Mentioning McGuinness in the same breath as Mandela? I really do despair

YESTERDAY, a great statesman and architect of political reconciliation died — or so the BBC would have us believe. Our national broadcaster lavished airtime on a succession of politicians so they could heap praise on the former Provisional IRA terrorist Martin McGuinness.

Particularly nauseating to me were the syrupy reminiscences of Tony Blair, who thought the IRA killer should be remembered as a ‘formidable peacemaker’ whose behaviour would ‘inspire’ others.

The former PM’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell (who was at Blair’s side during the Northern Ireland peace process) remembered McGuinness as ‘likeable’. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former egregious sidekick, tweeted that he was ‘a good guy’.

Meanwhile, Peter Hain, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during Blair’s final two years of office, waxed lyrical about McGuinness’s supposed achievements, and asserted he had ‘proved to be an indispensable figure’ — as though all this somehow eclipsed his murderous past.

They were talking about a man who had killed countless people. The precise number he has taken to the grave, and will have to account for with God, in whom he professed to believe, despite his murderous proclivities.

Sabotage

Perhaps we should expect no better from a group of Blairites. But when a journalist as distinguished and normally fair-minded as the BBC’s John Simpson yesterday drew a comparison between McGuinness and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela on Radio 4’s Today programme, I really did despair.

Mandela was jailed for plotting sabotage under a dictatorship where blacks were denied basic human rights by the white government. Having spent 27 years in prison, some of it in solitary confinement, he showed forgiveness to his former enemies as his country’s president and embodied a spirit of reconciliation.

McGuinness, by comparison, embraced violence and murder in a part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, where there were free elections and a democratically elected government. Though utterly wrong, the discrimination suffered by the Catholic minority pales into insignificance in comparison with the persecution of blacks in South Africa.

All these misguided panegyrics for a very bad man stand in shocking contrast with the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013. When that democratically elected leader died — the woman who revolutionised the British economy, saw off the rapacious unions, stood up to the Argentinians after they had invaded the Falklands and, with Ronald Reagan, destroyed the Evil Empire — the BBC unearthed a swathe of disgruntled critics to savage her ‘divisive’ reputation.

But McGuinness is portrayed virtually as a hero — if, inevitably, a flawed one. What message does this grotesquely lopsided treatment send to other terrorists, even now plotting atrocities on our soil, that a man who never showed the slightest contrition or expressed one word of apology for his sins should be celebrated in this way?

It’s true that, after a quarter of a century as a terrorist in the upper echelons of the IRA, McGuinness did embrace the ‘peace process’ along with his long-time friend, Gerry Adams, widely believed to have been an active terrorist.

But this was only after the IRA had waged war brutally on their enemy — the British state — for more than 25 years, targeting soldiers and policemen in Northern Ireland and Britain, and killing countless innocent civilians in the proc- ess. It was a ruthless terrorist campaign without the remotest merit or justification.

In the end, they made peace largely because they were forced to. As the former Tory Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit — whose wife was left paralysed by the 1984 Brighton bomb — reminded us yesterday, the IRA gave up violence because it realised it would never achieve its aim of a united Ireland through the Armalite rifle.

Price

Its high command had been penetrated by British intelligence. IRA killers also began to realise that, despite all the outrages, neither a Tory nor a Labour Government would ever pull out the troops and leave Northern Ireland to the mercy of the terrorists, though that is what many of the Left advocated.

Far from having seen the light or accepted the moral error of their violent ways, McGuinness and Adams simply had the intelligence and pragmatism to try to fulfil their ambitions though negotiation with an accommodating Labour Government under Tony Blair.

I happen to think the peace process was justified. It would be difficult to believe otherwise given the almost total lack of violence over the past 19 years. That said, the price became very high indeed when it emerged that Blair and Powell had secretly agreed to amnesties for hundreds of IRA terrorists. Meanwhile, British soldiers still face prosecution — an outrageous piece of onesided justice, which McGuinness naturally supported.

And I would also argue the price of the peace is very high if a former terrorist is to be lauded as a good man and some sort of saviour on the BBC and elsewhere when the gruesome facts of what he did are there for all to see.

McGuinness himself didn’t even try to deny that he was a very senior member of the IRA. He could hardly do so in view of his appearance in a Dublin court in 1973, after having been close to a car filled with 250lb of explosives and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.

Former Tory Cabinet minister Peter Lilley, whom I know to be an honourable man, has testified in the House of Commons that McGuinness once told him that he had 12 Catholic informers killed in Northern Ireland. How can such crimes be forgiven when they are not even admitted?

McGuinness was a senior member of the IRA when Prince Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was killed in a bomb explosion off Co. Sligo in 1979. Four others died, including a 15-year- old local employed as a boat boy.

McGuinness was also a leading member of the IRA when the Brighton bomb — intended to kill the entire British Cabinet including Margaret Thatcher — was detonated by Patrick Magee, who was released early in 1999 as part of Blair’s Good Friday Agreement with the IRA. Five people were killed and 31 injured.

To the incautious observer, McGuinness may have appeared as a chubby and jokey fellow in recent years after his election as a Sinn Fein member at Stormont. He was even known as one of the ‘Chuckle brothers’ because he laughed so much along with ultra-Protestant, Democratic Unionist First Minister, the Rev Ian Paisley.

Underneath, though, he was still the same ruthless killer. He even had the gall to profess a love of cricket, following England’s fortunes in the Ashes. Yet this is the same man whose IRA colleagues posed such a threat to the England rugby team when they played Ireland in Dublin in 1973 that players feared being targeted on the pitch by snipers.

Evil

McGuinness may have worked constructively for peace during the last 20 years of his life, but there was never any public contrition. If he had really been the peacemaker Tony Blair claims he was, he would have wanted to try to give comfort by admitting his fault to the families of victims. He didn’t.

When a man has just died, even one as wicked as Martin McGuinness has been, there is no relish in condemning him. For all I know he may — as a religious person — have made his peace with God. But he never made his peace with those he had wronged.

I fear our values have become warped in the aftermath of the ‘peace process’. What hope is there for us as a nation if we can’t acknowledge the evil in a man who took up arms without cause or justification and killed numberless innocent people without apparent remorse?