The ruthless IRA commander who helped broker peace

On 27 August 1979, the Provisional IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten while he was on a family holiday in Sligo, said Henry Mcdonald in The Guardian. The explosion, on his boat, also killed the 83year-old dowager Lady Brabourne, the earl’s teenage grandson and a local boy. A matter of hours later, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers near the Irish border. To Martin Mcguinness – the IRA’S chief of staff at the time – such violence was the organisation’s “cutting edge”. Yet by the time of his death this week, aged 66, Mcguinness had been transformed: the feared IRA commander whose voice had been banned from the British airwaves was now a mainstream political figure, a former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, and a passionate defender of a peace he’d helped bring about.

“Few men have travelled as far, personally and politically, as Martin Mcguinness,” said The Times. A poor boy from the Bogside who failed his 11-plus, he was received in the White House by three successive US presidents. He directed, and perhaps perpetrated, pitiless violence in the republican cause, but then put down his gun, and persuaded hardliners in the IRA to do likewise. As a minister in the power-sharing assembly, he remained committed to his goal of a united Ireland, yet formed such a friendly relationship with the DUP leader Ian Paisley – formerly his most implacable enemy – that they were dubbed the Chuckle Brothers. But perhaps most remarkable were his meetings with the Queen, “head of the very state against which the IRA had waged a vicious war that claimed more than 3,500 lives over three decades, and ruined many more”. The first such meeting took place in 2012, when, at a theatre in Belfast, she shook his hand “in a powerful symbol of reconciliation”. The last took place in 2016, when the Queen was visiting Northern Ireland as part of her 90th birthday celebrations. Mcguinness asked how she was. “I’m still alive,” she replied, smiling. “She was probably referring to her longevity,” but it could have been a “sly dig” at a man who, in his younger days, had considered any member of the Royal Family a “legitimate target for assassination”.

James Martin Pacelli Mcguinness was born in 1950 into a devout Catholic family, and grew up in Derry in the deprived Bogside. Yet his background was not republican. His father, a foundry worker, disapproved both of the movement’s violence and its socialist tendencies. Having failed to get into grammar school (something that always rankled), he went to a technical school, which he left at 15 to become a butcher’s assistant. As a Catholic, he was disqualified from better jobs. But it was photographs of MP Gerry Fitt, covered in blood after he’d been baton-charged by the Constabulary during a civil rights march in 1968, that turned him from a stone-throwing youth, in the riots that bedevilled the increasingly lawless Bogside, into a full-time IRA street fighter.

By the time of Bloody Sunday, in 1972, when British troops fired on unarmed civilians staging a protest against internment without trial, Mcguinness was second in command of the Derry IRA; as to his own involvement on that day, the Saville Inquiry concluded that he had probably been armed with a sub-machine gun, but that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether he had fired it. In the aftermath, the Northern Ireland secretary Willie Whitelaw invited the IRA for secret talks in London, said The Daily Telegraph. Mcguinness, then 22, was one of two younger IRA men selected by the leadership to attend the meeting, at the Chelsea home of junior minister Paul Channon. The other was Gerry Adams. The talks got nowhere – cementing Mcguinness’ view that negotiation was futile – and on his return to Derry, he launched a brutal bombing campaign that left only 20 of the city’s 150 shops still trading. He then fled across the border, where he was caught with explosives in his car, and jailed for six months; a further brief jail sentence for IRA membership followed soon after.

In the mid 1970s, Mcguinness became a member of the IRA’S ruling Army Council. He and Adams then conspired to seize control of the leadership, claiming the old guard had grown soft. Together, they devised a new cell system, smuggled in new weaponry, broadened their range of targets, and turned the IRA into an efficient guerilla force capable of fighting the long war that they believed, at that point, was necessary. Yet the events of 1981 – when a hunger strike by republican prisoners in the Maze Prison boosted support for the cause, and Bobby Sands won a by-election as he lay dying in his cell – encouraged them to adopt the “Armalite rifle and ballot box” strategy, whereby elections were contested by Sinn Féin, while the IRA continued the armed struggle.

At this point, Mcguinness nominally took up a political role, but he insisted that this would not be the thin end of the wedge. “Our position is clear and it will never, never, never change – the war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved,” he declared in 1986. And the IRA did indeed continue its lethal campaign of violence, yet no British withdrawal came about. Slowly, he and Adams came to accept that it was time to forsake the Armalite. With his reputation for “implacable militancy”, it fell to Mcguinness to win around the hardliners in the IRA grass roots, said The Independent. The fact that some could not be persuaded, leading to the formation in 1997 of the breakaway Real IRA – which carried out the 1998 Omagh bombing – illustrates how much resistance there was to this proposal, and the courage it took to pursue it. Secret exploratory talks began in the 1990s, and continued as various IRA ceasefires were made, and broken, with Mcguinness as chief negotiator (again to reassure the hardliners): a “complete” ceasefire was officially announced in 1994, and led, after countless setbacks, to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. More wrangling followed, much of it over decommissioning; but in 2007, Ian Paisley was persuaded the IRA really had destroyed its weapons, and he agreed to share power with Sinn Féin. He and Mcguinness duly became first minister and deputy first minister respectively.

Mcguinness formed a solid working relationship with Paisley’s successor, Peter Robinson, too, but failed to repeat the feat with Arlene Foster: it didn’t help that the IRA had tried to kill her policeman father. Mcguinness resigned this January, in protest at her handling of the “cash for ash” scandal. Looking pale and drawn, he said that he was suffering from a serious illness, and would not be returning to politics. He is survived by his wife, Bernadette, whom he married in 1974, and their four children.

“With his reputation for ‘implacable militancy’, it fell to Mcguinness to win around the hardliners in the IRA grass roots”