‘Fuckers.’
Martin McGuinness had his eye up against the peephole in the door of Sinn Fein’s shabby office in the Bogside and was staring out at a squad of British Army soldiers milling around in the street outside. ‘Bastards. Cunts.’
I was standing in the narrow hallway behind the man the army in Northern Ireland believes to be the leader of the Provisional IRA and wondering if the flimsy wooden door was just about to crash in on us. We had just finished a lengthy newspaper interview but as we left the building we had walked straight into the path of a British Army patrol cruising the streets of Derry’s republican stronghold. At the sight of McGuinness, the soldiers immediately jumped out of their armoured Land-Rovers and ordered him to open the boot of his car, parked on the opposite side of the street. The patrol’s intelligence officer, a corporal, at last rubbing shoulders with the enemy’s chief general, struck up a false bonhomie.
‘How’s it going, Martin?’
‘Open the boot of the car, Martin.’
‘Nice day, Martin, eh?’
McGuinness turned defiantly away. ‘Open it your fucking self,’ he said as he walked back into the Sinn Fein office. I scuttled back inside as he closed the door. Outside, the patrol swaggered along the narrow pavement stopping and detaining everyone they encountered, waiting for us to re-emerge.
‘What happens now?’
‘We wait. If you’re in a hurry there’s a back route but you’d need to shin up a few walls,’ said McGuinness in a tone that implied he had over the years shinned up a good few walls in similar circumstances.
‘Don’t these guys ever knock on the door?’
‘Sure.’
‘And what happens then?’
‘We don’t let them in.’
It was another confusion of the Troubles – the Crown’s warriors, armed for combat and killing, did not have the authority to break down the door.
Outside, the soldiers’ personal radios squawked, the static interrupted by their English voices feeding car registration numbers into their communications network. I decided to take my chances on the street and McGuinness threw open the door. Two seconds after my feet hit the pavement I was stopped by the soldiers under the Troubles’ emergency powers.
‘Got any identification, sir?’ said the helmeted intelligence officer. A small group of Sinn Fein supporters gathered to watch my interrogation and McGuinness stood in the open doorway. I handed over my driving licence and the details were duly fed over the radio to the distant computer as the soldiers searched my bag.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m a journalist.’
‘What kind of journalist?’
The Troubles’ legal constraints limited British Army soldiers’ powers of interrogation but it was Army practice to exceed those powers to gain as much low-level intelligence as possible. Every detail, either casually or illegally gleaned, was entered into some sort of file somewhere.
‘What are you writing about?’
‘Pro-them or pro-us?’
‘I’m a reporter.’
‘Is that an Irish name, Toolis?’
I politely stopped speaking and waited for clearance to come back over the net. I briefly and inconsequentially defied the Crown in Ireland but it was more from calculation than bravery. I was indeed a reporter from a national London newspaper – my arrest would not go unnoticed. Unlike Martin McGuinness or Joan Doris, I was relatively immune from the power of the soldiers and their guns. After a couple of minutes the clearance came, the patrol released me and I went on my way.
McGuinness’s simple but absolute denial of Crown authority had shocked me. There were fifteen British soldiers, armed with at least one general-purpose machine-gun and fourteen SA80 combat assault rifles, in the patrol. They had flak jackets, helmets, two armour-plated Land-Rovers and sophisticated personal communications equipment. They were not the type of people you tell to ‘fuck off’. McGuinness had been alone, unarmed and wearing a tweed jacket; his only weapon of defiance was the Chubb lock on the door. He had been irritated but not, I felt, frightened or intimidated by the presence of these enemies. Despite their numbers and their weaponry, McGuinness had just denied their authority. But I was also struck by the crudity of McGuinness’s response; this street-fighter turned guerrilla statesman had not moved far from his roots. His disdain for the Crown was still couched in the language of the rioter.
I had visited Derry to interview McGuinness in May 1990 about another set of IRA ceasefire rumours. For two hours in one of the upstairs rooms of Sinn Fein’s Derry office we had verbally danced around a pin-head as the blonde-haired blue-eyed republican leader outlined an offer of an ‘unofficial IRA ceasefire’ in return for talks with the British Government. Similar peace offers had been made by other republican leaders, notably Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, but the significance of this possible peace venture had been enhanced by the fact that McGuinness, privately believed by the Ulster security forces to be a military hawk on the IRA Army Council, was now saying it too. As usual, in all the numerous interviews I have had with him, McGuinness stayed close to a certain brief, almost robotically repeating the same narrow verbal formula. He would not, for internal political reasons, publicly endorse the offer of an unofficial ceasefire that his responses clearly implied. Whenever I attempted to make him affirm his private offer by reworking the question in a different form, he would stop momentarily, keenly fix me with the hard quizzical stare of his bright blue eyes and then repeat his previous reply. ‘We are prepared to respond to any serious attempt to bring about a peaceful settlement in Ireland. We are prepared to be part of a peace process. We are prepared to help create a mood for peace in Ireland but it has to be done honourably,’ was all he would cryptically offer.
All the subtle everyday expressive nuances that guide us to the mental state of our fellow humans, the arch of an eye to express puzzlement, the crease of a brow indicating concentration, were absent in McGuinness. His intelligence was confusing, his mind detached from his unlined face; no trace of emotion showed. You asked a question, his face stared out at you like a blank canvas, indicating no reaction whatsoever, and then he patiently and calmly responded. Disconcertingly, there was no way to anticipate his response.
Journalists have often described him as ‘boyish’ or as having an uncomplicated ‘direct military bearing’. The adjectives partially capture the sense of a man in his mid-forties who seems remarkably self-contained, immune to despair. His self-assurance seems invulnerable to the thousands of setbacks, defeats, or even victories, of twenty-five years of militant Irish republicanism.
His equanimity is all the more surprising when you consider his position. For a generation he has been one of the top daily targets for the British security services. Every aspect of his life must have been spied upon and minutely analysed for some chink that would have allowed the Crown to trap, imprison or kill him; the intelligence files on him at RUC Special Branch Headquarters must run into volumes. Outside his family, every relationship, every encounter, in his life must be tainted with the prospect of potential betrayal from an informer working for the Crown. Every knock on his door, every drive to the shops, carries the threat of assassination. After the loyalist killer Michael Stone, who attacked Mairead Farrell’s funeral, was imprisoned, Stone revealed that he had made a determined bid to kill McGuinness as the republican leader bought his daily newspaper at a local shop. On the appointed day McGuinness failed to turn up and Stone got cold feet, but many other assassination attempts have gone unreported. McGuinness once gave me a lift in his car and even within the relative safety of the Bogside I started sweating, silently praying that the inevitable loyalist hit would not happen during my few minutes as a front passenger. The constancy of this threat did not seem to unduly worry McGuinness. ‘I am careful about my security but I don’t get up in the morning and say, “I could be shot at the end of the day.” But I am aware that it could happen. It does not stop me from doing things that I want to do.’
In person McGuinness is charming, straightforward and without a trace of affectation. In a later meeting with him he arrived alone in a three-year-old family car and we sat in his mother’s small terraced house in the Bogside surrounded by Holy Communion pictures of his brothers and sisters, and plaster-cast statues of Catholic saints, and drank and ate the tea and sandwiches he made as we talked. He is not a devious or slippery conversationalist and comes across as being sincere and honest.
He can be blunt and he has a temper. We have argued over the content of articles I have written on Northern Ireland. ‘I’m not one of these people who lie about you behind your back. What you wrote, Kevin, was crap, total and absolute crap,’ he once told me, his voice registering his disgust.
His RUC enemies say he is one of the most powerful men in Ireland, but McGuinness looks, dresses and talks like the articulate Catholic working-class man from the Bogside that he is. I have never seen him in a suit; he wears tweeds, poloneck jumpers, corduroys, the workaday casual clothing of someone oblivious to their impression on the world. He appears to be devoid of vanity and, peculiarly, personal ambition. He waits in line in the queue at the doctor’s surgery, he loves his four children and sends them to a local school. He rarely socializes in public, preferring the solitary pleasures of trout fishing.
McGuinness is not a theoretician or a deep political strategist. When he articulates the latest republican political nuance on the 1994 ceasefire and the peace talks process, one senses that he is delivering the ideas of other, lesser figures in the IRA/Sinn Fein northern republican ‘think-tank’, like Derry councillor Mitchell McLaughlin or the Belfast-based Tom Hartley. It is hard to imagine McGuinness at work in the small hours on the ninth draft of a report, and his views on the economic future of a United Ireland are primitive. This apparent lack of sophistication, his cold demeanour and blank mannerisms have given rise to the suspicion that McGuinness is nothing more than a gunman. But like McGuinness’s countenance, such a judgement would be deceptive. McGuinness, unlike most of us, and I felt rather dangerously, did not seek the approval of other human beings. He had no need for surface chatter. Martin McGuinness is quite content at being Martin McGuinness.
