Obituary - Martin McGuinness, Irish republican leader

Died: March 21, 2017

MARTIN McGuinness, who has died aged 66, was deputy first minister of Northern Ireland from May 2007 until his retirement in January 2017; before that, he had been the Sinn Féin MP for Mid-Ulster since 1997, and the party’s chief negotiator in the peace process which led to the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998.

McGuinness was also routinely described as the Provisional IRA’s chief of staff between 1977 and 1982. After a 1993 investigation by the television documentary series The Cook Report, McGuinness said: “I have never been in the IRA”; when on trial in the Republic of Ireland in 1973 for possession of explosives and ammunition, however, he had told the court (whose authority he refused to recognize) “I am a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann and very, very proud of it.” Like his fellow Republican and Sinn Féin MP, Gerry Adams, McGuinness spent many years denying his membership of the IRA, though he largely abandoned the pretence after the conclusion of the peace process.

He had been a prominent figure in the provisional IRA since 1970, and was second-in-command of the movement’s Derry brigade in 1972 at the time of Bloody Sunday, when British troops opened fire on unarmed civil rights protestors in Bogside, killing 14 people.

Years later, the Saville Inquiry heard claims that McGuinness had been involved in the supply of bomb parts earlier that day (which he denied) and concluded that he had probably been armed with a Thompson machine gun at the time of the march. It also found, however, that whatever his actions had been, they had played no part in provoking the army’s attack on the crowd.

As late as 2008, there were claims that McGuinness was still a member of the IRA’s army council; by 2012, however, his transition to politics, starting with the power-sharing agreement with Ian Paisley, even led to his being presented to the Queen, and shaking her hand.

James Martin Pacelli McGuinness was born on May 23 1950 and grew up in a two-bedroom house with no indoor toilet, or kitchen, in Derry, yards from the city’s Gaelic football stadium; his brother Tom, who was a year older, became one of the most successful Gaelic footballers the county had ever produced. Martin was less successful athletically, though he was a keen fan of Manchester United and had an obsessive interest in cricket (even suppressing his political instincts to support the English team).

He was one of six brothers and had a sister; the family was devout (the “Pacelli” in McGuinness’s name was the surname of Pope Pius XII), attending mass daily, but not at all political; McGuinness once described his mother Peggy’s shock when, after he left a black beret in the house, she realized he was a member of the IRA.

He was educated at St Eugene’s primary school and at the Christian Brothers’ Technical College and left school at 15 to train as a butcher’s apprentice. But he quickly became involved with militant Republicanism, joining, at first, the Official IRA. He remained with them for a while after Seán Mac Stíofáin set up the Provisional IRA at the end of 1969, taking with him most of the young leaders of the movement. He was soon persuaded to move across, however, and became a pivotal figure in the Derry brigade.

McGuinness’s considerable abilities were quickly recognized both by the Republican movement and by the British authorities. By July 1972, when he was just 22, he and Adams were amongst the team led by Mac Stíofáin and Seamus Twomey in clandestine negotiations with Willie Whitelaw, then the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The following year McGuinness was convicted by the Republic of Ireland’s Special Criminal Court, after being found near a car containing 110 kg of explosives and 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and sentenced to six months. He received a further conviction in the South for membership of the IRA. But despite being arrested several times in the North, and being the subject of RUC investigations up until the end of the 1990s, McGuinness was never convicted of a crime in the United Kingdom.

In 1974, he announced that he had left the IRA and was concentrating on a political career with Sinn Féin. In reality, he and Adams had supplanted the old guard of the Provisionals; internment and other security measures had galvanized the Republican movement. Radicals imprisoned at Long Kesh became impatient with the ceasefire led from Dublin, and McGuinness’s and Adams’s hardline approach came to the fore.

They served as chief-of-staff and (after Adams’s release from internment in 1977) adjutant-general respectively at least until 1982, when a combination of assembly elections to Stormont and the growth of “supergrass” informants led them to take a back seat.

McGuinness was almost certainly in command when the IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten and, six hours later, 18 paratroopers near Warrenpoint in County Down. The Cook Report alleged in 1993 that he had also been closely connected with the murder of Frank Hegarty, an informant. In 1982, McGuinness was elected for Derry to the Northern Irish Assembly at Stormont; like all Sinn Féin members, he did not take up his seat. The same year he was banned from travel to the mainland by the Conservative government.

He contested Foyle in 1983, and again in 1987 and 1992. He continued to take a hard line; in 1986 he defended the new IRA policy of murdering tradesmen and contractors who worked with the RUC. Yet he had also been amongst the Sinn Féin figures who secretly negotiated with the British government during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s. The journalist Peter Taylor claimed that at this time McGuinness led the IRA’s Northern Command and, amongst other attacks, had foreknowledge of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, which killed 11 people.

Adams and McGuinness made the most of the resurgence of the Provisional IRA in the 1980s, after the election and death of Bobby Sands. Many commentators felt that it was precisely McGuinness’s reputation as an extremist that enabled Sinn Féin separately to capitalize on Republican sentiment – Provisionals suspicious of Adams’s political manoeuvres were placated by McGuinness’s support.

The secret talks of the 1990s, during John Major’s premiership, were accompanied for a while by a ceasefire, which ended with the Canary Wharf bomb in 1996. That year, McGuinness was elected to the Northern Irish Forum for Foyle, and the following year became the MP for Mid-Ulster. The year after, following the Agreement, he also took the seat for the Northern Irish Assembly.

By this time, he was making some surprisingly conciliatory statements – memorably backing the idea that RUC officers (though he wanted the force itself disbanded) could play a role in policing after any agreement was reached. With the conclusion of talks in 1998, under power-sharing he joined the assembly as a minister, initially for education. His main action was to abolish the 11-plus.

McGuinness got on well with Mo Mowlam, Labour’s Secretary of State, and continued to present himself as a politician committed to the peace process. He was re-elected to the UK Parliament in 2001, 2005 and 2010, and formally resigned in 2012. Though he had never taken his seat because it involved swearing allegiance to the Crown, as an MP he could resign only by becoming a Crown servant (he became Steward of the Manor of Northstead, rather than of the Chiltern Hundreds).

In 2007, the culmination of his career came when he became deputy first minister, with the DUP leader Ian Paisley as First Minister. It was a pairing which many would have thought impossible a few years earlier, yet the two men appeared to get on well, and were dubbed “the Chuckle Brothers” by the media. In 2011, he stood as Sinn Féin’s candidate for the Presidency of Ireland, coming third.

In January 2017, he resigned in protest at an energy scandal involving the DUP politician Arlene Foster, who had become First Minister, triggering a new election for the Assembly. A few days later, he announced that he would not stand for re-election, due to ill health. Though he regarded his health as a private matter, it was subsequently reported that he was suffering from amyloidosis.

McGuinness’s greatest passion away from politics was fly-fishing; he was teetotal. He married, in 1974, Bernadette Canning; they had two sons and two daughters.

ANDREW MCKIE