From Armalite to ballot box in one generation

Once he renounced violence Martin McGuinness proved himself a skilled and good-natured politician

Recruiting was boosted by the killing of 14 unarmed civilians by British Paras in the city in 1972. The British Army gave him the unsavoury soubriquet of “the butcher boy” — partly due to his previous job as a butcher’s runner, partly because of the forms of torture carried out by IRA men under his command. Military intelligence officers taped hours of McGuinness’s phone calls. Many British soldiers just wanted him dead.

He was long believed to have been a key member of the Provos’ seven-man National Army Council, alongside Gerry Adams. It is not clear exactly when both men quit their military positions. Both were associated with the murder of the Queen’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, at his holiday home in Sligo in 1979.

Move forward two years, and we begin to see a different McGuinness. He was beginning to show that as well as a man of action he was an arch diplomat.

In 1981, in the depths of the crisis over Sinn Fein hunger strikers, it was McGuinness who led the back-channel negotiations with British Intelligence. Both he and Adams had done their apprenticeship in the school of militant Irish nationalism and subversion known as the Maze Prison. But whereas to this day Adams has remained the philosopher and ideologue, McGuinness was the talker, the bargainer, the wheelerdealer.

He, more than any of the Provo hierarchy, seemed to realise that the time of the Armalite was coming to an end — that the violence could not deliver a lasting peace — let alone the distant goal of a united Ireland.

He would talk to the brains and leaders of the opposition. Most important was his working partnership with Ian Paisley, which gave their country a real prospect of peace. They shared the same sense of humour. Not for nothing were they called the Chuckle Brothers at Stormont.

In 2012 he shook hands with the Queen, whose uncle his men had killed. The warmth of the reconciliation seemed genuine.

What of his legacy? Sinn Fein is not the party he would have wanted it to be. He wanted a mainstream centre-Left nationalist party. He might have proved the best guide for negotiating Brexit, the hard border with the Irish Republic and the murky future of the UK. We can only learn from the good things he brought to the party, while not forgetting the bad.

That part of his legacy should endure — let’s hope.