McGuinness defines an Irish Republican as ‘a person who wants the freedom of Ireland, a person who wants to see the end of British Government rule in Ireland’. The two things are synonymous in his mind. ‘The British Government has no right to rule in Ireland. The IRA will deny them the right to rule us and it will do everything in its power to make sure they do not rule us easily,’ said McGuinness, simply stating the fundamental republican position. His life is single-mindedly centred on two absolute ideological certainties – that Her Majesty’s Ministers of the Crown will sit down at the negotiating table with the rebels if the IRA keep the pressure on and that the Troubles will only cease when there is a united Ireland. No other living person is a greater threat to the British State.
* * *
To his admirers and supporters, McGuinness has a heroic, exalted status that is unique within the Republican Movement. ‘Martin personifies the armed struggle. Martin is the armed struggle. There are other people who have been around as long but Martin is a man who has come to epitomize the indomitable spirit of armed struggle republicanism and does so with great charm and amicability,’ said Eamonn McCann, the chronicler of the Troubles in Derry, McGuinness’s home town.
‘Martin is a too-good-to-be-true IRA man,’ said a former IRA Volunteer, who fought under him during the seventies. ‘If you thought about the idealized IRA man that you would like to have, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, completely principled, man of integrity, respected by republicans and non-republicans, a good Catholic, you are in fact thinking about Martin. A lot of people would disagree with Martin one hundred per cent but as a person they will say Martin lives by his word.’
In Derry, it is a mark of McGuinness’s distinction that both IRA Volunteers and British Army squaddies stationed in the city refer to him by his first name. His identity can be conjured up in any conversation, distinguished from the mass of ordinary everyday Martins who fill the Catholic city, with a tiny shift in tone – ‘Did Martin say that?’
Only one other republican leader, Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein President and ex-West Belfast MP, approaches McGuinness’s stature within the republican leadership. But Adams’ role as the first Sinn Fein MP for West Belfast, his tours of England and the United States as the public face of republicanism, his appearances on CNN, and the Larry King Show, and a decade of politicking and manoeuvring on Ulster’s narrow ground have tarnished his reputation amongst militant IRA Volunteers. In a movement that disdains the ballot box and glorifies the gun, Adams’ image is dangerously linked with political slickness, equivocation and compromise.
McGuinness is a passionate and active enemy of the British State and proud to be so. He denies being a member of the IRA but as Officer Commanding the IRA’s Derry Brigade in the early seventies he personally fought in countless gun battles with British soldiers and organized the destruction of the commercial centre of his native city. As Director of Operations of the IRA’s Northern Command in the seventies he had a pivotal role in reorganizing and strengthening the IRA’s structures and capabilities. He was, security sources insist, the IRA’s Chief of Staff in the late seventies when the IRA Army Council authorized the killing of Lord Mountbatten and a host of other spectacular operations.
Twice, the IRA have come extremely close to decapitating the Conservative Government, at Brighton in 1984 and in Downing Street in 1991. IRA bombers have twice devastated large areas of the City of London.
Since his 1982 entry into electoral politics, McGuinness, it is believed, no longer has an official title on the Army Council, but then he does not need one. His stature within Irish republicanism is so high that everyone accepts that he is, as the Derry informer Martin Hogan describes him, ‘the OC for Ireland’.
McGuinness does appear to genuinely believe that the British Government’s presence in Ireland is wrong and the world would be a better place if they and their troops left. ‘He believes he is fighting for Irish freedom. He is like Michael Collins, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, they just seem to feel more intensely about these things than the rest of us,’ said Pat McArt, the editor of the local Derry Journal, who has closely followed McGuinness’s career.
In Belfast Gerry Adams, a former IRA Belfast Brigade Commander and fellow IRA Army Council member, wears a bullet-proof vest and lives on the run for fear of assassination by loyalist paramilitaries. But in the relative safety of Derry, where Catholics outnumber Protestants two to one, McGuinness lives with his wife and five children in a modest private house in the Bogside. ‘Martin lives a working-class life in a very ordinary house. His wife works in a local shop. Their kids go to school with other kids, every detail of their car, their clothing, is known to the community. Any time people heard talk of the Provos being racketeers or being sleazy, Republicans pointed to Martin. People knew it was not true,’ said Shane Paul O’Doherty, a former IRA Derry Brigade member and one-time associate, who was released from prison early after denouncing IRA violence.
McGuinness’s apparent incorruptibility has been a major political asset to the Provisionals. ‘In many ways Martin McGuinness is an exemplary man. He is a good father, a good husband, a strong church-goer. I believe him to be honest and upright in his personal conduct,’ commented the former Catholic Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, who has clashed with McGuinness countless times over the issue of IRA violence within the nationalist community. ‘I fundamentally disagree with him on the issue of violence. I believe it to be immoral and wrong, he believes it to be morally justified. But no one should underestimate Martin McGuinness. He is a man of great capabilities, very able, and of considerable political ability.’
McGuinness’s political opponents in the Protestant community hold, understandably, a diametrically opposed view. ‘McGuinness is cold-blooded and ruthless. In the early seventies he single-handedly masterminded the partial destruction of an entire city, the city of Londonderry. Whole streets were reduced to rubble because he directed the operations. But he is also a rational being. He marks the percentages. He sits down and assesses the benefit to the republican movement of any individual action. The effects on wives or children would only come into the equation if he thought that operation would backfire on the Provo public relations machine,’ says Gregory Campbell, the local Democratic Unionist Party councillor.
My newspaper, the Sunday Correspondent, printed my May 1990 interview with McGuinness under the headline ‘IRA hints at deal on ceasefire’, but privately I was sceptical that the British Government would abandon its long-stated policy of not talking to terrorists when McGuinness’s commitment to a United Ireland was as obdurate as ever. I was wrong. The interview had been a message in a bottle from McGuinness to secret negotiators within the highest echelons of the British State. In November 1990 the head of the Crown Secret Service, MI6, in Western Europe began a series of protracted negotiations with McGuinness. In November 1993, despite many denials to the contrary, details of these negotiations leaked out and the contents of secret memos published. McGuinness had been right – the British Government can be forced to the negotiating table. Like every other commentator in Ireland, he ascribes the genesis of the 1993 secret talks directly to the ‘cutting edge’ of the IRA’s campaign and the two city-blaster bombs in London. ‘I am not a member of the IRA,’ he explained somewhat half-heartedly, ‘but at the same time people knowledgeable about these events can clearly see that the IRA believed the British Government could be put under more pressure on the streets of London. Most people in Ireland would accept that the large bomb explosions have inflicted grievous blows against the British Establishment.’
McGuinness’s role as chief negotiator on the republican side was further proof to his opponents of his pre-eminent stature within the IRA leadership, despite his denials of involvement. ‘McGuinness is the IRA. That is why the British Government were dealing with him. They knew that if he could be brought along, so could the IRA,’ claimed a scornful Gregory Campbell.
Officially Martin McGuinness is just a member of Sinn Fein’s National Executive, the Ard Chomhairle, and if asked he will as a matter of policy deny membership of the IRA – a sensible response given that membership of the IRA, an illegal organization, carries a six-month jail term in Northern Ireland. But this view of his role within the Republican Movement is not shared by the United States Government, which named him in a 1988 report, Terrorist Group Profiles, as leader of the Provisionals. Nor are his denials accepted by RUC policemen and British Army officers, who, in private, simply state that he is head of the IRA. Nor is it the view of the British Government, which has twice negotiated directly with McGuinness in a bid to bring the IRA campaign to an end. Nor do the people of Northern Ireland, and certainly no one with what McGuinness would describe as a ‘titter of wit’ within Derry’s nationalist population, believe his formal denials.
* * *
Martin McGuinness was born in 1950, ten years before Paddy Flood, in the Bogside district of Derry, into a society condemned by its Unionist rulers to failure and economic stagnation. The minority Protestant population ruthlessly excluded Catholics from all positions of power. Catholic families were corralled into the slums of the Bogside in order to prevent a shift in the narrow voting balances in the city’s gerrymandered electoral wards and a subsequent threat to Unionist domination of Derry Corporation.
In general, the Catholic population, conditioned by its Church and its own political leaders, resentfully but apathetically accepted their inferior status. ‘Expectations were little higher than the reality. As long as the state existed there would be discrimination, and as long as there was discrimination we would suffer unemployment and slum housing. Everyone knew that. Demands were made, of course, that discrimination be stopped, but more for the record than in real hope of a result,’ wrote Eamonn McCann, in his definitive account of the outbreak of the Troubles, War and an Irish Town.
McGuinness came from a typical working-class Bogside family. His mother Peggy was a housewife, his father William worked in a foundry. Martin was the second oldest boy in a family of seven children. As with their neighbours, life held little promise of economic betterment for the McGuinnesses, nor was any expected. The family voted for the local nationalist MP Eddie McAteer and had no contact with the dangerous ‘communistic’ agitators like Eamonn McCann, who from March 1968 onwards had begun a series of protests against the local council over housing.
