It is fair to say that the authors and the subject of this biography will never form a mutual admiration society. Their request for an interview with Martin McGuinness was met with a solicitor's letter and he also issued a press statement asking fellow-republicans to "withhold co-operation". Liam Clarke is Northern Ireland Editor of the Sunday Times, probably Sinn FΘin's least favourite newspaper, and McGuinness clearly expected to read little in the way of good news about himself in this book. In this assumption he was correct. The authors quote approvingly from Peter Robinson's statement under parliamentary privilege last May that McGuinness and other Sinn FΘin leaders were members of the IRA's Army Council. He has certainly been up to his neck in republican activities for over 30 years. At various times he has sought to portray himself as a political activist pure and simple but Clarke and Johnston present a very different picture, putting their subject at the heart of the republican campaign to end British rule: directing, motivating, planning and organising almost every aspect of it.
They present a catalogue of actions and operations, beginning with his early days as a na∩ve young militant in Derry, drawn into the maelstrom of revolt, up to the present in which the strident revolutionary has been transformed into a smiling Minister of Education, patting schoolchildren on the head.
Most readers will conclude that, if Martin McGuinness is really as bad as this book makes out, then he should be in jail. The authorities in the North have not been slow to pursue suspects. For their part, the authors imply that "Operation Taurus", a major and concerted effort by the then-RUC to prosecute McGuinness in the early 1990s was aborted because of political sensitivities arising from his role as a negotiator with the British.
Be that as it may, McGuinness has avoided any major term of imprisonment and has now made the familiar leap from rebel to ruler. Like him or loathe him, we are pretty well stuck with him. He is by no means the first person to be reviled as a terrorist who later went on to make a reasonable fist of becoming a statesman, as the examples of Frank Aiken, Menachem Begin, Yasser Arafat and many South African leaders clearly demonstrate.
But this book is more than a catalogue of alleged misdeeds. Republicans will dismiss it as "black propaganda" but those who can afford to take a more detached view will find it interesting to chart the progress of the fiery young rebel through the twists and turns of republican politics until he found himself on the high road to compromise and the Good Friday Agreement.
Reading back over the history of our "thirty years' war", one is overcome again with a sense of the waste and futility of it all and a feeling of great sadness that there was insufficient goodwill and imagination on any side to bring it to an end much sooner. At the same time, students of the republican movement and its counterparts around the world will be intrigued by the authors' description of how McGuinness transformed it from a loose, semi-anarchic organisation into a tightly-controlled instrument of his political will.
There are harrowing accounts of the fate of various informers and so-called "collaborators" in the Derry area and the terrible sufferings of their families. This is the darkest side of the book and underlines once more the need for a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission if Northern Ireland is ever to be at peace with itself.
Unlike some of its counterparts elsewhere, the republican movement successfully cashed in its paramilitary chips and secured in return immediate political power in the North and growing influence in the Republic. It is arguably the biggest change in the political landscape since the Treaty, with McGuinness undeniably one of the main architects of change. A telling story, attributed to McGuinness himself, describes the republican leader attempting to shake hands with a young Protestant woman at the funeral of one of the Omagh bomb victims. McGuinness tells how she turned away but then called after him: "She said, 'I am sorry for turning away. I am a unionist and I am hurting,' and she started to cry. I said that we were all hurting but that we were doing our best, and she said, 'I know you are doing your best'."
The version of Martin McGuinness's past in this book will undoubtedly arouse concern, especially among unionists. However the funeral story illustrates the point made by none other than David Trimble, that just because you have a past does not mean you cannot have a future.
Deaglβn de BrΘad·n is an Irish Times journalist. His book, The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, was published this year by the Collins Press