In 1994, when attempts to get the IRA to call a ceasefire were intensifying, Martin McGuinness was about to enter the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin for a discreet meeting with officials.
This was in itself remarkable: 21 years earlier, in 1973, he had also been in an official building in central Dublin, the Special Criminal Court, which he refused to recognise, informing the judges that “we regard the Free State government as cowards, traitors and allies of the murderers of the people.
“ I have no interest in Free State laws.”
On this occasion, having at last recognised the existence of the State, McGuinness was now the main conduit between the IRA and the government, even if these contacts were still tentative and delicate.
There was, however, an open-topped tour bus making its way along St Stephen’s Green.
As McGuinness recalled in a subsequent BBC documentary, “I was attempting to get into the building without being seen and suddenly I hear, through the loudspeaker on the bus, the man saying, ‘And the chief negotiator for Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness, is now entering the Department of Foreign Affairs.’ This was all over Stephen’s Green. I couldn’t believe it.”
Surreal as the moment may have been, it also seems somehow apt. It is easy to characterise McGuinness’s political journey as one from the shadows into the light.
But it was never that simple: he was always both famous and mysterious, well known for his surreptitious life.
The journalist Malachi O’Doherty has recalled how, as early as 1972, outlandish stories of McGuinness’s exploits as a “sniper” with “nerves of steel” were in circulation.
Perhaps only an island as intimate as ours could produce such an easily recognisable leader of a secret army: from the early 1970s McGuinness was the public face of an organisation that liked to hide its face in a balaclava.
Morally, McGuinness is no less complex: a mass killer – during his period of membership and leadership the IRA killed 1,781 people, including 644 civilians – whose personal amiability has been essential to the peace process.
If he were not a ruthless and unrepentant exponent of violence he would never have become such a key figure in bringing violence to an end.
Arguably, no one – not even Gerry Adams – carried as much weight with the hard men of the IRA, for McGuinness, unlike Adams, was famous among them as a military operator.
George Mitchell, who chaired the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement and ultimately to McGuinness’s ascension as deputy first minister at Stormont, was charmed by his “curly red hair, pale blue eyes and boyish smile” and regarded him as an “intelligent, forceful advocate for his party”.
But the force was always as important as the charm and the intelligence.
His very name could make things happen, because it was a synonym for the IRA. It is one of the ironies of his history that one of the most potent actions attached to that name was not his at all.
In 1990, the British government was encouraged to deepen its previously tentative engagement with the IRA by a message it genuinely believed to be from McGuinness: “The conflict is over, but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.”
John Chilcot, then permanent secretary of the Northern Ireland Office, assured the British prime minister at the time, John Major, that "it was authentic, it was from McGuinness and it was spoken with authority".
All of this was untrue, but the very fact that the British believed it came from McGuinness gave it authority.
They assumed that he was the person who held most sway over the IRA. And even if they were, in this instance, mistaken, this broader assumption was evidently correct.
Without his authority it is not at all clear that the IRA would ever have accepted that its self-styled war was a dead end and that there was another way out of the hole it had dug for itself and for Northern Ireland.
We have to accept therefore that the two sides of Martin McGuinness, the perpetrator of violence and the adept and constructive politician, are inseparable.
Perhaps, more disturbingly, we even have to accept that it is the very qualities he honed as an IRA leader – endurance, patience, relentless focus on the goal – that made McGuinness such a patient and well-focused deputy first minister, willing to humour Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson and to shake hands with Queen Elizabeth, embodiment of all he had once hated.
McGuinness almost certainly killed people directly as an active IRA volunteer, and as a senior IRA figure he directed many more killings. He also saw many of his friends killed.
In his early 20s he systematically bombed the heart out of his own home town, Derry.
If you can put up with that and still feel fine about yourself, biting your tongue to keep Ian Paisley happy probably doesn’t feel so bad.
Carnage
Because he has never really opened up about his long career in the IRA – he claimed during the 2011 presidential election to have left the IRA in 1974, even though most sources suggest he was its chief of staff between 1978 and 1982 and a key leader thereafter – we do not know how he really sees the carnage in which he played such a prominent part.
He demanded accountability for murders by the British army but delayed his own co-operation even with the inquiry into Bloody Sunday as long as he could.