The year 1968 was that of student revolution, Vietnam War protests and the Paris uprising. In Northern Ireland streams of middle-class students took to the streets singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and protesting against the Unionist monopoly of power. But the struggle in Ulster was far older than the fashionable battle between hippies and the riot police of the Western democracies. The reactionary Stormont Government had no means of coping with dissent, seeing the civil rights demonstrators merely as the ancient historic enemy in another guise. A major showdown with the protesters took place on 5 October 1968 in the Protestant Waterside district of Derry after four hundred demonstrators defied a ban on a protest march and assembled in the city’s Duke Street. Pointedly, McGuinness, like the vast majority of the Bogside community, did not attend. The mainly Catholic marchers, in hostile territory, found themselves trapped between two police cordons with no exit route. The RUC, the Protestant police arm of a Protestant state, began batoning their way into the panicking crowd. The West Belfast MP Gerry Fitt attended the rally as a speaker but like everyone else received a severe beating. The film images of Gerry Fitt’s bloodied head were broadcast to living rooms around the world. The latest eruption of Northern Ireland’s Troubles had begun.
At the time, McGuinness was employed as a butcher’s assistant in a shop in the city centre, having left school three years before at fifteen. ‘Word spread back to the Bogside that Fitt had been assaulted by the RUC and other people had been beaten,’ said McGuinness, recalling the reaction in the nationalist community.
It was an absolutely shocking experience. It was the event that totally changed things in this city and made people extremely angry. The RUC had attacked the nationalist people of this city, who were the majority. I found it incredible that the RUC denied their right to march and then they beat them. There was a lot of anger and tension. I was eighteen at the time and like ninety-five per cent of my acquaintances would have been very angry and distraught.
Prior to Duke Street McGuinness had had only one encounter with the Unionist state. ‘I had left school and there was a local garage advertising for a mechanic. I went for the interview and the first question was, what school did I go to? When I answered “Christian Brothers” [a local Catholic school] the interview immediately ended. I walked almost shell-shocked from the building. I thought they did not like the look of me. I went home and told my parents but there was no big discussion about it.’
Three years later the mood of resigned acceptance was over. There was an explosion of rage and an escalating series of confrontations as the city’s youth began to hurl stones, bricks and petrol bombs at the now detested RUC. McGuinness kept his day job but devoted his energies to rioting.
I threw stones, petrol bombs, whatever else I could lay my hands on. I would be rioting in my lunch hour, going home, changing my clothes and walking back through the same RUC men in full battle-rig, some of whom were lying exhausted on the floor because of what the likes of me and other people were doing in their spare time. After work I would go home, get my dinner, and go back down and throw stones and whatever else was to hand until twelve o’clock at night. It was unreal.
The riots, as these things go, were relatively straightforward and soon established their own rules of engagement; no man’s land was an area on the outskirts of the city centre at the entrance to the Bogside and the Saturday afternoon fixture was known as the ‘matinee’. But events across Northern Ireland were spiralling out of control and in Derry the ill-disciplined police force made a series of midnight incursions into the Bogside district that amounted to police riots. In April 1969 they invaded the home of forty-two-year-old Sammy Devenney and savagely bludgeoned him in front of his wife and children. Devenney died of his injuries a few months later but no officer was prosecuted and relations between rioters and police deteriorated to a dangerous pitch. ‘Suddenly people were not prepared to turn the other cheek any more. The RUC became the enemy, the Unionist Government was the enemy. I cannot say at that stage that I had worked out that the people who were responsible for all this were in Downing Street. That came later,’ said McGuinness.
The final confrontation came on 12 August 1969 when Orangemen from all over Northern Ireland descended on Derry for the annual Apprentice Boys’ March to commemorate the lifting of the siege of Derry in 1689. As the marchers skirted the edge of the Catholic district they were stoned by Bogsiders entrenched behind makeshift barricades. The police and Orangemen charged into the nationalist area after the fleeing rioters, indisputably violating the Bogsiders’ self-declared defence threshold – the infamous Battle of the Bogside began. Pitched street battles broke out as rioters used everything to hand, stones, scaffolding rods, bricks and bottles, to fight the police to a standstill. The roof of a local tower block was used as a strongpoint to launch a withering deluge of missiles down on police heads; it rained petrol bombs. After forty-eight hours the police conceded defeat and the British Home Secretary, James Callaghan, ordered British troops in to restore order, thus effectively ending fifty years of Protestant autonomy and domination. The Bogsiders had won but not before the communal conflagration had spread to Belfast, where the Finucane family and hundreds of others were soon to be expelled from their homes by vengeful Protestant mobs.
The first British troops were hailed as saviours and protectors by the Bogsiders and local girls queued to offer them tea. The rioters were more suspicious. ‘I could not work out what was going on. The RUC were beaten to defeat in the city and then the soldiers arrived. Some people said they were here to control the RUC and others said they were here to shoulder up the state. Before long those words turned out to be prophetically true,’ recalled McGuinness.
* * *
In December 1969 a moribund IRA, based in Dublin, had split into two wings, the Officials and the Provisionals, primarily over the issue of recognizing the Dublin and Westminster Parliaments but more importantly over tactics on the erupting civil disorder in ‘the occupied area’. The Officials, influenced by Marxism, wanted to see a cross-community, class-based workers’ revolution and were reluctant to supply weapons for fear of alienating the Protestant working class. The Provisionals, led by a triumvirate of Daithi O’Connaill, Ruairi O’Bradaigh and Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain, were more direct – get guns into the hands of Catholics so they could shoot dead the Protestant mobs attacking nationalist homes.
McGuinness, like many of the enthusiastic rioters, joined the more numerous Officials in October 1970 but soon left in disgust, bored by the tedious lectures on class warfare and the pitiful state of an organization that aimed to blow up electricity pylons with four ounces of gelignite. ‘My own feelings were that the only way that this force that was being used against the community could be repelled was through resistance. The only people who were capable of doing that were Republicans, who were prepared to resist, whilst others were prepared to sit back and hope for change.’ McGuinness went searching for the right sponsors and at a hastily arranged meeting with MacStiofain and O’Connaill in late 1970 found the men he was looking for.
McGuinness’s tone in interviews from the early years of the Troubles reveals a young man aggressively eager to take the war to the British Army. He told Irish Times writer Nell McCafferty in 1972:
The Officials would not give us any action. All this time there was fighting in the streets and things getting worse in Belfast. You could see the soldiers just settling in in Derry, not being too worried about stone-throwing. Occasionally the Officials gave out Molotov cocktails which wouldn’t even go off and I knew that after fifty years we were more of an occupied country than we ever were. It seemed to me as plain as daylight that there was an army in our town, in our country, and that they weren’t there to give out flowers. Armies should be fought by armies.
Derry, whilst remaining psychologically isolated from the sectarian conflict of Belfast, was gripped by revolutionary ferment, chaotic riots and a confusing struggle between the rioters and the Crown’s soldiers. Said McCann:
Martin, at the age of eighteen, very quickly became convinced that the gun was the only thing the British understood. Throwing stones was not enough, there was going to have to be a war, a war of the nationalist people against the oppressive British presence. As a socialist it was not until Bloody Sunday in 1972 that I realized there was going to be a war and the Left had missed the boat. Martin was saying things that a couple of years earlier had only been said by people over fifty. He was young, fresh-faced, articulate, very self-confident. He was obviously held in high regard by his peers.
In the Bogside the British Army quickly became the target of the rioters’ stones. In reply, rubber bullets were fired, snatch squads deployed, local youths beaten and harassed. The conflict escalated; the first lead bullets were fired in July 1971, killing two local youths whom the Army claimed were armed with a rifle and a nail bomb. ‘I was there the day Desmond Beattie was killed, his body was brought round the corner near my home. It was obvious the fella was dead or close to death. At that stage there was blood everywhere. I found it shocking. I was very scared and couldn’t understand it. It was the first time I had seen anybody killed by a bullet,’ said McGuinness. A few days later the Provisionals made their first determined bid to kill British soldiers, with a sub-machine-gun attack on a patrol manning a checkpoint. ‘The Duke Street beatings, the attack on Sammy Devenney and the killing of Casey and Beattie were the four incidents why I became a Republican,’ said McGuinness, as we sat at his mother’s table, overlooked by black and white pictures of his father Tom, now dead, and a Catholic family blessing depicting the sacred heart of Jesus Christ.
McGuinness’s power base within the IRA was built on his reputation as Officer Commanding of the Derry Brigade from 1971 to 1973. He emerged as a natural leader from within the rioters who flocked to the Provisionals’ cause to channel their anger down the barrel of a gun. Until his leadership the Derry Provisionals had been poorly equipped and poorly led. The first attempt to manufacture explosives in June 1970 had been disastrous – the entire middle-echelon leadership blew themselves up, as well as killing two of the house-owner’s children, in the house where the three Provisional IRA men were making bombs.
In August 1971 the Stormont Government introduced internment, the traditional weapon for suppressing the IRA. The wave of arrests removed the top echelon of the Provisional leadership but left the street fighters like McGuinness untouched.
