The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
IRA commander later became a peacemaker
Militant turned into politician who won over his enemies.
DUBLIN — Martin McGuinness took up arms to fight British soldiers in the streets but ended up shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth II. A militant who long sought to unify Ireland through violence, he became a peacemaking politician who earned the respect, and even the friendship, of his former enemies.
McGuinness, who died Tuesday at 66, was an Irish Republican Army commander who led the paramilitary movement toward reconciliation with Britain and went on to serve as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister for a decade in a Catholic-Protestant power-sharing unity government.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who worked with McGuinness to forge Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord, said “there will be some who cannot forget the bitter legacy of the war. And for those who lost loved ones in it, that is completely understandable.”
“But for those of us able finally to bring about the Northern Ireland peace agreement, we know we could never have done it without Martin’s leadership, courage and quiet insistence that the past should not define the future,” Blair said.
McGuinness’ Sinn Fein party said he died in a hospital in his hometown of Londonderry after a short illness.
McGuinness suffered from amyloidosis, a rare disease with a strain specific to Ireland’s northwest. The chemotherapy required to combat the formation of organ-choking protein deposits sapped him of his strength and forced the once-indefatigable politician to start missing government appointments. He stepped down from frontline politics in January.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said McGuinness was “a passionate republican who worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation and for the re-unification of his country.”
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said McGuinness “will always be remembered for the remarkable political journey that he undertook in his lifetime. Not only did Martin come to believe that peace must prevail, he committed himself to working tirelessly to that end.”
But some who suffered at the hands of the IRA could not forgive.
Former British government minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralyzed by an IRA bombing of a Brighton hotel in 1984, said he hoped that McGuinness was “parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell for the rest of eternity.”
McGuinness’ transformation into a peacemaker was remarkable. As a senior IRA commander during the years of gravest Catholic-Protestant violence, he insisted that Northern Ireland must be forced out of the United Kingdom against the wishes of Protestants.
“We don’t believe that winning elections and any amount of votes will bring freedom in Ireland,” he told the BBC in 1986. “At the end of the day, it will be the cutting edge of the IRA that will bring freedom.”
Yet within a few years of making that stubborn vow, McGuinness was involved in covert contacts with British intelligence that led eventually to a truce, inter-party talks and the installation of the IRA icon in the heart of Northern Ireland’s government.
Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole argued in January 2017 that McGuinness had been “a mass killer — during his period of membership and leadership the IRA killed 1,781 people, including 644 civilians — whose personal amiability has been essential to the peace process.”
“If he were not a ruthless and unrepentant exponent of violence, he would never have become such a key figure in bringing violence to an end,” O’Toole said.
Unlike his close ally Adams, McGuinness never hid the fact that he had been a commander of the IRA — classed as a terrorist organization by the British, Irish and U.S. governments. Nor could he.
Born on May 23, 1950, he joined the breakaway Provisional IRA faction in his native Londonderry — simply Derry to Irish nationalists — after dropping out of high school and working as an apprentice butcher in the late 1960s. At the time, the Catholic civil rights movement faced increasing conflict with the province’s Protestant government and police.
He rose to become Derry’s deputy IRA commander by age 21 as “Provo” bombs systematically wrecked the city center. Soldiers found it impossible to pass IRA road barricades erected in McGuinness’ Bogside power base.
McGuinness appeared unmasked at early Provisional IRA press conferences. The BBC filmed him walking through the Bogside discussing how the IRA command structure worked and stressing his concern to minimize civilian casualties, an early sign of public relations savvy.
In 1972, during Northern Ireland’s bloodiest year, McGuinness joined Adams in a six-man IRA delegation flown by the British government to London for secret face-to-face negotiations during a brief truce. Those talks went nowhere. McGuinness went back on the run until his arrest in the Republic of Ireland near a car loaded with 250 pounds (110 kilograms) of explosives and 4,750 rounds of ammunition.
Historians and security analysts agree that McGuinness was promoted to the IRA’s ruling army council following his November 1974 parole from prison and would have overseen many of the group’s most spectacular attacks. These included bomb attacks on London tourist spots and the use of “human bombs” — civilian employees like cooks and cleaners at British security installations — who were forced to drive car bombs to their places of work that were detonated by remote control before they could raise the alarm.