MCGUINNESS DIES
May 23, 1950 - March 21, 2017
Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams, back, and Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill carry the coffin of Martin McGuinness Tuesday to the family home in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Mr. McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army warlord who was Northern Ireland's deputy first minister for a decade, died Tuesday. Obituary,
Martin McGuinness, an Irish revolutionary whose tactics of armed resistance and then political conciliation made him a hero to nationalists in Northern Ireland, where he fought to end British rule, negotiated a sweeping peace treaty and climbed to the top of the province’s political system, died Tuesday in Derry, Ireland. He was 66.
An announcement of Mr. McGuinness’ death by political party Sinn Fein did not cite a cause of death, aside from a “short illness.”
Mr. McGuinness had been hospitalized in late February for amyloidosis, British and Irish newspapers reported. The disease causes an abnormal protein to build up in the heart and other organs, and was one reason Mr. McGuinness resigned Jan. 9 from his post as deputy first minister, one of Northern Ireland’s two top political positions.
Mr. McGuinness was an equally stabilizing and polarizing force in Northern Ireland politics, where he had served as deputy first minister since 2007. The position is part of a powersharing agreement that splits the British province’s executive branch between two long-warring factions: Catholic nationalists who seek to unite the north with its sovereign counterpart to the south, the Republic of Ireland, and Protestant loyalists who believe Northern Ireland ought to remain a part of the United Kingdom.
A former butcher’s apprentice, Mr. McGuinness was known for many years as a leading figure in the outlawed militant Irish Republican Army, which waged a nearly three-decade bombing campaign and guerrilla war against British authorities that it viewed as illegal occupiers. More than 3,600 people were killed and thousands more were injured during the conflict.
But it was as a statesman, not a gunman, that Mr. McGuinness helped bring an end to the conflict known as the Troubles. Working as lead negotiator for Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, he helped forge the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, which established Northern Ireland’s current political system and called for the IRA to set aside its weapons.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said in a statement that although she could not condone the “path he took” earlier in life, he went on to make a historic contribution to the search for peace.
“While we certainly didn’t always see eye-to-eye even in later years, as deputy First Minister for nearly a decade, he was one of the pioneers of implementing cross community power sharing in Northern Ireland,” the statement said.
Mr. McGuiness was inspired, he said, by the South African activist and president Nelson Mandela, a hero to Catholics in Northern Ireland who believed Mandela’s struggle (and eventual victory) against apartheid mirrored their own battle against discrimination.
“Before Mandela came out of prison he stretched out his hand in friendship to a people who had been arrogant, who had neglected the blacks, and who had been very narrow-minded,” Mr. McGuinness told The New York Times in 1994, shortly after the IRA announced a cease-fire that set Northern Ireland down the path toward peace. “We have got to do the same.”
Mr. McGuinness had served two stints in prison as an IRA member, once after being found with a car filled with 250 pounds of explosives and 5,000 rounds of ammunition. That toughguy reputation allowed him to sell the peace deal to party members who resisted any agreement that did not include independence from Britain.
Separately, a willingness to compromise on domestic issues allowed him to find common ground with political partners who had once branded him a terrorist, and whom his own militant group had sometimes nearly killed.
James Martin Pacelli McGuinness was born May 23, 1950, in the Catholic Bogside neighborhood of Londonderry — or Derry, as it is known to Irish nationalists.
He studied with the Christian Brothers, a religious order with republican political leanings, before leaving school at 15. He became radicalized, he later said, when he encountered anti-Catholic sentiment while looking for a job and saw police and soldiers’ violent response to Catholic protesters marching for civil rights.