Hume was a far greater leader than McGuinness

IF PUSHED I can give Martin McGuinness two cheers for his emotional intelligence but I will remain standing when others genuflect to his posthumous political beatification. I watched a spontaneous outpouring of respect, and even love, from fellow citizens at his funeral in Derry, but my priorities were restored seeing one of his neighbours, John Hume.

I know the former SDLP leader and he has all of the qualities claimed by McGuinness’s post-mortem publicists – and more. Hume could be the narrator of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken.

Now a feeble old man taken by dementia, he came into the church supported by his sainted wife, Pat.

And my regard for John Hume is not to detract from McGuinness’s many admirable qualities that include humour and making others feel glad to have met him.

I remember DUP traditionalists such as Jeffrey Donaldson telling me they couldn’t help liking ‘Martin’ yet intensely disliking ‘Adams’.

McGuinness had integrity, a quality that Adams claims but never earned – one admitted leading the IRA in Derry, the other has always denied even being a member of the IRA in Belfast.

Both are unrepentant killers of innocents: remember the execution of Joanne Mathers, 29, who forfeited her life in 1981 collecting census forms in McGuinness’s IRA enclave in Derry?

Or Patsy Gillespie, chained in a lorry on his son’s 18th birthday by McGuinness’s men, who held the family hostage before blowing him up as he drove, as they instructed, into to an army base.

Neither was McGuinness candid about his role as an IRA commander – as late as 2005 he gave the okay for the IRA’s robbery of £26.5m from the Northern Bank in Belfast.

He could never admit that the IRA campaign he led for two generations had been morally abhorrent and politically wrong – and he was haunted by the fact that the Provisionals killed more Catholics than loyalists.

THESE life-and-death choices for others must have been a great burden to carry for a prayerful, practising Catholic.

And I believe that was why he was just as passionate an advocate for peace in his later years, as he had been a warmonger addicted to violence in his youth.

YET the constant twinning with Adams ignored the enormous difference in their backgrounds. Adams was raised in a house where republicanism was as revered as Catholicism and the Irish language was spoken with a Jailtacht dialect; he was born for the Troubles.

The apolitical McGuinnesses voted for nationalist candidates before the Troubles in 1969 – and tradesmen sons were the norm in a respected family in a city of sectarian-inspired unemployment.

If there had been no civil rights agitation followed by unionist suppression, tradesman McGuinness would have married his childhood sweetheart Bernie and lived contentedly in Derry.

But the righteous anger of youth took McGuinness into the IRA, an organisation of ageing veterans crying out for clean cut and intelligent young volunteers.

And if Hume took The Road Less Travelled, McGuinness saw his advancement in the IRA as sort of pilgrim’s progress – and there was no turning back for him.

He seemed relieved leaving his murderous career behind and he pursued partnership in government with an unquenchable enthusiasm.

Reaching out to the Paisleys and other DUP figures, it seems, was his way of atoning for his years straddling the contradictions of a devout Catholic leading a murderous IRA campaign.

Martin McGuinness will not be forgotten but it is imperative that his many victims are remembered.

PASCHAL DONOHOE is the one certain winner in Fine Gael’s marathon succession race.

Michael Noonan will bow out when Enda eventually steps down and the keys to the Department of Finance will be passed on to the minister best qualified for the most senior portfolio – Donohoe.

Maybe that explains why he is not a leadership contender.

Neither the Taoiseach nor Minister for Finance is likely to be a Fine Gaeler after the next election. And therefore the new party leader would, by definition, be a loser. Ever modest, always diligent and unsullied, Paschal would then be ideally placed (and the logical choice) for the top job.

Meanwhile, he will have to bide his time while the party agonises over when Enda Kenny should go and who should replace him.

The party’s self-indulgence comes at huge cost to the public.

Allowing the obscure historical milestone of whether Enda can serve longer as taoiseach than John A Costello to factor in the deliberations is Fine Gael’s ultimate insult to the public.

But then Fine Gael was always a sort of arcane boys band.

THURSDAY was a good day to bury bad news for the gardaí – they announced that 14,500 traffic offences would have to be quashed. They were also spoofing about the number of drink-driving breath tests carried out.

The Garda Press Office had known about the embarrassing screw-ups for at least eight months but released the news on the day of Martin McGuinness’s funeral. That was when the rest of the media was following up the London terror attack and preparing for a national bus strike.

The Guardian newspaper went one better and let their journalists know there was going to be more redundancies on Wednesday afternoon while the newsroom was scrambling to cover the horror story in Westminster.

AN INCANDESCENT light in popular journalism went out last week when its most stylish practitioner Jimmy Breslin, died in New York.

He once hired a private ambulance to take him from home to a 9am crisis meeting with his bosses in the Daily News because his hangover was so debilitating.

I had dinner with him recently and later he tried to escape into the New York night on his Zimmer frame with his wife and doctor in hot pursuit. An evening with Jimmy Breslin was a riotous privilege.