Lest we forget | 23 March 2017

I never met Martin McGuinness, but I was certainly affected by him from an early age. His decisions, and those of his colleagues on the IRA Army Council, indelibly coloured my childhood. Belfast in the 1970s and ’80s was a grey, fortified city, compelling in many ways, but permanently charged with the unpredictable electricity of violence.

Our local news steadily chronicled the shattering of families, in city streets and down winding border lanes that were full of birdsong before the bullets rang out. There were regular, respectful interviews with pallid widows and dazed widowers, and funerals attended by red-eyed, snuffling children tugged into stiff, smart clothes to pay formal respects to the end of family life as they had known it. The murders arrived singly or in pairs, via gunshot or car bombs, occasionally bursting into more audacious atrocities that claimed many lives simultaneously. The names of the bigger ones — Claudy, La Mon, Enniskillen — stained the memory with a vivid horror. And the knowing strategist behind much of this killing was the young Martin McGuinness.

It was a pity for Northern Ireland that McGuinness failed his 11-plus. He was undoubtedly intelligent, and early academic success might have directed his talents towards something fruitful. Instead, those energies poured into the zealous dispensation of death for Irish republican ends. During the Troubles, McGuinness firmly believed that the cause of a united Ireland could be furthered by killing, and he was broad in his selection of targets.

One illustration: according to Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston’s book Martin McGuinness: From Guns To Government, ‘McGuinness personally supervised the Derry IRA’s first major success of 1987.’ That ‘success’ was for two IRA men first to murder a psychology student called Leslie Jarvis, who taught leatherwork to inmates in Magilligan prison and was therefore deemed a ‘legitimate target’.