A heroic Irish chieftain with all the flaws and nobility the role imposes
As the world absolves McGuinness’s violent past, our writer asks: ‘What was all the killing for, Martin?’
IN DEATH he is being hailed as an Irish chieftain, a man of war turned man of peace, as if absolved of all sin and the unquiet dead of the Troubles forgotten. The real question, the real judgement on McGuinness remains unasked and unanswered: was all the damage, all the bloodshed, he inflicted as a Provisional IRA commander anything other than purposeless killing?
In essence, McGuinness was an Irish chieftain with all the flaws and the nobility such a role imposes. As befitting his historic role in shaping the destinies of Ireland, Martin had all the glory of a great tribal funeral. Prime ministers and presidents came. Bishops intoned homilies. Former US president Bill Clinton gave the eulogy from the altar. Flags flew at half mast on government buildings and thousands lined the streets of Derry. An Irish hero was laid to rest.
No doubt soon, wherever green is worn, the first Martin McGuinness school will be named in his glorious memory. The young are already worshipping him on social media. Our very Irish forgetfulness is washing away all memory of the blood of a thousand killings.
But such glib panegyrics are an outright denial of history and the personal responsibility for the mayhem of the Troubles that lies on McGuinness’s shoulders. In the very same city as his funereal rites, McGuinness ordered his Derry Brigade followers to bomb the town flat, shoot innocent female census takers in the head, murder suspected informers, strap men into booby-trapped cars and tar and feather young women for the ‘crime’ of dating British soldiers.
Ironically, McGuinness, the heroic peacemaker, will now share the same earth of Derry’s City Cemetery with scores of those IRA victims, many of whose killings he personally sanctioned. The names of his victims, a roll call of atavistic cruelty, are almost entirely obliterated as if their lost lives were just the detritus of a forgotten past.
THE real McGuinness is being airbrushed away. I was one of the first writers to spend a significant amount of time with the man in the 1980s and 1990s when the IRA’s war was raging. In 1991, the IRA had just mortar bombed Downing Street, coming within feet of killing the entire British cabinet, and hundreds were yet to die before the Troubles ceased. The first secret talks with MI6, led on the IRA side by Martin, were just beginning. I was, back then, one of the few journalists Martin would speak to. We met many times and spoke at length about his violent life. In my book Rebel Hearts on the IRA I devoted a whole chapter, a mini-biography, to the Provisional IRA leader.
The logic for writing about McGuinness was self evident – no other living person was more of a threat to the British state. He was the IRA. The Martin McGuinness I knew was hard not to like. He had a confounding direct simplicity, a self-assurance about himself, that was easy to admire. He was a natural leader who seemed utterly indifferent, uncowed by the threat of daily assassination or betrayal, which shadowed every hour of his life. He was not a devious or slippery conversationalist and lacked the usual pretension of most politicians. Martin queued up in the doc- tor’s surgery like everyone else, sent his children to the local school and lived in a small, unpretentious house in the Bogside.
He drove around alone in a family saloon without guards, heavies, or any of the paraphernalia of power. We would often end our interviews back in his mother’s cramped millworker’s cottage in the heart of the Bogside where, entirely unselfconsciously, Martin would make us tea and toast.
In Derry, McGuinness was the IRA, a paramilitary rock star. In a city of Catholic Patricks and Martins, McGuinness could be conjured up by British soldiers or Derry residents alike by the slightest inflection on his name, ‘Martin.’ Everyone knew who you were talking about and even his bitterest enemies had a kind of grudging respect for a man who embodied physical force Irish republicanism. McGuinness’s obdurate philosophy was best summed up by his first public speech as a 22-year-old denouncing Derry SDLP politician John Hume’s early peace proposals: ‘We’re not stopping until we get a United Ireland.’
The violence he directed as leader of the IRA’s Derry Brigade was also the shaping force of his life. In the cartoon colouring book version of the Troubles there were a few riots in Derry in 1969 and then the British Army at Bloody Sunday shot dead 13 civil rights protestors in January 1972 and all hell broke loose. In reality hell had broken loose already; scores of British soldiers had been killed in IRA ambushes, IRA bombers were blowing up shops and hotels and murdering as many policemen as they could target.
A significant number of McGuinness’s close personal friends, fellow members of the Derry Brigade, would also die. His own closeness to such loss clearly blunted empathy for the anguish of the IRA’s victims. He was unapologetic. With Martin you always felt you knew where you where. He took the position that the IRA was morally right to fight the British Army and that was that.
In the eulogies at his funeral, in the tributes from Tony Blair and the like, versions of the same Martin McGuinness clearly appeared later on across the Downing Street negotiating table. McGuinness was straightforward, likeable, charming in person. He stood by his word. His reputation as an IRA hardliner was crucial in delivering the rest of the IRA into the peace process. He won the respect of his British adversaries, a stone-cold poker player who outmatched the unionists in the tortuous rounds of peace talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Both Gerry Adams and McGuinness won a string of indulgent concessions from Blair, including the £200m Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
But there was another side to McGuinness that was rarely seen. And one I glimpsed in an encounter we had together when we stumbled into a British army patrol in Derry in the 1990s. Catching sight of the enemy general, the soldiers, armed with machine guns and SA80 rifles, dismounted and asked McGuinness to open his car. Straight out, McGuinness answered: ‘F***ing open it yourself.’ Another string of expletives followed. The guerrilla statesman when provoked had not moved far from his rioter roots.
