Day his mask slipped ... and I saw McGuinness the monster
The Irish Mandela? You must be mad, says this expert
MARTIN McGuinness had his eye up against the peephole of the door of Sinn Fein’s shabby office in Derry’s Bogside. Standing in the narrow hallway, McGuinness was staring out at a squad of British Army soldiers milling in the street outside. ‘F*****s. B******s,’ he snarled. I was standing just behind the then leader of the Provisional IRA, wondering if the flimsy wooden door was about to come crashing in on us under the weight of a burly squaddies’ shoulder-charge. The year was 1991 and the IRA’s war was still raging. Back then no other living person was a greater danger to the British state than Martin McGuinness.
In February, the IRA had mortar-bombed Downing Street, coming within feet of killing the entire Cabinet. Seven years earlier the IRA’s secretive Army Council, on which McGuinness was a perpetual force, had sanctioned the Brighton bomb that nearly killed Margaret Thatcher.
Hundreds of people would die before Ireland’s Troubles ceased.
I was in Derry investigating rumours of secret peace talks between the IRA and the British Government. But just after I finished interviewing McGuinness at the Sinn Fein office, we ran into a British Army patrol cruising the streets of the IRA’s 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 away defiantly. ‘Open it your f****** self,’ he said as he walked back to the Sinn Fein office.
I jumped in behind him. McGuinness’s simple but absolute denial of British Crown authority shocked me. Heavily armed soldiers are 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 street fighter turned guerrilla statesman had not moved far from his roots. His disdain for the Crown was still couched in the language of the rioter.
IT WAS a stunning insight into the mind of the man who led the most ferocious terrorist movement in the Western world. Despite all the claims of warm family chats from politicians such as Tony Blair, McGuinness remained an enigma until the end of his life. A dangerous cold fish who had for decades no compunction about killing other men.
The real McGuinness was a closed book who only revealed what he wished others to see. 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, were absent in McGuinness. He was a stone-cold poker player who outmatched his adversaries, Unionist or British, in the tortuous rounds of peace talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Back in Derry I had by chance caught the future ‘statesman of peace’ in character. It was a momentary slip of the mask for which McGuinness would never forgive me. When I quoted his swearing in a book I later wrote about the IRA, McGuinness phoned me at home, incensed that I had punctured his crafted image of a church-going, genial, family man. He vowed never speak to me again.
At his funeral, McGuinness was hailed as an Irish Nelson Mandela. Prime ministers and presidents came, flags flew at half mast on government buildings, and thousands lined the streets of Derry. In his eulogy, former US President Bill Clinton said the congregation had to ‘finish the work that is to be done’.
But such glib panegyrics are an outright denial of history and the very personal responsibility for the Troubles that lies on McGuinness’s shoulders.
In the very same city, the Derry Brigade he masterminded ordered its followers to bomb the town flat, shoot policemen in the head, murder suspected informers, and tar and feather young women for the ‘crime’ of dating British soldiers.
Ironically, McGuinness the heroic peacemaker will now share the same earth of Derry City Cemetery with scores of those IRA victims, many of whose killings he personally sanctioned.
The real question, the real judgment, on McGuinness remains unasked and unanswered: was all the damage, all the blood- shed, he wrought as a Provisional IRA commander anything other than purposeless killing? The fawning funereal coverage also masks the far more dangerous present threat Sinn Fein poses to the stability of both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
McGuinness’s last political act was to plunge the peace process again into crisis by bringing down the Stormont Assembly in a manufactured row against his Democratic Unionist Party opponents.
Even as Deputy First Minister, McGuinness was never there to help run a better British- ruled Northern Ireland. His unswerving aim – handshakes with the Queen aside – was to destroy her rule and bring a United Ireland into being. His loyalty was always to Óglaigh na hÉireann, the Gaelic name for the IRA, whatever the cost in blood and lives.
Even now Sinn Fein is no more than a pretend democratic party clandestinely commanded by the remnants of McGuinness’s old IRA Army Council and their Machiavellian leader Gerry Adams. Parts of Belfast’s Catholic communities are ruled in terror by British-taxpayer funded ‘republican community’ workers. And at the next Irish general election, Sinn Fein could easily force its way into power in a coalition government in Dublin. The long war that McGuinness fought so violently for most of his life is far from over.
TO UNDERSTAND McGuinness we have to return to the sectarian world of Derry in the 1970s when a corrupt Protestant police force batoned peaceful Catholic demonstrators off the streets for protesting about discrimination in housing and employment. The protests soon descended into riots and McGuinness, unlike the vast majority of his fellow citizens, made his fateful choice to take up the gun and join in a devil’s bargain with the hateful fanatics of the old IRA.
McGuinness swiftly became the protege of the old southern IRA leaders eager to supply guns and bombs in return for the futile ‘ glory’ of once again killing British soldiers on Irish soil. McGuinness, barely 19, was their boy general, a good Catholic who loved his wife, went to Mass on Sunday, and took to the roofs at night to snipe at British Army posts.
As Northern Ireland descended into near civil war, Derry was soon a cauldron of killing and mayhem. Other Derry politicians, such as the Social Democrat John Hume, fought for peace but McGuinness committed himself to war, wrecking every attempt at peace talks for the next 20 years.
There is no moral equivalence between the wrongs of anti-Catholic discrimination and the wrongs of blowing up pubs full of innocent civilians. But when asked, McGuinness would always justify the IRA’s murders as a war ‘against British occupation.’
In 1998, when the Ulster peace deal was struck, the constitutional position of Northern Ireland remained unchanged. The same power-sharing deal that had once been offered decades before by previous British Governments and decried by McGuinness as treachery was repackaged and served up to his own followers as an overwhelming victory.
None of the IRA’s killing, the bombed cities, had brought a United Ireland one inch closer. His own life as an IRA gunman achieved nothing. Now, if only the dead could still speak, even as they lie alongside McGuinness beneath the earth of Derry City Cemetery, surely they would finally shame an answer from him: what, Martin, was all the killing for?
I punctured his image as a genial family man. He never forgave me