The day before internment I was a nobody, the day after internment I still regarded myself as a nobody. I did not know what to do. People credit you with this great military mind but it was a débâcle, a mish-mash. A large number of young people who had joined the movement wanted to be organized. I wanted to be as organized as they did. Unfortunately for me many of them felt I could do a good job. So that is what I did.
The job twenty-one-year-old McGuinness set about organizing was the systematic destruction of what was then considered to be the alien Protestant-dominated city centre. In a devastating onslaught McGuinness’s volunteers blasted and re-blasted their own city until it looked, in Eamonn McCann’s words, ‘as if it had been bombed from the air’. Of the city’s 150 shops only twenty were left trading. In interviews at the time, McGuinness justified the campaign as a means of putting pressure on the British Government and the Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw. ‘We are prepared to bomb any building that will cause economic devastation and put more pressure on the Government. The aim of our campaign is to cripple the city economically. It is to let people like Whitelaw see we cannot be walked over any longer,’ he told the Daily Telegraph’s reporter. McGuinness was careful to instruct IRA Volunteers to avoid civilian casualties and it is accepted that his soldiers were extraordinarily successful at avoiding killing the wrong type of people. ‘Sometimes mistakes are made,’ he admitted to the Irish Times in 1972. ‘There was an explosion in Derry some time ago and I read afterwards that a man had been trapped in the basement. He lost part of his leg. Then you read that he’s a cyclist and you feel sad,’ confessed a naive-sounding McGuinness.
Destroying your home town is a strange form of behaviour but one, at the time, that appeared perfectly natural to the teenagers who swelled the IRA’s ranks. ‘The city centre was near enough flat because of the way we had bombed it,’ said a former Derry Brigade Volunteer.
Once the security forces decided to put security barriers around the town our strategy was then to break through them. It was – how many bombs can you get inside their net? Every bomb we got inside was looked upon as a victory for us. It was not so much the physical damage you were doing as the sheer number of attacks. But it was still nice to get a car bomb and then ‘boom’, a whole row of shops would be gone.’
There was no shortage of Volunteers but the risks of arrest or getting shot were high. The Provisionals might have viewed themselves as freedom fighters but in reality they were just a bunch of local kids with a few old rifles, led by McGuinness, up against one of the world’s most professional armies. The first Volunteer to be killed was Eamonn Lafferty, an eighteen-year-old who died in a gun battle with troops eight days after internment was introduced. In republican eyes, Lafferty is a hero.
Lafferty, who was very poorly equipped, stood his ground against the might of the British Army and lost his life. A substantial number of soldiers had attempted to go into the Creggan and Lafferty and two or three other IRA Volunteers tried to stop them. There was a gun battle and he was shot dead. Lafferty had been an acquaintance of mine and his death had a tremendous impact on young people in Derry because he was seen as someone who was prepared to take on the might of the British Army.
We were recalling names and dates of events twenty years old but the details slipped from McGuinness’s mouth with a weary, steely precision. I was unable to distinguish in his blank face whether his recall was the by-product of frequent repetition or a mind that still held the remembrance of these things bright. It was impossible not to wonder if McGuinness was one of those ‘two or three’ other IRA Volunteers. There were no secrets to be read on his smooth face in his mother’s sitting room.
On 30 January 1972 British Army paratroopers shot dead thirteen civil rights protesters at a peaceful march on the fringes of the Bogside. ‘Bloody Sunday’ hurled Northern Ireland to the edge of civil war and in Dublin a mob burned down the British Embassy. But on the day of the march, McGuinness, like the rest of the Provisionals, was unarmed.
The decision was taken that Republicans would attend the march and that there would be no aggro whatsoever. It was more important to have thousands of people marching in the streets against internment as opposed to us trying to take advantage. We all went to the march and we ended up in the Bogside with the paratroopers shooting people dead. I saw people being killed all around me but there was nothing I could do. I was absolutely raging.
McGuinness and his companions quickly determined that it would be counter-productive to attack the paratroopers and instead the Provisional leader proposed a national strike until after the funerals. But his rage was not only reserved for the Crown.
We were in a car driving through the Bogside that night when I saw men and women getting on the bingo bus to Buncrana. I got on the bus and castigated them. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves. There are thirteen people dead. You know some of their families.’ They walked off the bus and we went home. I think now I was wrong to do that because at that stage everyone was in shock, but I was in a terrible rage. No one knew how to handle this event.
The shaming of the bingo bus reveals the degree of zealotry, social conservatism and self-confidence to order other individuals within the nationalist community around, that made McGuinness a natural leader. He was a rebel, not a revolutionary, and his respect for priests, the Church and the social mores of Catholic Ireland bolstered his position within the community as a true son of the Bogside. ‘Martin was a celibate priest of Irish republicanism, a virtuous guy,’ said Shane Paul O’Doherty. ‘Whereas other people would go out for a jar with a girl, Martin was not into that. He had one girlfriend prior to his wife.’
McGuinness’s leadership style is reputed to be oblique. He does not directly order people around but suggests they act in accordance with his predetermined wishes. His standing in republican eyes is so formidable that few IRA Volunteers have ever dissented from his judgement.
Despite his lack of formal education McGuinness was soon considered to be an astute strategist by his IRA comrades in the Derry Brigade. Said an ex-Volunteer:
Martin was a relatively rare phenomenon in the IRA, he was a thinker at a time when there was a lot of blind faith: ‘We are right, we might not be able to tell you how we are right but we are.’ If someone with a bit of education came along they could tie you up in knots. A common response was: ‘We know we are right and if you don’t lay off we’ll shoot ye.’ But Martin was deeper than that, he could sit down and win the argument. He was articulate and could explain publicly where we were at. That was also unusual in the IRA and it secured his place very early on and kept him there because he is still able to think.
After internment the Bogside and Creggan areas were sealed off to the British Army by barricades and the mini-republican statelet of ‘Free Derry’ was established. McGuinness, with his good looks and coy boyish charm, came into his own as an IRA propagandist, giving tours behind the barricades to the world’s media and holding daily press conferences where on one occasion he introduced journalists to the sniper who had just shot and killed a British soldier on the city’s walls. In later years he found the semi-glamorous image of the ‘Boy General’ hard to shake off and to his acute embarrassment in 1976 he endured a visit from Hollywood film star Jane Fonda, dubbed ‘Hanoi Jane’ by American right-wingers for her well-publicized tour to Communist North Vietnam.
Behind Free Derry’s barricades McGuinness gave his first brief but seminal speech to a crowd of cheering supporters. Grabbing a microphone at a rally in the Bogside, he succinctly encapsulated his political philosophy in two lines: ‘Gerry Fitt and John Hume [Catholic constitutional politicians] can say what they like. We’re not stopping until there’s a United Ireland and that is that.’
McGuinness’s elevated status did not find favour with his mother Peggy. In an April 1972 Irish Times article she was recorded as being worried about her son’s future job prospects. ‘His trade’s been interrupted. His father is a welder, his brothers are at the bricklaying and carpentering, but what will become of Martin? That’s why they’ll have to get an amnesty, so’s he can get back to work, and not always be on the run.’
The article also reported that both his parents had been panic-stricken after Peggy McGuinness had found her son’s gloves and IRA beret in his bedroom. ‘There was a big row. She and my father told me to get out of it, and for the sake of peace I said I would and they calmed down. But now they have to accept it. They’ve seen the British Army in action and they know I’ve no choice … I used to worry about being killed before Bloody Sunday but now I don’t think about death at all,’ said a chilling twenty-one-year-old McGuinness.
Amongst the new seventeen-year-old recruits flooding into the Provisionals after Bloody Sunday there was no question about his pre-eminence in the IRA. ‘Martin would always have been looked upon as a Volunteer’s man. He was looked upon as being on our side,’ commented an ex-Derry Brigade Volunteer.
He was very considerate and you felt he would never ask you to do anything that he had not done himself. If you were going out on a job that involved an attack on a shop or pub, Martin was the one to say: ‘Have you got any money for a drink if you are in there?’ Sometimes when you planned things you would forget things like that – sixteen-year-olds did not have money. Martin would be the one to say: ‘Here, here’s your money.’ He was not detached, not way up there. It made all the difference to how he was viewed. We thought of him as one of us.
McGuinness’s rapid promotion to command of the nascent Derry Brigade and the bloody events of the early seventies have been the shaping force of his life. One third of the 320 people killed in Derry because of the Troubles died in the street clashes and gun battles of 1971 to 1973; fifty-four of them were members of the British security forces. Over the last twenty-five years, forty IRA Volunteers have been killed. Derry city is a small close-knit community and McGuinness would have known all of the dead IRA men and been a personal friend to many. Inevitably that bloodshed must have inured McGuinness, and those like him, to violent death and the taking of human life. ‘Obviously it does have an effect on you. Many of my friends have lost their lives. And on many occasions, through chance or whatever, I could have lost my life as well.’
I asked him what was his strongest personal memory of that violent life.
