Martin McGuinness’s death has sparked a wave of fawning and fury in the obituaries. So: ‘man of war’, peacemaker or something in between? The Sun’s verdict is clear: the ‘pious praise’ for McGuinness is nothing short of ‘revolting’. It’s true, the paper says, that the ‘second part’ of his life differed from his early days. And it’s also the case that McGuinness ‘risked his own neck’ to help bring peace in the end. But to hear the likes of Tony Blair play down McGuinness’s role as an IRA commander ‘turns the stomach’. McGuinness might have fancied himself as a ‘folk hero’, but there was ‘nothing noble about this “struggle’, says the Sun. We mustn’t forget the truth about McGuinness: ‘He was a vicious, merciless killer who wanted to unite Ireland under a hard-left government by force’. And for a generation of people in Northern Ireland, McGuinness brought nothing more than ‘daily carnage, terror, kidnappings, torture and punishment beatings’, the Sun says. Why should the atrocities of McGuinness and his IRA thugs be quietly forgotten,’ the paper asks.
It’s easy to fall into cliche on the death of Martin McGuinness, says the Times. The Troubles have left a nightmarish imprint in the minds of many – and McGuinness was both a ‘child and a parent of those times’, the paper says. It’s true that ’he occupied a senior position in an organisation that regarded murder as a patriotic duty’. And while other Irish politicians, like John Hume, opted for the ‘path of non-violence’, McGuinness’s choice was markedly different. But despite his role in the IRA, it’s also true that McGuinness did have the ‘courage’ to ditch violence. Had he and Gerry Adams not done that, ‘the killings would have continued,’ says the Times. And once he had chosen that course of action, McGuinness ‘pursued it as absolutely as he had once advocated the “armed struggle’’. So what can we say about the life of such a contrary man? The Times says ‘the life of Martin McGuinness is a vindication of the urge to talk’ to our enemies. But it is also ‘a vindication of the decision not to surrender to them.’.
Did the world lose another Nelson Mandela yesterday, asks the Daily Mail? You’d be forgiven for thinking so if you tuned into the BBC’s coverage of the death of Martin McGuinness, the paper says. But don’t be fooled: for the bulk of his life, ‘McGuinness was a psychopathic serial killer and torturer’. There was never a word of remorse spoken for the ‘knee-cappings, ruthless murders of police and soldiers and the random slaughter of civilian men, women and children’. It’s also true that McGuinness ‘bore heavy responsibility for tearing Northern Ireland apart’ in the first place. Nowadays, the six counties are ‘comparatively peaceful’. But for all the fawning, it’s ‘highly questionable’ how much this state of affairs is actually down to McGuinness. Some have spent the past 24 hours paying tribute to McGuinness; Alastair Campbell, for one, has called him a ‘great guy’. The Daily Mail says it prefers Lord Tebbit’s verdict: ‘The world, he said, is a ‘sweeter and cleaner’ place without him.’
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