UK Edition
There is an adage, attributed to Chilon of Sparta 2,500 years ago, that we should speak only good about the recently departed. With some people that entreaty is hard to observe. One such was Martin McGuinness.
Rarely can a terrorist godfather’s death have dominated the news agenda for an entire day as his passing did on Tuesday. The former IRA commander and Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister has joined the pantheon of politicians who renounced a violent past to embrace peaceful engagement with one-time enemies. For that he deserves praise. But he was not like, say, Nelson Mandela whose support for an armed struggle was driven by the absence of any democratic route to power or even rudimentary political expression.
While in the late 1960s, Roman Catholics could say with some justification that they were frozen out of office and influence, many nationalist radicals did not respond with violence, not even after Bloody Sunday in 1972. McGuinness, however, chose to lead a murderous campaign against the British state when another, peaceful road was available. He chose, furthermore, to continue that campaign when it should have ended.
True, when clandestine back-channel discussions began in the late 1980s between the British government and the IRA about ending the Troubles, McGuinness was one of the key points of contact in the Republican movement. The result was the Good Friday Agreement. But many more people were killed before the process came to fruition.
Arguably, it took many years to convince the IRA rank and file to exchange the Armalite for the ballot box; but in extolling McGuinness as a repented sinner (though he never felt contrition, which is a requirement of repentance) we should not forget the consequences of the course he voluntarily adopted for much of his adult life.
Given that he played a leading role in the miserable round of killings, atrocities and political failure for nigh on 45 years, it was surprising that McGuinness was just 66 when he died. He was hardly 20 when he became an influential member of the newly formed Provisional IRA in Londonderry during the civil rights protests of the late 1960s. The Provos supplanted the old Official IRA because they were prepared to defend Catholic communities with the gun.
Ironically they ended up in a confrontation with the British Army, deployed to the Province in August 1969 under Operation Banner to protect Catholic homes. McGuinness was the Republican movement’s most significant figure throughout the Troubles, the very personification of the “armed struggle”. The author Kevin Toolis, in his book Rebel Hearts, said of him in 1995: “No other living person is a greater threat to the British State.”
It is believed he twice acted as chief of staff and commanded the IRA in his native Londonderry during a ruthless campaign of bombings and assassinations. At the height of the Troubles, hundreds of people were killed every year. In 1972, aged just 22, he was important enough to be flown secretly from Ulster, with Gerry Adams, and other imprisoned IRA leaders, to negotiate with William Whitelaw in a failed attempt to end the bombing campaign.
With the understandable exception of Lord Tebbit – a victim, with his wife, of IRA violence – dozens of politicians lined up to pay tribute to McGuinness’s role in forging a new beginning for Northern Ireland, But it is less easy for the relatives of those killed and maimed to forget the carnage and the grief the IRA caused. When McGuinness reached the apogee of his recantation by dining with the Queen at Windsor Castle a few years ago, Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son James was killed by the 1998 Omagh bomb, commented: “A terrorist in white tie and tails is still a terrorist.” There are many fathers, mothers, children and siblings who feel just as strongly.
But McGuinness was never prosecuted in the UK. Only once was he convicted and jailed and that was in the Republic of Ireland in 1973 when he was arrested near a car containing 250 pounds of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition. In court, he unequivocally declared his membership of the Provisional IRA. Undoubtedly he ordered bomb attacks and murders. He may well have carried them out himself: indeed, the Saville Inquiry concluded that he was “probably” armed in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday.
It is too late to bring charges against McGuinness now; and for the past 25 years who wanted to? He was, after all, instrumental in bringing peace to a troubled land. To have mounted an investigation against him, relying upon informers and undercover agents whose lives would be at risk and then pursuing him through the courts would have prolonged the violence when there was chance to end it.
Most people understand that sometimes justice must take second place to realpolitik and hard-headed pragmatism. But in that case why are British soldiers, now in their late 60s, still threatened with prosecution for alleged unlawful killings carried out when they were serving their country?
As many as 1,000 soldiers long retired may yet be caught in the net. Several have been charged with alleged offences and members of the Parachute Regiment who were involved in Bloody Sunday remain under investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s legacy branch. Yet if there is legacy to be investigated it is surely McGuiness’s. What justice is served in hounding soldiers who were doing their duty in difficult circumstances while never contemplating the prosecution of the leader of the terrorists they were required to confront? And unlike McGuinness, they never had the choice.
Moreover, they were the good guys. We should remember that before turning the old IRA chief into a latter-day saint. By all means give McGuinness his due for playing a role in ending the violence he perpetuated – though a high price was paid with the marginalisation of moderate Unionist and nationalist voices in Northern Ireland in order to appease the extremists. But let attempts to prosecute former soldiers die with him.
Martin McGuinness was a killer, not a saint