Show no forgiveness for this deadly coward who dodged justice

Dealing with terrorists is a hazardous business and it is important that we do not nourish a false historical narrative of events.

Yes, of course, Martin McGuinness played a key role in “the peace process” in Northern Ireland. That is a fact. What is important, however, is to understand why a long-time hardened terrorist and brutal murderer should have decided to negotiate a ceasefire leading to a “peace deal”.

The Army and our intelligence services had penetrated the IRA organisation right up to the governing Army Council. No one in that organisation knew who he could trust as a fellow terrorist, who had been suborned and who was a British spy.

Probably had Airey Neave, who would have been Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, not been murdered on the eve of the 1979 general election at which she became prime minister, that penetration would have been pursued earlier and more vigorously.

The pace was, however, stepped up after the audacious, and very nearly successful, attempt to murder Mrs Thatcher and as many of her colleagues as possible in Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in 1984. The refusal of the prime minister to give in to demands for prisoner-of-war status to convicted IRA killers concentrated minds, and by early 1988 McGuinness and his fellow killers knew that the IRA was on the verge of defeat. Indeed, McGuinness himself had good reason to think he might well be charged with several murders which he had personally committed. Like most terrorists, McGuinness was a coward at heart. He was, however, also a realist and he suddenly sued for peace. In the Good Friday Agreement he was totally successful in obtaining immunity from prosecution for himself and his friends. In a monstrous betrayal of the men of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Police Service of Northern Ireland by the then-prime minister, Tony Blair, those who fought the terrorists were not granted any parallel immunity. Many apologists for McGuinness and his fellow terrorist killers say that all this was worth the uneasy peace that has ensued in Northern Ireland.

That does not take account of the probability that there was a better outcome in which the IRA (including McGuinness) would have been defeated and brought to trial. No doubt had those apologists been around during the Second World War they would have been looking for a “peace process”, particularly after the arrival here of Hitler’s emissary Hess.

It would have been so easy and comforting to believe that Hitler had become a man of peace wanting a negotiated end to the war, leaving him in office with a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted for what had happened in the concentration camps.

Fortunately in Winston Churchill, we had a man of better quality than Blair. His was the policy of achieving a total surrender.

Appeasement only increases the appetite of the aggressor. We should never forgive those like McGuinness and his like who demand forgiveness but neither confess their sins, nor repent, nor offer atonement.

‘He was totally successful in obtaining immunity from prosecution for himself and his friends’