Martin McGuinness / The Times 21.3.2017

Few men have travelled as far, personally and politically, as Martin McGuinness. He failed his 11-plus and, after leaving school at 15, worked as a butcher’s assistant in his native Londonderry. Within a few years he had become the scourge of the British state as one of the Provisional IRA’s most senior and ruthless commanders, responsible for many deaths and acts of terror. His voice was banned from the airwaves and he was barred from entering Britain.

However, much later a very different McGuinness emerged. He embraced electoral politics and helped his close associate Gerry Adams bring most of the IRA’s hardmen on board. Not only that, but he was a principal architect of the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and became education minister in Northern Ireland’s new power-sharing assembly, and later deputy first minister.

During the ten years he held that post he worked hard to preserve the province’s fragile peace and formed a highly improbable partnership with Ian Paisley, the first minister and hardline Democratic Unionist leader who had formerly been his implacable enemy. The two men got on so well that they were dubbed the “Chuckle Brothers”.

Once an international pariah and convicted terrorist, McGuinness was received in the White House by three successive American presidents — Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama.

Most remarkable of all were his meetings with the Queen, the 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 meeting took place at a Belfast theatre in 2012. The Queen shook McGuinness’s hand in a powerful symbolic act of reconciliation, although some reports suggested the Duke of Edinburgh did not do the same. Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was murdered by the IRA while on holiday in the Republic of Ireland in 1979.

A later meeting with the Queen occurred at Hillsborough Castle in 2016 when she visited Northern Ireland as part of her 90th birthday celebrations. McGuinness asked how she was. The Queen, smiling, replied: “I’m still alive.” She was probably referring to her longevity, but some commentators perceived a sly dig at a man who, in his younger days, had considered any member of the royal family to be a legitimate target for assassination.

McGuinness never abandoned his goal of a united Ireland, but in the course of a long and tortuous journey he came to believe that it was more likely to be achieved through constitutional politics than through violence.

He mellowed in person as well. The militant young Republican became in later life an amateur poet. He loved to go fly-fishing and supported Manchester United as well as following the traditionally Protestant sport of rugby. Strange as it may sound, he was also a devotee of the England cricket team. Equally unexpected was his favourite television series, Last of the Summer Wine. He once said: “I sometimes wish I was one of the characters discussing the affairs of the world from a similarly idyllic background.”

Non-smoking and teetotal, he was a family man too. He married Bernadette Canning in 1974 and lived with her in the heart of Londonderry’s Bogside for the rest of his life. Together they raised four children: Gráinne, who married Sean Hargan, a retired football coach; a second daughter Fionnuala; and two sons, Fiachra, an electrician and Emmett, an environmental health and safety adviser. All survive him.

James Martin Pacelli McGuinness was one of seven children, born in 1950 to poor Catholic parents living in the deprived, overcrowded Bogside. His third name came from that of Pope Pius XII.

He did not come from a conventional republican background, unlike Adams. His father, an iron foundry worker, was a conservative nationalist who disapproved both of republicanism’s violence and its socialist tendencies. Living 50m from Celtic Park, the home of Derry’s Gaelic Athletic Association, he became a fan of the Derry Gaelic football and hurling teams, playing the sports while growing up. His brother Tom played Gaelic football for Derry.

He was educated at Hollybush Primary School and at the rough, tough Christian Brothers technical college rather than the more reputable St Columb’s College. He left at 15 and became a butcher’s assistant having been curtly rejected for other jobs because he was a Catholic.

McGuinness’s baptism of fire occurred in 1969 when, along with many of the youths of his neighbourhood, he found himself throwing petrol bombs and stones at the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a police force that local Catholics rejected as oppressive and unacceptable. He quickly graduated from stones to more lethal weapons. Although he originally joined the Marxist-inclined Official IRA, McGuinness was soon drawn towards the Provisionals, who took on the RUC and army much more aggressively.

Disciplined, ruthless and charismatic, he rose fast. As a leader of the IRA in Londonderry he masterminded its relentless bombing of the city, reducing much of its commercial centre to rubble. He and his accomplices then began targeting British soldiers, killing 26 in the city between August 1971 and December 1972. A British army officer who fought against McGuinness at that time described him as “excellent officer material”.

