Our world is cleaner without this butcher

ANYONE tuning in to the BBC’s coverage of Martin McGuinness’s death might be forgiven for thinking the world had lost another Nelson Mandela.

Among Labour figures queuing to pay homage, a fawning Tony Blair was wheeled on to Radio 4 to describe the IRA gangster and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland as a ‘formidable peacemaker’.

In another sickening tribute, Alastair Campbell said there was something ‘very, very special’ about him, adding: ‘ He was a very warm human being who I grew to be very fond of.’

Meanwhile, it was the BBC’s own John Simpson who raised the comparison with Mr Mandela, saying McGuinness should be seen ‘on that kind of side of the ledger’.

Yes, the fact that there’s been relative peace in Ulster for the past two decades is a great achievement. But before the Corporation’s distortions get written into the history books, let the Mail offer an alternative assessment.

For most of his life, as Ruth Dudley Edwards spells out on Pages 12-13, McGuinness was a psychopathic serial killer and torturer.

Nicknamed the ‘Butcher of Bogside’, he never expressed a word of remorse for ordering knee-cappings, ruthless murders of police and soldiers and the random slaughter of civilian men, women and children.

Indeed, he bore heavy responsibility for tearing Northern Ireland apart, setting back by decades any hope of understanding between the province’s two communities.

Yes, the Six Counties are comparatively peaceful today – thanks in part to a process begun by Sir John Major (not Mr Blair, though he likes to claim the credit).

But just how much this is due to McGuinness is highly questionable. Indeed, many believe he offered cooperation only to escape arrest after the IRA had been effectively beaten – a defeat completed when Irish Americans cut off funding after 9/11 taught them what terrorism means.

Whatever the truth, today’s uneasy peace has been bought at a horrendous price in pandering to the IRA, with Mr Blair blithely tearing up guarantees to the Northern Irish majority and secretly offering terrorists immunity from prosecution.

Every moral principle has been prostituted and turned on its head, as heroic British soldiers – called in, never forget, to protect Catholic civil rights protesters – are today mercilessly hounded over their actions in Northern Ireland more than 40 years ago.

And something else is clear. It is simply grotesque to draw comparisons between the blood- drenched, unapologetic, manipulative McGuinness and that paragon of reconciliation, Mr Mandela.

True, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Northern Irish Catholics suffered injustices. But they had votes in free and fair elections and, after direct rule from Westminster in 1972, a government bending over backwards to address their grievances.

Mr Mandela and the black majority in South Africa had no such access to democracy, barred from voting by a brutal apartheid regime.

Yet even after 27 years in jail, he had the magnanimity and wisdom to hold out the hand of friendship to his persecutors.

As for McGuinness, enjoying the trappings of office with that vain old poseur Ian Paisley Snr, he was never shown anything but mercy in a lifetime spent subverting democracy.

Yet the BBC, which painted Margaret Thatcher as a pantomime villain on her death, now treats this murderer as some kind of flawed hero.

In a tweeted eulogy, Mr Blair’s liar-in-chief Mr Campbell described the Bogside Butcher as a ‘great guy’. Try telling that to the widows, orphans and maimed he leaves behind in the province he terrorised.

This paper prefers the verdict of Lord Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was permanently paralysed by McGuinness’s IRA henchmen in the Brighton bombing of 1984. The world, he said, is a ‘sweeter and cleaner’ place without him.