I was with Eugene McGillan [an eighteen-year-old IRA Volunteer who the Army claimed had fired on troops] the night he was shot by the British Army, fifty yards from here. I lifted him into the ambulance. There was only he and I in that ambulance. He looked at me, his eyes were wide open, and I looked at him. He had just been shot but he knew he was going to die and I knew he was going to die. It was deathly quiet and then when I left the ambulance Colm Keenan [who the British Army said was also involved in the gun battle] was lying down the street, shot in the head. They were two unarmed Republicans who had been murdered by the British Army and both of them were exceptionally close friends of mine.
Regardless of the exact circumstances of the men’s deaths, it was clearly not an experience likely to induce empathy for the anguish of his enemies within the British political and military establishments when the IRA killed soldiers or politicians.
After Bloody Sunday the British State in Northern Ireland was under siege. The nationalist community, wrote Eamonn McCann, ‘made a holiday in their hearts at news of dead soldiers’. Bombing and shooting incidents soared to record levels; nearly five hundred people were killed in 1972, including 150 members of the security forces. In defiance of his public rhetoric, Secretary of State William Whitelaw invited the Provisional leadership for peace talks on the future of Ireland in the splendour of Guinness family millionaire Paul Channon’s house in Cheyne Walk in London. Although only twenty-two, McGuinness, as leader of the Provos in the North’s second largest city, was included in the seven-man delegation, along with Gerry Adams. The former butcher’s assistant had come a long way in eight months. McGuinness recalled:
The whole experience was unreal. The house was a mansion. I came from a working-class area of the Bogside. But it wasn’t just the house, it was the way the whole thing was done. First we were taken in a blacked-out van to Shantallow. An RAF helicopter descended and we took off and were flown to the military part of Belfast’s airport where a private RAF plane was waiting to fly us to England. An officer was waiting for us at the bottom of the steps and as we walked past he saluted us. It was incredible.
In Cheyne Walk the Provisionals listed their demands in the form of an ultimatum calling for the British Government to recognize the right of Irish self-determination, to issue a declaration of intent to withdraw by 1 January 1975 and to promulgate an amnesty for IRA prisoners. Whitelaw prevaricated; the gap between the two sides was too great and the IRA cease-fire that accompanied the talks soon collapsed. But the venue afforded McGuinness the opportunity to put pressure on Whitelaw personally over the Bloody Sunday killings.
I tackled Whitelaw when he said British soldiers did not kill civilians in Ireland. I said it was untrue and the city that I had come from had seen thirteen of its civilians shot dead. I said it was disgraceful that he could sit there and say that British soldiers were not killing Irish civilians in Ireland. But like everything else it was just glossed over, move on, to the next item.
The talks were a failure but the episode bolstered and sustained the Provisionals in their belief that sufficient military pressure would bring the British Government to the conference table and that ministers’ protestations about ‘never talking to terrorists’ were just lies. Apart from showing greater flexibility about the date of withdrawal and the nature of the transitional political structures, the IRA’s fundamental negotiating position remains unchanged despite a generation of conflict. ‘The position of the Republican Movement is that the objective we wish to achieve is one where the British Government are politically and militarily no longer in Ireland. That is our goal and that has not changed and it is not going to change,’ states McGuinness.
In January 1973 McGuinness was arrested in Donegal, across the border from Derry, close to a car filled with 250 pounds of explosives and five thousand rounds of ammunition. He was tried in the Special Criminal Court in Dublin but refused to recognize the court and was convicted of IRA membership and sentenced to six months. He struck a defiant note. ‘I am a member of the Derry Brigade of Oglaigh na hEireann and am very, very proud of it. We fought against the killers of my people. Many of my comrades were arrested, tortured or killed. Some of them were shot, while unarmed, by the British Army. We firmly and honestly believed we were doing our duty as Irishmen.’
A year later McGuinness was again jailed in the Republic on membership charges and spent most of 1974 in prison. He has never been convicted of a terrorist offence in Northern Ireland, though he did spend several months in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Jail in 1976 before membership charges against him were dropped. He was excluded from Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for most of the eighties and the ban was only finally lifted in October 1994. His imprisonment in 1974 absolved him from blame within the IRA leadership for the disastrous year-long 1975 truce with the British Government.
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On paper the IRA’s structure has remained unchanged from the 1920s. The supreme IRA authority is the Army Convention, which acts as a delegate IRA Parliament with representatives from each active IRA unit in Ireland. In theory the Convention meets to elect a twelve-person Army Executive, which then elects from within its members a seven-man Army Council. The Army Council then appoints one of its members as Chief of Staff, the operational head of the IRA. One of the key functions of the Chief of Staff is to recruit the active service units, like Frankie Ryan’s, that bomb British cities.
But the Provisional IRA’s Army Convention has only met twice in the last twenty-five years and only at times of great revolutionary change in IRA doctrine. The first occasion was the split from the Official IRA in 1969 that founded the Provisionals and the second was in 1986 over the thorny controversy of dropping the traditional ban on taking seats in the Dublin Parliament. In reality changes within the IRA leadership occur infrequently and only at the behest of the existing tiny hermetic republican elite, termed ‘the leadership’, who already dominate the IRA Army Council. It is not a coincidence that the two youngest members of the 1972 IRA delegation to London, Adams and McGuinness, are the two most prominent republican leaders today. Co-option on to the IRA Army Council does confer considerable power. The IRA purports to be an army with military not political command structures; in theory refusal to obey an order from a superior is an act of treason and can be punishable by death.
In February 1975 Sinn Fein President Ruairi O’Bradaigh, backed by Daithi O’Connaill, both senior Army Council members, declared an open-ended cessation of ‘hostilities against Crown forces’. The IRA leaders mistakenly believed that they had induced the British Government to leave Ireland and that the protracted negotiations, at arm’s length, between themselves and British officials were the preamble to a public declaration of intent to withdraw. In fact the Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, was reforming the judicial system to try IRA suspects like Seamus Finucane as common criminals – the British Army was digging in for a long war.
The ceasefire had a mixed reaction amongst IRA Volunteers. The former Derry Brigade Volunteer commented:
Amongst certain sections of republicans there was a feeling of ‘All right, we gave it our best shot, another glorious defeat. Let’s put away the weapons and get the best deal we can.’ That feeling became more and more obvious as the ceasefire lasted. But there was another strand in the movement saying, ‘We are not into glorious defeats. This time we will settle it for once and for all.’ Martin would have been on that side but at that stage you accepted blindly what the leadership did.
The protracted and apparently aimless ceasefire sapped republican morale and confused IRA Volunteers. Without a clear offensive target like the British Army, republican anger turned in on itself in a series of debilitating internecine feuds and outright sectarian attacks on Protestant targets. By late 1975, as the truce petered out in ignominy on the ground, the Provos were falling apart.
The recriminations over the ceasefire brought out into the open the latent power struggle between the old guard Southern leadership of O’Bradaigh, a pious, bloodthirsty, priest-like fanatic, and his ally O’Connaill, a chain-smoking former gunman who favoured white gabardine trench-coats, and the Northerners, like Adams and McGuinness, who were doing the actual fighting but had little executive power on the Army Council.
Both O’Bradaigh and O’Connaill were veterans of the abortive IRA fifties campaign when self-styled heroic IRA Volunteers turned up in stolen tipper trucks at rural border RUC police stations on New Year’s Day and machine-gunned the inhabitants to strike a blow for ‘old Ireland’s cause’ – and usually did so by being killed themselves. Theirs was an intensely narrow, parochial vision which stressed Catholic piety, absolute ideological intransigence and near-religious veneration of the IRA martyrs of the 1923 Civil War – remorselessly crushed by the ‘Free Staters’ who had accepted the 1922 Treaty with England, and partition. It was a commonplace amongst O’Bradaigh’s contemporaries to take Holy Communion from a sympathetic Catholic priest before going on a mission to murder RUC policemen.
Both O’Connaill’s and O’Bradaigh’s republicanism was founded on maintaining a purity of doctrine within the greater nationalist ethos of the Irish Republic; true Republicans differentiated themselves from sell-outs and traitors by refusing to join in the corrupt politics of the illegitimate ‘usurping legislature’ of the Dublin Parliament in Leinster House.
According to this purist IRA doctrine, the real Irish Republic, a thirty-two-county all-Ireland state, was proclaimed at the Easter Rising in 1916 by the republican leader Padraig Pearse. The Easter 1916 Proclamation was then ratified by the first all-Ireland elected parliament, Dail Eireann, established in defiance of the British authorities after Sinn Fein MPs won the majority of seats in the December 1918 General Election. The unity and indivisibility of this Irish Republic was again affirmed by the Sinn Fein majority of the Second Dail, elected in May 1921 in the last all-Ireland elections to be held this century.
The Second Dail soon narrowly split into pro- and anti-Treaty factions and a civil war commenced in which the anti-Treaty IRA were defeated by their one-time comrades and the twenty-six-county Free State was successfully established as an independent state. It was the first of many schisms within republican ranks over the following decades as successive factions broke away to pursue pragmatic electoral politics. But the Civil War left the republican leadership with a bitter historical legacy; in the IRA, political compromise was for ever afterwards synonymous with betrayal.
