McGuinness’s revelation shocked no one; the outlines of his terrorist exploits have been known for some time. But his decision to go public is a measure of how profoundly the so-called hard men of the IRA have changed. They began their political lives disdainful of compromise, respecting bullets over ballots. “Put it this way,” says Richard English of Queen’s University, Belfast. “If 10 years ago McGuinness had been seen in the grounds of Stormont [seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly], someone would have called the police.” Now leaders like McGuinness and Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, hold elected office and enforce the peace process they helped give birth to during the 1990s.
McGuinness’s conversion from man of violence to man of peace didn’t happen overnight. By the early 1970s he was the IRA’s second in command in his hometown of Londonderry. He helped plan and carry out a two-year IRA campaign that left more than two dozen members of Britain’s security forces dead and the city’s Protestant-dominated commercial center devastated. On Bloody Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, soldiers of Britain’s Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil-rights march, allegedly believing they were being fired upon, killing 14 Catholics–and focusing the world’s anger on the paras. It would be more than 20 years before any kind of political solution was a real possibility in Northern Ireland. Now a tribunal is trying to determine who fired the first shot.
Even during the worst of the Troubles, McGuinness saw some virtue in talking, not just fighting. A few months after Bloody Sunday, he was one of seven IRA leaders flown to London for secret talks with the British government. (The talks, which also included Adams, collapsed; shortly thereafter McGuinness received the first of two convictions in the Irish Republic for his IRA activities.) According to press accounts, it was McGuinness who secured a green light from the IRA’s ruling council that allowed Adams to begin secret talks with John Hume, leader of the largest nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Those talks set the stage for the 1994 IRA ceasefire that finally led to the Good Friday Agreement. McGuinness’s “commitment to a peace process was absolutely essential in carrying the republican movement,” says Brendan O’Leary of the London School of Economics. “He more than anyone else had the authority and capacity to do this. Had he not, the IRA wouldn’t have moved.”
McGuinness’s decision to confess a small part of his IRA past was not a selfless act. Accusations have been flying about the IRA’s role in the Bloody Sunday tragedy. A source close to the inquiry says McGuinness, 50, may well have wanted to counter testimony from an IRA informer, code-named “Infliction,” who said McGuinness told him that he had fired the shot on Bloody Sunday that caused the British paras to fire back. McGuinness denies this, and others have questioned the informer’s veracity as well. “As far as I am concerned,” McGuinness said last week, “the British Army got away with murder on Bloody Sunday and they are presently trying to get away with murder at the tribunal.”
McGuinness may not testify for several months. But as English says, “The very fact that he’s going public now amounts to him saying, ‘This is how it was in the past.’ This is what he did in the war.” There’s plenty left to fight over. Unionists are furious that the IRA hasn’t decommissioned its weaponry, and nationalists refuse to endorse the new police service to replace the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Peace can be a messy business. But even at its messiest, as Martin McGuinness has come to acknowledge, it’s better than the alternative.
