Martin McGuinness - from IRA to the presidency

Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's candidate for the presidency of Ireland, has come a long, long way since his role was to assure IRA hardliners that the organisation would never give up its arms and abandon its "armed struggle".

In the early days of the peace process, his task was to reassure militant doubters suspicious that Gerry Adams and other republican "doves" might be going too far, too fast in redrawing republican orthodoxy.

"Our position is clear and it will never, never, never change," he insisted with characteristic bluntness at a Sinn Fein conference in 1986. "The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved."

However, today the IRA has put its weapons beyond use and has left the stage. Mr McGuinness pursues his aim of Irish unity by purely political means, saying yesterday that, if elected to succeed Mary McAleese, he would be prepared to meet the Queen.

Governments in London, Dublin and Washington have no illusions about his career as a top IRA leader, during which he must have approved of hundreds of shootings and bombings. Unionists know this, too, yet with their votes they have endorsed the partnership government he heads along with their political representatives.

His journey from guerrilla leader to presidential candidate has been long and tortuous, and many people have died along the way. He joined the IRA in his home city of Londonderry long before paratroopers killed 13 people there on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Even as a young man he was an important IRA figure, one of a group who later that year held an ultra-secret meeting with a cabinet minister in Chelsea. Read full article in The Independent...

Context

An exciting election

“Martin McGuinness 1, the People’s President,” runs the optimistic headline of An Phoblacht, the official mouthpiece of Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin. According to The Observer’s Belfast correspondent, the entry of the former IRA commander into the ring for what is merely a titular role has made this “the most fascinating contest for a generation.” However, “Throughout the four-week campaign he will be haunted by his IRA past and in particular his claim that he left the Provisionals as far back as 1974”, an assertion contested by a retired head of the Garda Síochána [Irish police] who said “he believed McGuinness remained on the IRA's army council right up to the peace process of the 1990s.”

In a list of seven candidates, the main front runners include the Labour party’s Michael D. Higgins, a popular ex-minister; former MEP and 1970 Eurovision song contest winner Dana, appealing to a traditionalist Catholic vote, and Senator David Norris. Openly gay, and a celebrated Joyce scholar, Norris previously withdrew from the race in August after it emerged that he had written to the Israeli authorities pleading for clemency over a lover who had been convicted of statutory rape of a minor. He nevertheless remains the most popular candidates in opinion polls, standing in the most recent at 21%, with Higgins on 18% and McGuinness at 16%.