Although the IRA were beaten, they and their lineage descendants, like O’Bradaigh, the Provisionals’ official theoretician, denied their defeat by declaring the decision of the majority of the Second Dail’s members to vote for the Treaty as invalid. In IRA terms they had broken their oath of allegiance to the real republic and turned themselves into a ‘usurping legislature’ that accepted partition. By use of an arcane legal argument, O’Bradaigh and his fellow unelected gunmen on the IRA Army Council actually claimed to be the legitimate government of Ireland, the true inheritors of Pearse’s invisible republic.
The IRA logic ran as follows. In December 1938 the rump of republican members of the Second Dail transferred their authority to the IRA Army Council. In effect the membership of the last ‘legitimate’ Parliament of Ireland conferred upon the IRA the right to act for the Republic. The IRA Army Council was therefore the de jure government of Ireland. IRA Volunteers were informed that Oglaigh na hEireann was the ‘legal and lawful government’ of the Irish Republic and all other parliaments were ‘illegal assemblies, the willing tools of an occupying force’. Sinn Fein candidates could fight elections but they had to pledge themselves that ‘if elected I will not sit in, nor take part in the proceedings of any Parliament, legislating or purporting to legislate, for the people of Ireland other than the Parliament of the Irish Republic representative of the entire thirty-two counties of Ireland … any breach thereof will be regarded as an act of treachery, to be dealt with as such’. Non-recognition of the twenty-six county State Parliament at Leinster House became the fundamental bulwark of IRA political philosophy and the doctrine of abstentionism was written into the Sinn Fein/IRA Constitutions. The will of the Irish people and the political parties they endorsed in fifty years of democratic elections were arrogantly dismissed.
This self-denying ordinance ensured that a vote for Sinn Fein was always a futile protest. The IRA remained true to its ideals but from the 1920s onwards the movement, riven by factionalism, dwindled away to a fanatical core of believers, irrelevant to the electoral politics of the Irish Free State – whose chronic economic failures forced generations to emigrate.
In hindsight it seems shocking that legions of gunmen could be so confused about the nature of the campaign of political violence they pursued. IRA leaders affected to despise the corruption of electoral politics and stressed their own doctrines of militarism – fighting the Crown by shooting policemen dead. They were consumed by their own ‘doctrine of the gun’ but failed to see that their own bullets and their own killings were just another form of political symbolism. Political violence in Ireland has always been inextricably linked to the public electoral process and the pursuit of power. The IRA never have been and never will be a significant open military threat to the Crown’s Armed Forces – in the period of O’Bradaigh’s early guerrilla days in Ireland from 1956 to 1962, only six RUC policemen were killed.
The old IRA’s self-willed refusal to confront political reality had one overwhelming tactical advantage – their very fanaticism sustained the movement through five decades in the political wilderness until the Battle of the Bogside and the rioters’ leader Martin McGuinness rekindled their political fortunes.
From the renewal of the Troubles in 1969, O’Bradaigh’s Civil War republican theology was irrelevant to street fighters like McGuinness, engaged in an open insurrection against the Crown in a hostile Protestant state. But that initially did not matter. The Northerners were after weapons and explosives, and the Southern old guard, firm advocates of the gun, were eager to supply them. Decrepit IRA fund-raising structures and arms-smuggling routes creaked back into action and a supply line of guns and gelignite was opened up to the war in the North.
But in the aftermath of the disastrous 1975 ceasefire the Northerners began increasingly to question the validity of abstentionism and the authority of O’Bradaigh and O’Connaill. From his prison cell in the Maze, Gerry Adams saw the need to broaden and politicize the IRA’s campaign and break free of the ‘rule from the grave’. A convoluted power struggle, led by Adams, his personable lieutenant, Danny Morrison, and McGuinness, ensued against the Southern leadership. The first indications of dissent clustered around control of the Belfast IRA propaganda sheet Republican News, which carried ‘war news’ of the IRA’s operations. ‘It was shitty,’ said Morrison, who became editor in 1977. ‘Just before we took it over there was a tirade against contraception on the front page. It was completely inappropriate and reflected the views of those who were out of the heat of battle. Republicans get drunk, chase skirt, don’t go to Mass. So what? You cannot expect this pure emblem in the real world.’ Morrison, a natural propagandist, dropped the Catholic piety and replaced it with a more forceful class-orientated journalism that increasingly questioned both moral and political republican orthodoxies. But Morrison’s freedom to do so was ultimately founded on the support of leading figures, like McGuinness, who retained their emblematic position within the IRA through their unquestionable support for the IRA’s military campaign.
To appease his internal critics, O’Bradaigh in November 1976 acceded to a new IRA structure that weakened the power of the Army Council and formally transferred control over much of the IRA’s military campaign to the Northerners. A Northern Command, a mini-Army Council to oversee all offensive operations in the North, was created; its first Director of Operations was Martin McGuinness. The Northerners would soon come to dominate all areas of the IRA leadership but the rancour over the truce and the feeling that the older leaders allowed themselves to be duped persist to the present day. ‘This generation of Republicans is not going to be fooled by the Brits’ fancy diplomatic language,’ states McGuinness.
From 1976 onwards McGuinness kept a low public profile, his energies devoted to his roles within the IRA leadership, first as Director of Operations, then as the organization’s Chief of Staff from 1978 to 1982. He oversaw the reforms of the IRA’s internal structures away from the old companies and battalions, where internal security was easily compromised by informers, to a tighter cell-like organization.
Although the IRA purports to be a national army, its command structure is fragmented. The actual fighting in Northern Ireland is undertaken by individual units reporting to a brigade like that of East Tyrone or Derry, whose membership figures would range from thirty to sixty IRA men. The rate of IRA activity is almost totally dependent on the leading IRA figures within that specific geographic power structure. British security sources allege that McGuinness, despite his Army Council position, still maintains an oversight role on all IRA operations by the Derry Brigade, including attacks like the Coshquin bombing which the informer Martin Hogan failed to abort. The role of the Army Council is really just to supply those brigades with weapons, explosives and training facilities. If a particular brigade or local IRA commander disagrees with certain aspects of Army Council policy, the leadership’s power to enforce its will on him is limited. Membership of the IRA is voluntary and power flows from the bottom upwards. The potential for a split between the geographical factions is ever present and the IRA Army Council goes to great lengths to seek consensus rather than dangerous division. The Irish writer Brendan Behan, a one-time IRA activist, perfectly satirized the incestuous, sometimes murderous, factionalism within republican ranks in a mocking joke. ‘What’s the first thing on the agenda when three IRA men enter a room?’ ‘The split.’
Far from being revolutionary, the IRA leadership is extremely conservative when reforming republican doctrine. It took Gerry Adams ten years before he felt ready to provoke the split with O’Bradaigh over abstentionism. In 1986 Sinn Fein at its annual conference finally dropped the traditional republican doctrine of refusing to recognize or to take seats in the Dublin Parliament. The decision was the result of years of careful lobbying, back-room alliances and consensus-building between the leadership and the different factions and IRA units. The most important element in the whole process had been the calling of an Army Convention, a couple of months prior to the Sinn Fein conference, to endorse the Northern leadership’s position. Once that Convention had done so, it was axiomatic that Sinn Fein would concur with the views of the IRA; in Irish republicanism the IRA fire and call the shots. But the IRA leadership, of course, would not have called such an Army Convention unless they could have predicted and predetermined the result.
When the results of the Sinn Fein vote were finally announced in Dublin’s Mansion House, O’Bradaigh and a group of supporters in a pre-arranged manoeuvre stood up and walked out of the hall. A preceding piper struck up a republican refrain whose lyrics run: ‘Take it [the Irish tricolour] down from the mast Irish traitor/Its the flag we Republicans claim/It cannot belong to Free Staters/For you have brought on it nothing but shame.’
Later that same evening O’Bradaigh, with O’Connaill in a white trench-coat beside him, and a motley collection of aged southern Republicans gathered in a pre-booked hotel on the western outskirts of Dublin and founded a new party, Republican Sinn Fein, to maintain the true faith in an ever tighter vessel. A hastily mimeographed statement with the name of the new party handwritten on to the original typed text was handed round to journalists. There was a mad theatrical air to the proceedings. I was expecting Daithi O’Connaill, the archetypal fifties IRA gunman, to produce a Webley revolver from each pocket of his voluminous trench-coat, call the meeting to order and urge his followers to attack a border post that night.