When I quoted McGuinness’s swearing in my book he phoned me up at home prior to publication incensed not that I had described him as Provisional warlord and killer, but that I had punctured his crafted image as a genial family man. ‘My children will have to read that,’ he said vowing never to speak to me again. And he never did.
In all my chats with McGuinness I never forgot that there was this other hidden Martin. A dangerously enraged cold fish who had for decades no compunction about killing other men. The Martin who signed off on the death warrants for British informers, sanctioned sending truck bombs to blow up the City of London, and approved of blowing the legs off policemen with undercar magnetic bombs.
For far too long both the Irish and British media have gone along with the naked and utterly false Sinn Féin/IRA lie that there ever was, or is, some substantive difference in their identity. The same lie has been repeated ad nauseam in all his funeral coverage. But as with McGuinness they are one and the same entity. Killers and peacemakers in the same person.
To understand McGuinness, to judge him as a man, we have to return to the
No other living person was more a threat to the British
sectarian world of Derry in the 1970s when a corrupt Protestant police force batoned peaceful Catholic demonstrators off the streets for protesting about discrimination in housing and employment. The protests soon descended into riots and McGuinness, unlike the vast majority of his fellow Derry citizens, made his fateful choice to take up the gun and join in a devil’s bargain with the hateful fanatics of the old IRA.
He swiftly became the protégé of the old southern IRA leaders eager to supply guns and bombs in return for the futile ‘glory’ of once again killing British soldiers on Irish soil. Barely 19, he was their Boy General, a good Catholic who loved his wife, went to Mass on Sunday, and took to the roofs at night to snipe at British Army posts. An idealised republican hero.
McGuinness was physically courageous, risking his life many times in gun battles against heavily armed British troops. He was a formidable leader, a man of immense capability, who directed his talents, and his followers, towards death and destruction. As Northern Ireland descended into near civil war, Derry was soon a cauldron of killing and mayhem. Other Derry politicians like the SDLP’s John Hume fought for peace but McGuinness committed himself to war, wrecking every attempt at peace talks for the next 20 years.
In their propaganda lie, Sinn Féin are already claiming that the war came to Derry and that McGuinness had no other choice but to fight. But that is not true. It was his moral choice. He volunteered. In all his savage brilliance, McGuinness did his damndest to make a bad situation worse and wildly succeeded. The Troubles, like a forest fire, was soon burning beyond control. But beyond a few childish slogans – Brits Out – the Provisionals had no plan other than to bomb their way to ‘Irish Freedom’.
McGuinness maintained his Catholic faith but there is no moral equivalence between the wrongs of anti-Catholic discrimination and the wrongs of blowing up pubs full of innocent civilians and fomenting nearcivil war. When asked, McGuinness always justified the murders as a war ‘against British occupation’. He never accepted responsibility for his own actions.
In the end in 1998, when the Ulster peace deal was struck, the constitutional position of Northern Ireland remained unchanged. The same powersharing deal that had been offered decades before by previous British governments, and decried by McGuinness as treachery, was repackaged and served up to his own followers as an overwhelming victory. The ‘occupation’ continued. None of the IRA’s killing, the bombed cities, brought a United Ireland one inch closer. His life as an IRA gunman achieved nothing.
The fawning funereal coverage also masks the far more dangerous present threat Sinn Féin poses to the stability of both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. McGuinness’s last political act was to plunge the Northern Irish peace process again into crisis by bringing down the Stormont Assembly in a manufactured row against his DUP opponents. Even as deputy first minister, McGuinness was never there to help run a better British-ruled Northern Ireland. His unswerving aim, handshakes with the British Queen aside, was to destroy her rule and bring a United Ireland into being. His loyalty was always to Óglaigh na HÉIREANN, whatever the cost in blood and lives.
Even now, Sinn Féin are no more than a pretend democratic party clandestinely commanded by the remnants of McGuinness’s old IRA Army Council and their Machiavellian leader Gerry Adams. Parts of Belfast’s Catholic communities are ruled in terror by British-taxpayer funded ‘republican community’ workers. And at the next general election Sinn Féin could easily force its way into power in a coalition government in the Republic.
The long war that Martin McGuinness fought so violently for most of his life is far from over.
When you bury Irish chieftains in the soft Derry earth of course you sing their praises, glide over their sins, and speak highly of their glories. And McGuinness, in his greatness, did do much to end the war he helped ignite. But it is also the duty of the living, in the days after, to remember the sorrows those chieftains inflicted. The Troubles were not the inevitable outcome of history. They were created, exacerbated, by the murderers, terrorists and killers led by men like McGuinness and Adams. And a lot of people died for no good reason.
Perhaps now, if only the dead could speak, even as they lie alongside McGuinness, in Derry’s City Cemetery, surely they would finally shame an answer from him: What, Martin, was all the killing for?
An enraged cold fish with no compunction about killing