He did not hold back in aiming abuse at the British
For ten years journalist KEVIN TOOLIS investigated the lives of the men and women who fought for the IRA against British rule. The result was the book, Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within The IRA’s Soul, published to great acclaim in 1995. Here, in an edited extract, he talks to, and assesses the role of, Martin McGuinness.
F***ERS.’ Martin McGuinness had his eye up against the peephole in the door of Sinn Féin’s shabby office in the Bogside and was staring out at a squad of British Army soldiers milling around in the street outside. ‘B***ards. C***s.’
I was standing in the narrow hallway behind the man the army in Northern Ireland believes to be the leader of the Provisional IRA and wondering if the flimsy wooden door was about to crash in on us.
We had just finished a lengthy newspaper interview but as we left the building we had walked straight into the path of a British Army patrol cruising the streets of Derry’s republican stronghold.
At the sight of McGuinness, the soldiers jumped out of their armoured Land-Rovers and ordered him to open the boot of his car. The patrol’s intelligence officer, at last rubbing shoulders with the enemy’s chief general, struck up a false bonhomie.
‘How’s it going, Martin?... Open the boot of the car, Martin... Nice day, Martin, eh?’
MCGUINNESS turned defiantly away. ‘Open it your f***ing self,’ he said as he walked back into the Sinn Féin office.
McGuinness’s simple but absolute denial of British Crown authority had shocked me. They were not the type of people you tell to ‘f*** off’. McGuinness had been irritated but not, I felt, frightened or intimidated by the presence of these enemies.
But I was also struck by the crudity of McGuinness’s response; this streetfighter turned guerrilla statesman had not moved far from his roots. His disdain for the Crown was still couched in the language of the rioter.
All the subtle everyday expressive nuances that guide us to the mental state of our fellow humans, the arch of an eye to express puzzlement, the crease of a brow indicating concentration, were absent in McGuinness. His intelligence was confusing, his mind detached from his unlined face; no trace of emotion showed.
His equanimity is all the more surprising when you consider his position. Every aspect of his life must have been spied upon and analysed for some chink that would allow the Crown to trap, imprison or kill him.
Outside his family, every relationship, every encounter in his life must be tainted with the prospect of betrayal from an informer working for the Crown. Every knock on his door, every drive to the shops, carries the threat of assassination.
McGuinness once gave me a lift in his car and even within the relative safety of the Bogside I started sweating, silently praying that the inevitable loyalist hit would not happen during my few minutes as a passenger. The constancy of this threat did not seem to unduly worry McGuinness.
‘I am careful about my security but I don’t get up in the morning and say, “I could be shot at the end of the day.” But I am aware that it could happen. It does not stop me from doing things what I want to do.’
In person, McGuinness is charming, straightforward and without a trace of affectation. He is not a devious or slippery conversationalist and comes across as being sincere and honest.
He can be blunt and he has a temper. We have argued over articles I have written. ‘I’m not one of these people who lie about you behind your back. What you wrote, Kevin, was crap, total and absolute crap,’ he once told me, his voice registering his disgust.
McGuinness’s tone in interviews from the early years of the Troubles reveals a young man aggressively eager to take the war to the British Army.
‘It seemed to me as plain as daylight,’ he told Nell McCafferty in an Irish Times interview in 1972, ‘that there was an army in our town, in our country, and that they weren’t there to give out flowers. Armies should be fought with armies.’
The Provisionals might have viewed themselves as freedom fighters but in reality they were a bunch of local kids with a few old rifles, led by McGuinness, up against one of the world’s most professional armies.
The first volunteer to be killed was Eamonn Lafferty, an 18-yearold who died in a gun battle eight days after Internment was introduced [in 1970].
‘Lafferty had been an acquaintance of mine,’ said McGuinness, ‘and his death had a tremendous impact on young people in Derry because he was seen as someone who was prepared to take on the might of the British Army.’
We were recalling names and dates of events 20 years old, but the details slipped from McGuinness’s mouth with a weary, steely precision.
McGuinness’s rapid promotion to command of the nascent Derry Brigade and the bloody events of the early Seventies have been the shaping force of his life. Over the last 25 years, 40 IRA Volunteers have been killed in Derry. McGuinness would have been a personal friend to many. I asked him what was his strongest personal memory of that violent life.
HE said: ‘I was with Eugene McGillan (an 18-year-old IRA Volunteer) the night he was shot by the British Army, 50 yards from here.’ We sat at his mother’s table, overlooked by black and white pictures of his father Tom, now dead, and a Catholic family blessing depicting the sacred heart of Jesus.
‘I lifted him into the ambulance. He looked at me, his eyes were wide open, and I looked at him. He knew he was going to die and I knew he was going to die. It was deathly quiet and when I left the ambulance Colm Keenan was lying down the street, shot in the head. They were two unarmed republicans murdered by the British Army and both were exceptionally close friends of mine.’
Regardless of the exact circumstances of the men’s deaths, it was clearly not an experience likely to induce empathy for the anguish of his enemies when the IRA killed soldiers or politicians.
McGuinness is exemplary of the great Irish republican passion. He cannot be dismissed, as the British press would usually put it, as an ‘isolated or mindless terrorist’. Twenty-five years of bloodshed, the destroyed cities, the murdered enemies, the lost Laffertys, Bloody Sunday, the negotiations with his one-time masters and the IRA’s attempts to kill them at Brighton and Downing Street have strengthened, never weakened, his commitment.
McGuinness is a leader because his faith in a United Ireland is profound, complete, unshaken and unshakeable; he is not stopping before a United Ireland. His belief cannot be subverted this side of assassination.
Edited extract from Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul by Kevin Toolis, published in 1995 by Picador.