The new party was a tiny, geriatric minority destined to be defeated by natural wastage rather than British Intelligence; O’Connaill, reputed to be the strategist behind the IRA car bomb, was to die peacefully in his bed a couple of years later. But O’Bradaigh, in an act akin to the papal laying-on of hands, had already been to the Mayo home of the last surviving member of the Second Dail, Commandant Tom Maguire, in his nineties, and had obtained a suitable ringing denunciation of the dropping of abstentionism. ‘I recognize no Army Council or any such body that advocates participation in the usurping legislature of Leinster House,’ Maguire was quoted as saying. But Maguire, the long-dead members of the second Dail and O’Bradaigh were ignored by the triumphant Northern IRA leadership. The killer-blow had in reality already been delivered by O’Bradaigh’s one-time protégé McGuinness in his speech earlier in the day:
We must accept the reality that sixty-five years of republican struggle, republican sacrifice and rhetoric have signally failed to convince the majority of people in the twenty-six counties that the Republican Movement has any relevance to them. By ignoring that reality we remain alone and isolated on the high altar of abstentionism, divorced from the people … The former leadership … has never been able to come to terms with this leadership’s criticisms of the disgraceful attitude adopted by them during the eighteen-month ceasefire of the seventies … If you allow yourselves to be led out of this hall today, the only place you will be going is home. Don’t go, my friends, we will lead you to the Republic.
In his keynote speech McGuinness was repudiating what had been sacred republican doctrine. He was rejecting the Civil War theology, the sacrifice of generations, and the ideology of denial which just years before had obliged both himself and Volunteers like Seamus Finucane to refuse to recognize courts, to refuse legal counsel, and voluntarily to consign themselves to decades of imprisonment. His speech was significant not just for its content but also for its place in the proceedings. He was the last speaker before the vote on the abstentionist motion was called – McGuinness was the Northern leadership’s trump card.
It is significant too that the Army Council played the same card to dispel rumours within their own ranks of a sell-out when details of their secret negotiations with the British Cabinet were leaked to the press in November 1993. Sinn Fein press officers were anxious to leak McGuinness’s name to journalists as the IRA’s chief negotiator in order to stem potential splits. In republican terms, McGuinness could not be the source of potential betrayal. As the epitome of the armed struggle, McGuinness’s commitment to the IRA and the politics of the gun was unchallengeable. He has remained distant from and immune to the criticism levelled at Adams’ coterie of Belfast Sinn Fein advisers that they were politicians masquerading as Republicans and hence potential sell-outs. The IRA’s rural defenders, like Fergus of the East Tyrone Brigade, could be reassured. ‘If Adams or his allies came up with a deal with the Brits you could never really trust it. But if Martin endorses it, then there must be something in it. The Army (IRA) trust Martin. If anyone can sell them a deal, then he can,’ explained a republican observer.
* * *
McGuinness’s apparent integrity is respected by many non-Republicans in Derry and with one notable exception, McGuinness, in his home town, has remained immune from personal responsibility for the cruelties of the IRA’s war. ‘There has not been a sectarian war in Derry. The IRA in Derry and therefore the leader of the IRA in Derry would not be associated with a whole series of terrible things, deaths of innocents and so on, things that smell strongly of naked sectarianism as in Belfast and other places,’ explains McCann.
Eamonn McCann may be accurate in assessing the way the nationalist community view their most famous Republican but McGuinness has implicitly endorsed what can only be considered needless cruelties. At the very beginning of his leadership of the Derry Brigade in November 1971, a group of local women seized Marta Doherty, the fiancée of a British soldier, and ritually sheared her hair, tarred and feathered her – the traditional punishment for female collaborators. No one intervened.
A decade later, in April 1981, a Derry Brigade Volunteer, now dead, cold-bloodedly murdered a twenty-seven-year-old Protestant housewife, Joanna Mathers, as she collected completed census forms from homes in the Waterside district of the city. Sinn Fein, as part of the agitation around the H-Block protest, Bobby Sands’ hunger strike and impending election, had been campaigning for a boycott of the census. The IRA gunman attacked Joanna Mathers, who was working part-time for ‘pin-money’, seizing the forms, then shooting her in the neck at point-blank range. After the killing the Derry Brigade lied, denying being involved. The republican National H-block Committee publicly condemned the murder and the frenetic but unrelated efforts of other IRA Volunteers, like Dermot Finucane in Belfast, meant Mathers’ murder was soon subsumed within a catalogue of more ‘legitimate targets’. But that does not absolve McGuinness as leader of the Derry Brigade of his moral responsibility, any more than private republican regret could restore Joanna Mathers to her husband and infant son. Her murderer continued to live openly in Derry and went unpunished for his crime.
The IRA and McGuinness did not escape the political consequences of what was accepted to be the greatest blunder in twenty-five years: the Good Neighbours bomb, planted by Paddy Flood and betrayed to his handlers. Sean Dalton, Sheila Lewis and Jed Curran had families and were well known in the Creggan community. Unlike the death of Joanna Mathers, a Protestant, their deaths could not be marked down as number two thousand and something. The Derry Brigade issued a statement of apology, claiming that the Good Neighbours operation had ‘gone tragically wrong’. ‘The Derry Brigade has conducted thousands of operations over the past twenty years. We have always taken great care to ensure that civilians are not put at risk and even our enemies acknowledge that fact. This time we failed and we accept the consequences and the criticism of that failure.’
But the shock-wave of anger was not so easily dismissed and McGuinness badly misjudged the mood when he attended the crowded funeral. ‘McGuinness might be head of the IRA but he was lucky he wasn’t kicked to death,’ said Sean Dalton’s son Martin. ‘Some cousins of mine, who were once members of another republican organization [the Official IRA], were prepared to take him at the back of the chapel and kick his head in. And if it had not been for some cooler heads that is what would have happened.’ At the funeral McGuinness and other Sinn Fein councillors were jostled and kicked, and one mourner repeatedly swore at the republican leader and publicly denounced his presence in the church. ‘This is all your responsibility,’ McGuinness was told.1
‘Sinn Fein came to us and offered us money for the funeral but they were told in no uncertain terms where to go. The IRA said they were sorry it happened but at the end of the day them people do not have any souls. They didn’t feel any remorse – to them it was just another bomb,’ said Martin Dalton. ‘I challenged them on television to defend what they did there – put a bomb not only in a nationalist area but in a built-up area. And they are supposed to be fighting for the people?’
The hostile mourners at St Mary’s in Creggan shared, however briefly, the outside world’s condemnation of the IRA as terrorists who plant bombs in bars and railway stations and murder indiscriminately.
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Since 1973 the IRA have ‘brought the war home to England’ through an episodic but sustained bombing offensive in London and the provinces and on the Continent. During McGuinness’s alleged personal tenure as Chief of Staff from 1978 to 1982, there were a number of IRA spectaculars, including the Chelsea Barracks, Hyde Park and Harrods Christmas bombs. Inevitably there were civilian casualties; Christmas shoppers were killed, members of an Irish emigrant family were blown up waiting at a bus stop near Chelsea Barracks. The pattern of attacks, and the resultant deaths of innocents, continued up until the declaration of the 1994 ceasefire under his authorization.
It is difficult for an ordinary English person to fathom the mentality of people who send young men like Frankie Ryan to England to plant bombs in streets. In his mother’s house I asked McGuinness how he could justify IRA actions like the March 1993 Warrington bomb which was placed in a litter-bin in a regional shopping centre and exploded, killing two children and injuring dozens. ‘I felt badly about the Warrington bomb, badly about those children and badly about the effect. I believe that the republican struggle was damaged as a result. I do not believe that the people involved in that intended for that to happen.’
I felt McGuinness was being disingenuous. The Warrington deaths were not intentional but they were foreseeable – a copycat litter-bin attack in Camden in north London on a crowded high street weeks before had injured fifty-six people. The IRA’s intention to terrorize in Warrington contained within its inseparable sub-clauses an intention to kill.
The Warrington bombing instantly provoked peace marches by middle-class housewives in Dublin and intense political pressure on the IRA. In a statement the IRA apologized, but saying you are sorry after murdering someone is not an acceptable defence under the criminal law.
Of course I totally understand that people in England would feel that statement was inadequate, but at the same time do they understand how we feel when our children are killed by the British Army by plastic bullets? I know that when you say that, you get into the business of what-aboutery, which goes on for ever and resolves nothing. But at the same time do people even begin to imagine the hurt of the nationalist community in the North whenever they look at the outflow of sympathy, sorrow and grief from people in Dublin over the Warrington deaths, people who look at the North as if it was three thousand miles away? That has a tremendous effect on the community here because they end up working out that the lives of our children and our lives come way down the list in importance.
McGuinness’s enemies believe he is a lying hypocrite. ‘You cannot regret something that you have sanctioned. It’s as if I put a gun to your head, or got someone else to do so, and blew your brains out and then said I regretted it. He is lying through his teeth,’ commented Gregory Campbell.
The Troubles has inured its participants to violent death and it is difficult for any outsider to comprehend the numbing emotional impact of twenty-five years of military occupation, constant house raids, arrests, security force killings and loyalist attacks. Eamonn McCann said:
For Martin and other Republicans this is war and in a war people suffer. As a supporter of the Republican Movement he is surrounded by people who have inflicted grief. But I have no doubt that Martin McGuinness would be distressed, at least as distressed by the deaths of civilians at the hands of the IRA as would British Army officers be distressed by the death of civilians killed by their troops. The evidence would suggest to me that Martin McGuinness is rather softer and a more sensitive, considerate man. The Brits have never said sorry for Bloody Sunday.
