Martin Mcguinness: leaving the stage
Martin Mcguinness’s retirement last week spelled “the end of an era”, said Siobhan Fenton in The Independent. Northern Ireland owes him a debt of gratitude. Along with Gerry Adams, he convinced the IRA to lay down its arms and commit to the peace process. And the unlikely friendship he formed with his opposite number, the Democratic Unionist Party’s Ian Paisley, became “iconic” for the younger “peace generation”. If a fire-breathing loyalist preacher and a former IRA commander could laugh and pray together, “then the rest of us had no excuse for clinging to prejudice and division”. Mcguinness, now 66, is stepping down ahead of Northern Ireland’s March elections, due to what he called a “very serious illness”, said Suzanne Breen in the Belfast Telegraph – reportedly amyloidosis, a rare disease that attacks the central nervous system. His calming presence will be missed. The DUP is unlikely to find a more accommodating coalition partner. Protestant civil servants who worked closely with him were “visibly emotional” as he left Stormont for the last time.
Mcguinness “may have been strategically astute and – in his later years – personally cordial”, said Jenny Mccartney in The Sunday Times. But the “misty-eyed talk” of “a man of war who embraced peace” sticks in my throat. For nearly 30 years, Mcguinness thought he had the right to kill anyone who stood in the way of a “united Ireland”. In 1990, when he was by many accounts still in charge of the IRA’S Northern Command, the group took the family of Patrick Gillespie hostage, then forced Gillespie to drive a van carrying a 1,000lb (454kg) bomb into a British Army checkpoint, killing himself and five soldiers. Gillespie, a Catholic father of three, worked as a chef at a local army base; the IRA described him as “part of the British war machine”. As recently as 2013, Mcguinness refused to condemn the attack.
Yet his retirement marks a “generational change at the top of the republican movement”, said Henry Mcdonald in The Guardian. Mcguinness’s replacement as Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’neill, is the first without a history of IRA involvement. The last devolved power-sharing government collapsed in acrimony over a bungled green energy scheme which wasted millions, said The Economist. The balance of power after the 2 March elections is unlikely to change much, though Sinn Féin is threatening not to return to Stormont. “Months of wrangling, and much brinkmanship, lie ahead.” But fractious and dysfunctional though the Stormont Assembly is, it is the only game in town. “The alternative is a political desert.”