McGuinness leaves a powerful legacy

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Those video clips of Martin McGuinness taken in early January are still raw. To see a colossus of republicanism reduced by serious illness to such a frail and unhealthy figure was deeply shocking to everybody.

Sinn Féin and the republican community tried to put a brave face on it. But everybody knew that McGuinness was “ag snámh in aghaidh easa” as they say in Connemara, that the condition was terminal.

In The Irish Times we disclosed that he was suffering from amyloidosis. It is caused by the abnormal buildup of protein deposits in tissues and organs. It eventually attacks the heart. The genetic condition is extremely rare and, in fact, can be traced back to a single individual in Inishowen in Co. Donegal. It is terminal, taking on average six years from inception to death. By the time McGuinness received his diagnosis last winter, the condition was far advanced, and his chances of recovery were nil.

It was a wrench for him to stand down from office in January. His farewell to the people of the Bogside was captured on a grainy video. We saw him weep in public for perhaps the only time. We also saw his wife, Bernie, (who has always remained in the background) move around quickly to embrace him and comfort him at the time of distress.

His death was announced just after dawn on Tuesday, by a Sinn Féin statement that was closely followed by a message from the President Michael D Higgins.

For the party leader, Gerry Adams, the loss of the man who had shared the long hard road with him to peace must have been particularly hard.

No life is easily assessed so close to the time of death, especially one that was so complex and contradictory as that as McGuinness. He was second-in-command of the IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday. There is no doubt he was Chief of Staff of the IRA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the IRA dispatched a lot of people (many of them innocent bystanders) to early graves.

He had a fair quotient of Derry charm that Adams could not muster in equal measure. In the eyes of many that made him the more approachable and palatable of the two members of the Northern republican leadership. But in some ways that was deceptive. As in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, it is the “laughing boy”, the gregarious one, that you have to watch most closely. When the time came for the IRA volunteers to call ceasefires and ultimately lay down their arms, it was reportedly McGuinness, the soldier who did most of the persuading and the bidding.

But once he crossed the Rubicon, everything changed. Everything that had been used to prosecute the war was now used to prosecute the peace, but the transition was not quite as seamless as that.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.