Regardless of his actions in the IRA – ones he proudly admitted to, unlike some – Martin McGuinness was blessed with the gift of likeability, even by those who would have happily seen him dead in his earlier years.
In Our Martin, Jim McVeigh has written the apologia for the Derry man’s life, presenting the increasingly visible argument “that there was no alternative” – one directed primarily at a generation who were not born to see the horrors of the Troubles.
The book knows on which side of history it stands. “What politicised me was the Civil Rights protest. It wasn’t anything I heard in the house, or even in my grandmother’s house in Donegal,” McGuinness is quoted saying.
His political awakening is put down to an interview he had to become an apprentice mechanic in 1965, one McGuinness believed he did not get because he was asked which school he had attended.
READ MORE
Its defence of the IRA’s actions is absolute. There is no mention of Patsy Gillespie, forced to drive a car bomb into a British army checkpoint outside Derry in 1990, or the 1986 killing of informer Frank Hegarty, who returned to Derry on the back of a pledge from McGuinness.
The IRA mortar attack on John Major in 10 Downing Street in 1990 was “daring”, quoting a Metropolitan Police commander’s opinion that they had shown “a remarkably good aim”.
The Warrington tragedy that killed three-year-old Jonathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Party “struck when two small bombs planted by the IRA exploded before the area was cleared of civilians.” The IRA had not set out to kill or injure innocent civilians, but that was of little comfort to the victims or their families. There was widespread condemnation of the attack in Britain and Ireland.
The bombing attacks on London’s financial district in 1992 drove the British to negotiate, it argues, on the back of threats from major financial companies to move their operations to Frankfurt.
McVeigh is convinced that McGuinness was the central figure in the peace process: “He was tough, assertive and unmovable when that was needed. He was even dogmatic at times. Wimps don’t make good negotiators – neither do so-called hard men.”
[ From the archives: Martin McGuinness - Profile of a ProvoOpens in new window ]
Senior Sinn Féin figure Danny Morrison published his memoir All The Dead Voices in 2002, a mix of essays and reflections on the Troubles and the lives of those now gone who touched his own life.
Nearly a quarter of a century on, Morrison has revised and updated the text. An older Morrison is if anything more contemplative, even more emotional – mawkishly, at times – than the one who wrote the original text.
Throughout, he holds to his republican past, convinced of its righteousness, linking Sandy Lynch, the IRA informer rescued by British soldiers, to Gypo Nolan, the main character in Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer.
More than 35 years since Lynch’s rescue led to him serving four years of an eight-year jail sentence for false imprisonment and IRA membership, Morrison holds to his hatred of Lynch, and the informer.
“Money for human meat has to be a sort of butchery,” he writes, before insisting that Lynch “squealed” on his own brother, and had acted as an agent provocateur, putting forward operations for which the IRA had “shown no interest”.
The passage of a quarter of a century has added to the list of those in his life who are now gone. The book ends in Santiago de Compostela, after a bike tour of the famous pilgrimage route that ends in the city in northwest Spain.
[ Danny Morrison: why I put the character before the causeOpens in new window ]
“Do you know who exists?” asks Anto Steenwijk, in Harry Mullisch’s The Assault. “The dead, the friends who have died,” says Morrison, who first voiced Sinn Féin’s “ballot paper in this hand, and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland” strategy.
People make the pilgrimage for many reasons – as Christian duty, for penance, to give thanks, to cope with grief or trauma, or to seek solace in the friends made and the beautiful churches visited on the way.
Morrison, a self-confessed atheist, does not clearly explain why he has made the journey: “Cycling though Galician forests, I was never alone, was comforted by nature, reflections and bittersweet memories.”
Approaching the cathedral in Santiago, Morrison pushes his bicycle up the final steps, raises his eyes “up towards the sky and the lustre of the infinite, and I burst into tears and sobbed without knowing why”.