By the time of Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when the army killed 14 unarmed civilians during a civil rights demonstration, he was second-in-command of the IRA’s “Derry Brigade”. The Saville inquiry reported 38 years later that McGuinness was engaged in paramilitary activity at that time, and was probably carrying a sub-machinegun that day, but had done nothing to justify the soldiers opening fire.

Later in 1972 McGuinness was part of an IRA delegation that was surreptitiously flown, in an RAF plane, to meet the home secretary William Whitelaw in a house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. “Whitelaw was a nice old man, but he didn’t have a clue about Ireland,” McGuinness later said. “But at least we were talking.”

Whitelaw recalled: “The meeting was a non-event. They were still in a mood of defiance and determination to carry on until their absurd ultimatums were met.”

After the London meeting McGuinness went on the run, the media describing him as one of Northern Ireland’s most wanted men. He was, he later said, “fired at by the British army on countless occasions”.

In 1973 he was convicted in the Republic of Ireland after being arrested near a car containing 250lb of explosives. He told the court: “We have fought against the killing of our people. I am a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann (IRA) and very, very proud of it.” After a short prison sentence he was again arrested in the Irish Republic for IRA membership and served another short sentence.

In the late 1970s McGuinness, Adams and other militant northerners seized control of republicanism, and McGuinness is widely believed to have served as a member of the IRA’s ruling “army council” and as the IRA’s chief of staff between 1978 and 1982.

The two men denounced the southern old guard as soft and out of touch, and claimed that the army and police were gradually getting the upper hand. To counter this they pioneered a new “cell system” that made it far more difficult for the security forces to penetrate the IRA. In effect they transformed a run-down paramilitary outfit into a streamlined guerrilla force able to sustain its deadly if futile campaign.

For years McGuinness and Adams remained adamant that the IRA should no longer call ceasefires as it occasionally had in the past, maintaining that they would be regarded by Britain as signs of weakness. They developed the theory of “the long war”, believing that violence would some day force a British capitulation.

“We don’t believe that winning elections and any amount of votes will bring freedom in Ireland. At the end of the day, it will be the cutting edge of the IRA that will bring freedom,” McGuinness insisted.

That long war did not work, however, and it cost many lives. A new dimension developed in 1981 when ten republicans starved themselves to death in the Maze prison near Belfast. In the highly charged atmosphere support for Sinn Fein rose sharply, with the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, winning a parliamentary by-election from his cell at the prison before he died.

After some hesitation, McGuinness and other IRA leaders decided to adopt a mix of violence and politics, the “Armalite and ballot box” strategy.

Veteran republicans argued at the time that this would divert their movement away from physical force and into politics, and eventually that is exactly what happened. But McGuinness heatedly denounced those critics at a 1986 Sinn Fein conference: “They tell you that it is inevitable certainty that the war against British rule will be run down. These suggestions deliberately infer that the present leadership of Sinn Fein and the leadership of the Irish Republican Army are intent on edging the republican movement on to a constitutional path [. . .] Shame, shame, shame [. . .] Don’t go my friends. We will lead you to the Republic.”

McGuinness, right, as deputy first minister, with Ian Paisley, the first minister, after being sworn in at Stormont in Belfast in 2007. The two men later became affectionately known as “the Chuckle Brothers”

The “struggle” went on, but McGuinness’s Republic never arrived, and although the IRA killed dozens of people a year it did not bring about a British withdrawal. Faced with what was effectively a stalemate, McGuinness and Adams led the IRA and Sinn Fein ever more deeply into politics.

The two developed a “hard cop, soft cop” partnership. Hardliners in the IRA who felt that Adams was rather too political for their taste were reassured by the presence at his shoulder of the Londonderry republican who was viewed as a flinty icon of militancy.

The irony was that McGuinness, originally viewed as an uncomplicated militarist, would become the movement’s most senior elected figure and its most personable politician.

