in politics before the start of the Troubles.
Nor did he join the IRA until after the British army had been sent to the North in August 1969 after a pitched battle between the RUC and inhabitants of the Bogside.
He was sufficiently highly regarded to be one of the IRA delegation flown to London to talk to Willie Whitelaw, the first-ever Northern Secretary.
But it was a court in the Republic that sentenced him to six months in prison after he was caught in a car containing large quantities of explosives and ammunition.
The teetotal, non-smoker with a love for GAA games, cricket and fishing insisted on ‘purity’ from his fellow partisans in the IRA, and when in jail in Dublin ordered his colleagues to remove pin-up pictures from their cell walls.
Mr McGuinness has said he left the IRA in 1974.
Other accounts suggested he was made chief of staff in 1978 and streamlined it into an urban guerrilla force based on small, tightly controlled cells.
Former justice minister Michael McDowell said he was a member of its ruling Army Council. But his membership or otherwise of the IRA was irrelevant since he was regarded as having more influence than anyone else over it.
He was instrumental in helping secure the IRA’s first cessation of violence in 1994, while in secret contact with the British, and later reflected: ‘In 1994, dialogue offered the only way out of perpetual conflict.’ In 1997 he was elected Mid-Ulster MP but did not take his seat as he would not swear an oath to the queen.
As Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement he helped establish the powersharing institutions and renounced violence.
In 1999 he became the education
Second-in-command on Bloody Sunday Ordered removal of pin-ups in cells
minister at the Stormont Assembly, as part of a power-sharing coalition of unionists and nationalists at Stormont. However, the DUP refused to work with him because of his chequered past.
By 2005 the Provisionals had decommissioned arms after Mr McGuinness led negotiations – a process which started with the armed group vowing to volunteer not an ounce of explosives.
By 2007, Sinn Féin had pledged support for the police force and Dr Paisley, the fiery preacher of ‘never!’, was prepared as leader of the largest party to enter government with Sinn Féin.
The pair struck up an unlikely ‘Chuckle Brothers’ bonhomie while heading the ministerial Executive.
But it was not all laughs and in 2009 Mr McGuinness described dissident republicans, who had murdered two soldiers and a police officer, as ‘traitors to Ireland’.
When the queen visited Dublin that year the veteran republican was absent but by June 2012 he was ready to meet her.
They shook hands at a Belfast theatre and Mr McGuinness said the encounter was ‘a result of decades of work constructing the Irish peace process’. In 2014 he attended a banquet at Windsor Castle as part of a state visit by President Michael D Higgins and joined in a toast to the monarch.
In 2013 he travelled to Warrington to speak at the invitation of Colin and Wendy Parry, whose son Tim was killed by an IRA bomb, to acknowledge their pain.
But he endured a more strained relationship with Dr Paisley’s successor as first minister at Stormont, Peter Robinson, as the joint office was embroiled in controversy over property dealings.
Difficulties also surfaced over welfare reform, delays in investigating the conflict deaths and later over the green energy scheme, now known as ‘cash for ash’, which rattled the DUP and is predicted to cost €500million.
After Mr McGuinness gave first minister Arlene Foster an ultimatum to step aside, which was ignored, he announced his resignation in January this year. It was the last act of a career forged in the flames of the North’s Troubles and which reached its zenith after the guns had fallen silent.
He is survived by his wife Bernie and four children.
At talks with first Northern Secretary