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27. October 2011: today Ireland will be electing a new president. Martin McGuinness put himself forward as a candidate. All of Ireland could use what Martin McGuinness gave the North 9.10.2011 | Ronan Bennett (the Guardian)
The success of Sinn Féin's man has presidential rivals invoking the IRA past.
But he's long grasped the need for inclusiveness
Martin McGuiness was one of the bogeymen, one of the so-called men of violence. There was a time when there could be no talks with the men of violence. They were killers addicted to killing. Without their guns they were nothing and they knew it, for Sinn Féin was, as the former Conservative secretary of state Patrick Mayhew once taunted them, "a mere 10% party". It would be an affront to democracy itself were they to be invited to the political table. In the pre-ceasefire mental arrangement, McGuinness had a special standing: he was raptor-in-chief in an organisation of blooded hawks. Even if Gerry Adams might like to talk, McGuinness would not.
In times of war it's understandable, though rarely useful, to attribute to your enemy all the qualities of the beast. But we have come a long way since then. The IRA campaign is over. Sinn Féin is firmly established in Northern Ireland as the second largest party, behind Peter Robinson's DUP. In the Irish Republic, the latest Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI poll now also puts Sinn Féin second. McGuinness has been elected three times to Westminster and five times as an assembly member. In 2007 he was nominated deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland assembly. He is now running for president of Ireland.
McGuinness's candidacy is proving popular, especially among Ireland's poor, and has his rivals' supporters reaching for apocalyptic rhetoric. The Fine Gael environment minister, Phil Hogan, said recently that putting McGuinness in charge of the state "would leave us looking like a banana republic". Ireland, he continued ominously, would be "denuded of serious levels of corporate investment within 24 months". His panicky warning coincided with the return of McGuinness and Robinson from the US with further promises of investment for the North. Far from having investors running for cover, McGuinness is well regarded in New York and Washington.
What galls McGuinness's detractors is that Sinn Féin has been so staggeringly successful. Forty years ago it barely existed in anything other than name. Thirty years ago, it was confined to republican heartlands in Belfast and Derry. Twenty years ago its leaders were still subject to censorship in Ireland and Britain, and its members and elected councillors were ostracised and – with suspected state collusion – on occasion assassinated. Now its candidate for president has a real chance of winning.
As president, McGuinness knows he would be the representative of all the republic's interests, even those to which he may be adverse. But he long ago absorbed the need for political inclusiveness. Even at the height of the Troubles he said he would talk to anyone at any time without preconditions in order to find a way to bring the conflict to a close. When negotiators eventually agreed to meet, they found him affable, straight-talking and easy to get along with. They were impressed. Against all expectation, they even liked him.
With arch republican foe Ian Paisley, McGuinness formed a close and apparently warm working relationship. When Paisley was forced out, many believed that his successor, Robinson, would prefer to sink the whole power-sharing arrangement rather than continue with a man he had so often denounced. It did not turn out that way, and while there are fewer signs of mutual personal regard in the present partnership, it is at least working effectively.
Principled and effective, McGuinness's popularity with his supporters comes from a mix of integrity, straight dealing, and a refusal to be compromised by the trappings of success. Born into a large, poor Derry family, he has avoided airs and graces. Nor does he share the Cherie Blair fear of descending again into poverty that she has tried to use as a licence for her and her husband to milk it while they can. Like all Sinn Féin's elected representatives, McGuinness gives his public salary to the party and takes an average wage in return. His nose remains firmly out of the trough. His appeal is to those who never experienced the economic benefits of the Celtic Tiger but who are now paying for its collapse: the people, as he puts it, who were not invited to the party. Traditionally ignored by the main parties, they now look to one of their own.
Unable to score points against his record in office or to find evidence of personal lapses, his opponents have fallen back on his membership of the IRA. Before the Saville inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings, McGuinness admitted that he was the Provisional IRA's second-in-command in Derry on that fateful day, and said he left the IRA in 1974. No one believes he left in 1974. Indeed, his stature as an IRA leader was crucial in selling the peace deal to the organisation. His supporters treat his denials philosophically and even some of his critics understand the legal need to finesse the dates of his IRA membership, which is still a prosecutable offence. Does this mean he should not be president?
The violence in Ireland was appalling. McGuinness has already said that much of it was unjustifiable. But it was not the work of killers addicted to killing. What happened in McGuinness's home town of Derry in the summer of 1969 was an Irish spring, a spontaneous rebellion against a regime that discriminated and excluded from power a majority of its own citizens. Many reached for the gun in those strange, paranoid, idealistic and angry days. Martin McGuinness was one of them. But he put the gun down and he persuaded the British government to address the issues that sparked the conflict. The North is a better place because of him. The republic can be too.
First published in
Guardian, 9.10.2011:
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Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter who was born and brought up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London. His third novel, The Catastrophist, was nominated for the Whibread award in 1998. Havoc, in Its Third Year (2004) was listed for the Booker prize. His latest novel is Zugzwang. His television drama Top Boy will be broadcast by Channel 4 in November 2011.
Foto (Peter Muhly / AFP-Getty Images)
Martin McGuinness, deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, is a candidate for the Irish presidency.