BELFAST: Martin McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army commander who laid down his arms to become a key architect of Northern Ireland’s peace, died on Tuesday aged 66, prompting tributes from allies and former enemies alike.
The face of Irish Republicanism for many during some of the worst moments of three decades of sectarian bloodshed that killed more than 3,600 people, McGuinness remained a figure of hate for many pro-British Protestants until his death.
But he earned widespread respect across Britain and Ireland by embracing his bitterest rivals to cement the 1998 peace deal and allow Northern Ireland to slowly return to normality.
“While I can never condone the path he took in the earlier part of his life, Martin McGuinness ultimately played a defining role in leading the Republican movement away from violence,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said.
“In doing so, he made an essential and historic contribution to the extraordinary journey of Northern Ireland from conflict to peace.” He was present during the opening salvos of the Northern Ireland conflict as a 20-year-old IRA commander fighting the British army on the streets of his native Londonderry on behalf of a community he said had been denied basic human rights.
McGuinness swiftly rose to become a senior IRA commander and was convicted in 1973 of being a member of the group after being stopped in a car packed with explosives and bullets.
“Martin McGuinness never went to war, it came to his streets, it came to his city, it came to his community,” fellow Republican leader Gerry Adams told Irish national broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.
“He was a great man in my opinion and he will be missed.” By the 1980s McGuinness emerged alongside Adams as a key architect in the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, advocating a strategy of using the ballot box alongside the Armalite rifle.
Grassroots credibility
Following the IRA’s second ceasefire in 1997, McGuinness became Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator in peace talks that led to the landmark 1998 Good Friday peace accord.
“He had the grassroots credibility of a Republican leader and former IRA commander … to take Republicans from the past of terror and horror into a democratic future,” former British Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain told BBC radio.
But it was the energy with which he worked to bed in the peace process that surprised many. His handshake with the British Queen in 2012 became one of the defining images of Northern Ireland’s peace.
Key to the success of power-sharing in Northern Ireland was the close relationship with former enemy Ian Paisley, the firebrand preacher many Catholics see as a key player in the genesis of the conflict.
A partnership many thought would prove impossible was soon dubbed by the media “the Chuckle Brothers” and allowed McGuinness to become Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister in 2007. He held the role for a decade until he resigned in January shortly after being diagnosed with a rare heart condition.
On the night McGuinness retired, Paisley’s son Ian Junior, a member of the British parliament, said that had it not been for McGuinness’ work, especially with his father, Northern Ireland would not have been in a position to rebuild itself.
McGuinness was active until the last weeks of his life, helping to orchestrate one of the biggest political victories for Irish nationalism in decades by forcing a snap election in March that deprived unionism of its majority in the regional parliament for the first time.
Former first minister Arlene Foster, whose party was humiliated in the vote and whose father narrowly escaped alive from an IRA shooting, also paid her respects.
“History will record differing views and opinions on the role Martin McGuinness played throughout the recent and not so recent past but history will also show that his contribution to the political and peace process was significant,” Foster said.
Some were less forgiving. Former conservative minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was badly injured in an IRA blast in 1984, said the world was “a sweeter place” without McGuinness, who he described as a coward who posed as a man of peace.
Colin Parry, whose son was killed by an IRA bomb in Warrington, was more measured.
“We can never forgive him but we can respect the man he became,” he told the BBC.
