The morally illiterate obituaries to Martin McGuinness are just what he would have wanted

Well the obituaries for Martin McGuinness are in. And many are as morally illiterate as the man himself could have wished for. For instance, various obituarists have noted that the young McGuinness’s failure as a young man to get an apprenticeship as a mechanic started him off on the road to terror. Few of these eulogists have noted the many people across continents and generations who also failed to get apprenticeships (often for even more sectarian reasons) and yet strangely refused as a consequence to pick up some pliers and an Armalite and torture and kill their way to political power.

Other obsequies have been even stranger. Alex Salmond, for instance – perhaps recognising a fellow nationalist – praised Martin McGuinness as ‘a friend of Scotland’.

While recognising that Scottish Nationalists must claim their friends where they can these days, whatever his stance towards Scottish nationalism, McGuinness was not, of course, such a good friend to Scots. For instance he was not a friend to Peter Deacon Sime of Glasgow, shot by the IRA while on duty with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in West Belfast in April 1972. The 22-year old Lance-Corporal Sime left a wife and an 18-month old child.

Nor was Martin McGuinness a great friend to the Glasgow-born 21-year old Paul Jackson. On the 28^th November 1972 the organisation McGuinness was then heading chose to put a bomb at Long’s supermarket on Strand Road in Londonderry. Gunner Jackson was part of a bomb disposal team which went to disarm the device, but it exploded when they arrived, shattering his skull and killing the married father of two.

Nor was McGuinness a good friend to John Gibbons of Edinburgh who was killed on 5 May 1973 by a roadside bomb planted in Armagh by the IRA.