As with Dermot Finucane, no single IRA blunder could ever, nor would ever, I thought, shake McGuinness’s obdurate belief in the justness of the IRA’s cause. Said McGuinness:
The reality is that the IRA fought a military campaign, which had an element in it of economic targets of some description. The natural conclusion you come to of those people who criticized the IRA was that their starting point was that the IRA should not do anything at all. They are people who are not prepared to address the issue of why there was an IRA in the first place or the circumstances under which the nationalist community were forced to live in the six counties.
McGuinness’s measured tone and facial blankness made it impossible to ascertain how sincere, how deeply felt, his regret for the dead children of Warrington was. But in another sense his personal feelings were irrelevant. The campaign in England was the collective result of the efforts of dozens of individuals within the organization; the IRA’s war was the summation of the actions of hundreds of families, thousands of individuals. McGuinness was a representative of their violent disaffection towards the Crown. It was pointless to attempt to over-individualize the republican struggle; McGuinness’s assassination, or an even more unlikely personal repudiation of the Provisionals’ deeds, would not stop violent republicanism. Nor would there be any shortage of like-minded substitutes to replace him on the IRA Army Council.
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From 1982 onwards McGuinness ceased to be Chief of Staff and adopted a more political role, standing and being elected on an abstentionist platform to a reformed Stormont Assembly, before it too was wound up and consigned to the political dustbin as another failed political initiative. He stands against SDLP leader John Hume at parliamentary elections and consistently garners seventeen per cent of the poll or around nine thousand votes in the Foyle constituency.
In 1985 he was involved in the controversial BBC television programme At the Edge of the Union, which portrayed both McGuinness’s and Campbell’s family and political lives. An attempt by the Home Secretary Leon Brittan to force the BBC Board of Governors to ban the programme led to the first ever worldwide BBC news blackout.
Although he is no longer involved in the IRA’s administration on a day-to-day basis and holds no formal title on the Army Council, McGuinness remains the most important republican leader.
Since the late eighties the IRA have been involved in a complex political process to align the Dublin Government and their electoral rivals, the SDLP, in a pan-nationalist front to negotiate a British withdrawal. By politically dissolving the border so that the mass of nationalists in Ireland can be consolidated into one powerful negotiating bloc, Republicans hope to reorder the political stalemate that has marooned them as a minority within the Catholic minority inside the boundaries of a hostile Protestant-majority-dominated state. Says McGuinness:
Everyone is responsible for this conflict in Ireland. The British Government, the Dublin Government, the SDLP, the Unionists, the IRA, everybody, we are all responsible, and it is only by getting together and sorting it all out that there will be a resolution. I haven’t got any grand plan or solution but what we are saying is, let’s get together in a room, let everyone express their fears and their difficulties, and let the people of Ireland discuss what sort of political structures they want.
Such an all-Ireland political forum would be anathema to the current generation of Unionist leaders but a guaranteed victory from the republican perspective. If the Provisionals can immerse the blatant desire of the Protestants of Ulster to remain separate from a United Ireland within the greater Catholic majority of Ireland’s desire to be united, then the IRA will have dissolved partition.
To create space for such a political reordering of present boundaries, the IRA leadership will trade a ceasefire for negotiations with the Crown. In return for such a prolonged IRA ceasefire and the prospect of peace, the IRA hope, the Crown will, however discreetly, signal its intention to leave its Irish province and gradually force a historic accommodation with the people of Ireland on the Unionists.
Our position has not changed. We would like to see a unitary state, we would like to see a thirty-two-county Republic, but we recognize that we are only a small percentage of the total people of this island. The people of this island might decide on some other type of structure. I am not going to oppose it. I might oppose it politically but there is no way I would defend anybody’s right to use armed force to go against the democratic wish of the people of this island.
The aim of the current republican leadership’s pan-nationalist strategy is to achieve a ‘historic handshake’ with the Crown, like that between South African President De Klerk and Nelson Mandela before his release from prison in 1989, which indicated an intention to negotiate political change. The ANC did not overthrow the apartheid regime overnight or map out an exact plan for the transfer of authority but from that moment on power flowed steadily from De Klerk to the future President Mandela. Similarly in Ireland, power would at first trickle, then flow, from the Crown into nationalist Ireland until the balance of power was so weighted in the nationalist/republican’s favour that a section of the Unionist community would break away and strike a political deal with the ancient enemy. Many parts of the republican plan are as yet unproven and after twenty-five years of conflict such a peace is likely to be gained slowly, only in piecemeal stages, and at the cost of considerable further bloodshed. But it seems certain that the long horror of Ulster’s Troubles is dwindling away to a whimpering conclusion.
I questioned McGuinness again and again on the point about what was acceptable to the IRA as ‘some other type of structure’, trying to tease out the exact nature of the potential IRA compromise implied by his words. And again he returned somewhat robotically to the same narrow formula. He found it easire to state what was not acceptable – there could be no return to the old-style Stormont regime.
The Unionists want power, power they have abused in the past, power they have used to humiliate me, humiliate my father, my forefathers before. The British Government allowed them to behave like spoiled brats for years and now the British are reaping the harvest they have sown. That has got to change. The British have got to face up to Ian Paisley and the UVF. Britain has got to take its responsibilities seriously.
I asked the question again in another form: ‘If I was to come back to Derry in five years would I find one of your nephews wearing a policeman’s uniform?’
‘If it’s a situation where those security forces were subject to the laws of the Irish people and the Irish people alone, then there is every likelihood you would.’
‘Could that be in the uniform of a modified RUC?’
‘Certainly not. There has to be dramatic changes. I am not saying that the British Army must disappear overnight and that all the changes we require have to be brought about next week or next month or even in two years time. Republicans recognize this process is going to take time. There are no quick fixes in this problem.’
The IRA Army Council and McGuinness are prepared to be patient with the Crown but it is a patience that only stretches to the date, the period of transition, and the nature of interim political structures before the Union Jack flag is finally removed from Irish soil. The ultimate uncompromising aim of a United Ireland is never far from the surface. Says Eamonn McCann:
Republicans like Martin are fixated on the idea of a United Ireland. The Republican Movement exists to get the British out of Ireland. They move to the left and they move to the right, whatever seems tactically and strategically proper at a particular time. For the last four years the plan has been to form an alliance with the SDLP and the Dublin Government, a pan-nationalist front, but all these things are dedicated to the one object – to get the British out.
If the Provisionals’ peace plan is to succeed, then the Army Council must maintain the IRA ceasefire against internal opposition and finally call an IRA Army Convention to declare the ceasefire permanent. Delegates from every IRA active service unit will gather to thrash out the final republican response towards the peace process in Ireland; their answer through a simple show of hands will mean war or peace. It is a certainty that the last speaker before the final vote on such a ceasefire motion will be Martin McGuinness. If McGuinness was convinced that the Provisionals’ plan is right, his voice, primus inter pares within the republican leadership, would appeal to the delegates for their support for a permanent end to the savage butchery of Ulster’s Troubles. If McGuinness believes the British Government is duping the republican leadership and is not convinced that the rhetoric of the Crown’s emissaries is sincere, then there will be no such Army Convention, no more peace plan, and the IRA’s answer will be heard, loudly, on the streets of the City of London.
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Irish Republicanism is deeply embedded in the whole Irish national psyche. It is the founding philosophy of the Irish Republic. It is the cause to which the state’s first leaders gave their lives in the 1916 Easter Rising, and are now revered for their sacrifice. Its ideals, of a United Ireland, would be affirmed by every living Irish man, woman and child. ‘For generations our people have been reared on a notion of patriotism as fighting and dying for Ireland,’ acknowledges John Hume MP, McGuinness’s electoral Derry opponent. ‘The Provisional IRA are just a product of our history.’
McGuinness is exemplary of the great Irish republican passion. To reject him is to reject part of the ideological core of the Irish Republic. McGuinness cannot be dismissed, as the British press would usually put it, as an ‘isolated or mindless terrorist’. It does not matter that he still calls British soldiers ‘cunts’ or that he lacks the political acumen or the manipulative negotiating skills of some of his Crown enemies. McGuinness’s greatness within the Republican Movement and in the wider nationalist community across Ireland rests on his irreproachable, unwavering commitment to a United Ireland. Twenty-five years of bloodshed, the destroyed cities, the murdered enemies, the lost Laffertys, Bloody Sunday, the negotiations with his one-time masters and the IRA’s attempts to kill them at Brighton and Downing Street have strengthened, never weakened, his commitment. His very existence is a denial of the will of his Crown enemies, their materialism and their machinations. McGuinness is a leader because his faith in a United Ireland is profound, complete, unshaken and unshakeable; he is not stopping before a United Ireland. His belief cannot be subverted this side of his assassination.