Mourning Mcguinness
Most men kill “on the spur of a heated moment”, said Fergal Keane in The Irish Independent. Very few “can keep killing for decades”. But Martin Mcguinness could. Every day for 30 years, right up to the time the IRA declared an end to its war in the 1998 peace agreement, the Sinn Féin politician and senior IRA leader, who died last week, made a deliberate choice to go on doing so. He didn’t have to. “Unless you’re a maniac driven by compulsion, killing other people always involves a choice.” He could have adopted the non-violent path of political engagement pursued by the great SDLP politician John Hume. At any point from 1969, he could have opted for a ceasefire. He didn’t.
Yet because he helped negotiate an end to the campaign of murder, befriended Ian Paisley and became Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, Mcguinness was last week hailed as a peacemaker, said Jenny Mccartney in The Spectator. “A great guy,” Alastair Campbell called him. “An extraordinary life that culminated in great service,” said Jon Snow. Veteran reporter John Simpson compared him to Nelson Mandela. But then, it is characteristic “of a particular type of educated Englishman” that he is “rightly repelled by manifestations of extreme English nationalism, yet bizarrely soppy over its Irish equivalent”. It’s an attitude that papers over the extreme brutality, such as the fact that when two policemen were blown to bits in 1987 in a booby trap he’d arranged, Mcguinness was in the house opposite: as one of his biographers explains, “he quite often liked to be close when things went off to watch and see… it was part of his strategy”. But if Mcguinness did terrible things, said Stephen Daisley in the same paper, he did something extraordinarily brave, too. At great risk to himself from IRA hardliners, “he took off the fatigues and donned the cloak of statesmanship”. Unlike most terrorist leaders, he rejected “the allure of ideological purity” for the sake of his community, and by so doing “made it more difficult for those who preferred bullets over ballots”.
That’s why it’s so hard to assess Mcguinness’s life, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “He was a core part of both the problem and the solution.” He applied the same single-minded dedication to the peace process as he did to the “unflinching brutality” of his terror campaigns. That Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, should have gone to the EX-IRA man’s funeral to pay her respects – a once unthinkable idea – testifies to that achievement. As Bill Clinton noted “in a masterful eulogy”, we can’t help but be inspired by those who abandon war to pursue peace. We who grew up around Derry, Mcguinness’s primary fiefdom, certainly can, said Lindy Mcdowell in the Belfast Telegraph. We recall the victims, “the 10-year-old girl murdered with her father when a bomb was placed under the family car”. As I see it, terrorists like Mcguinness saw the peace process “as their pension plan”. They were getting too old for action, and losing their war: it was “the ultimate safe house”. We shed many tears at news of his death. But “none for Martin Mcguinness”.