By the early 1990s McGuinness was acting as the IRA’s chief negotiator in ultra-secret contacts with government and intelligence representatives. These were followed by the IRA ceasefire of 1994, which broke down in 1996, but was reinstated and led on to long-drawn-out talks on the possibility of IRA disarmament and the formation of a coalition government.

Years of setbacks and negotiation followed, with Tony Blair, then prime minister, holding dozens of meetings with McGuinness and Adams, the heads of an organisation that had plotted to kill British ministers. McGuinness was much impressed with Chequers. “We spent most of the time sitting outside on garden chairs, very close to the rose garden,” he recalled in a television interview. “The scenery around it is absolutely beautiful, it just stretches for miles and miles and miles, and so it was a very relaxed atmosphere.”

McGuinness remembered that at one meeting involving himself, Adams, Blair and Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, his wife rang him to say their daughter had given birth. He recalled: “The four of us are sitting there talking about hugely important issues in relation to the peace process in Ireland and suddenly my mobile goes off. And it’s my wife, and you would have thought that she’d won the lottery, and at that stage I became a grandfather. So the meeting just more or less collapsed for about ten or fifteen minutes for all of us to fully absorb the great event, and both the British prime minister and the taoiseach wrote messages of support for my daughter, which I appreciated.”

Such pleasantries did not mean that either the republicans or the security dropped their guard. Sinn Fein spied on the authorities, while intelligence personnel fitted an elaborate bugging device to a car used by McGuinness and Adams.

Eventually the talks led to the Good Friday Agreement and the formation of a power-sharing administration. Jonathan Powell, who, as Blair’s chief of staff, spent many hours closeted in negotiation with Adams and McGuinness, said it was “a remarkable act of leadership by them to talk the IRA into peace, and to persuade them to settle for something far less than they had demanded”.

McGuinness initially served as minister of education in the new administration, though many Unionists were horrified at the thought of a man with his background being in charge of their children. His most radical act was to abolish the 11-plus exam in Northern Ireland.

In 1997 McGuinness had become the MP for Mid Ulster — a position he held for almost 16 years and four elections, though he never took up his seat due to Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism from the British parliament.

The first power-sharing administration broke down in 2002, but when Ian Paisley emerged as the leader of unionism, McGuinness became deputy first minister. By that stage the IRA had put its weapons beyond use and announced that it was going out of business, a key turning point in Irish history. Paisley’s acceptance that McGuinness had truly abandoned the bomb and the bullet was sufficient to convince the world at large that the new arrangement was a genuinely historic breakthrough — and one that was a long way from the days when McGuinness regarded Britain, and the unionist and Protestant population, as elements not to be negotiated with but to be defeated.

“My war is over. My job as a political leader is to prevent that war and I feel very passionate about it,” he said.

In 2008 Peter Robinson, the first minister of Northern Ireland, replaced Paisley, but continued to work with McGuinness. In 2011 McGuinness ran as Sinn Fein’s candidate for president of the Irish Republic, but came a distant third after a campaign in which he was dogged by questions about his IRA past.

He returned to his job as deputy first minister where the Queen, and others, proved more forgiving than the Irish electorate.

In January 2016 Arlene Foster replaced Robinson as first minister, but her relationship with McGuinness was complicated by the fact that in 1986 he had delivered a graveside eulogy at the funeral of Séamus McElwaine, an IRA volunteer who had attempted to kill her father.

It ended badly when, in January 2017, McGuinness resigned over Foster’s refusal to step down during an investigation of a bungled clean energy programme over which she had presided as minister. His resignation triggered the dissolution of the assembly and new elections, threatening to end a decade of relative stability in Northern Ireland.

At the same time, McGuinness resigned from politics, debilitated by the rare genetic disease — amyloidosis — that would go on to kill him.

Reactions to his death were predictably divided. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s director of communications when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, called him “a great guy”; Lord Tebbit, whose wife, Margaret, was left paralysed by the Brighton bombing in 1984, condemned him as a “coward”.

The Queen, meanwhile, reflected the journey he had taken in his life by writing a private message to his widow.

Martin McGuinness, IRA leader and politician, was born on May 23, 1950. He died on March 21, 2017, aged 66