He regarded himself as a good and loyal Catholic, even when the church, from the pope down, condemned his activities as murder.
He sometimes cited the murders in July 1971 by the British army of two unarmed Derry men, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, as key reasons for his decision to join the IRA. In fact he was in the IRA long before those killings.
He told the Special Criminal Court in Dublin in January 1973 that “for over two years he had been an officer in the Derry brigade of Óglaigh na hÉireann”.
He seems in fact to have joined the Provisionals around June 1970, a full year before the murders of Cusack and Beattie.
Likewise, there is evidence that McGuinness himself was unusually careful to avoid killing civilians in the operations he directed.
According to Eamonn McCann's 1974 account War and an Irish Town, "the Derry Provos, under Martin McGuinness, had managed to bomb the city centre until it looked like it had been hit from the air without causing any civilian casualties".
Yet on other occasions McGuinness seemed utterly indifferent to the murders of civilians.
In June 1984 he chose to describe the IRA’s campaign as disciplined and well directed.
This was just a few weeks after the IRA had blown up a Protestant undertaker, Herbert Burrows, who had no military or paramilitary involvement; shot dead a civilian, Robert Funston, on his family farm in Fermanagh; murdered Mary Travers, a 22-year-old teacher who was leaving Mass in Belfast, merely because her father (a Catholic) was a magistrate; blown up Thomas McGeary, a Catholic businessman and father of seven children, whom the IRA (hiding behind a cover name) falsely accused of being a “collaborator”; and shot dead Hugh Gallagher, a 26-year-old Catholic in Tyrone.
In calling these killings well directed McGuinness was sending out a message to the IRA membership that he would defend them, even when they strayed beyond their own self-proclaimed definitions of legitimate killing.
There was little in McGuinness’s IRA career to suggest that he would emerge as a democratic politician of great skill and adeptness.
It was McGuinness who articulated, at a meeting in the Brandywell area of Derry in 1972, the simple mantra: “We are not stopping until we have a united Ireland.”
The “we” was the IRA – he always prioritised violence over electoral politics.
In 1978, when Bernadette Devlin stood for the European Parliament in the Northern Ireland constituency, with the support of some in Sinn Féin, McGuinness, then allegedly chief of staff of the IRA, opposed this concession to electoral politics and followed her around Derry with the slogan “Back the prisoners! Back the war!”
Armalite
In June 1984 McGuinness stressed that, although he supported the "Armalite and ballot box" strategy that was then emerging, the Armalite would always come first: "The Irish Republican Army offers the only resolution to the present situation . . . If Sinn Féin were to win every election it contested, it would still not get agreement on British withdrawal . . . We recognise that only disciplined revolutionary armed struggle by the IRA will end British rule."
McGuinness’s eventual turn towards pragmatism was rooted not in a change of heart but in a change of mind.
There is no evidence that he experienced any great moment of moral truth, any wave of revulsion against the bloodshed in which he was so deeply embroiled.
He simply came to realise that if the slogan was an immediate united Ireland or nothing, the outcome would be an endless, bloody nothing.
What is remarkable, though, is that he followed through on this realisation with the same absolute determination that he showed in his IRA years.
He understood its logic: that the IRA was finished, that Sinn Féin would have to transform itself into a governing political party and that the only way to a united Ireland lay through reconciliation with the unionists whose consent it required.
When, in his resignation statement, McGuinness claimed that he had “always sought to exercise my responsibilities in good faith” there was no reason to doubt his words.
Those who have negotiated with him have noted his ability to switch from bullying aggression to warm charm. George Mitchell, for example, recalled McGuinness hectoring him to adjourn a particular session of the peace talks. When he refused to do so he looked across the table at McGuinness.
“He was smiling at me. He had anticipated that his request would be denied.”
There may be something disturbing in that capacity to turn the charm on and off. But the fact is that McGuinness, at crucial times, chose to keep it on. He realised, in the end, that good faith and charm and patience can be weapons too.
No one tried harder than he did to make power come from the barrel of a gun, and when that failed no one tried harder to make it come from making deals, creating compromises, keeping the democratic show on the road.
The hard man will be a very hard man to replace.
