ANALYSIS:Martin McGuinness will be questioned time and time again about his IRA history, but Sinn Féin is confident he can handle it, writes GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor
MARTIN McGUINNESS’S entry into the presidential race ensures the campaign will be as interesting and as exciting as it will be incendiary and dirty. But whether he gets elected president or not, as far as Sinn Féin is concerned it’s a win-win situation.
The bottom line, according to Sinn Féin sources yesterday, is that “people like Martin”. There will be forensic examination of McGuinness’s and the IRA’s past in the coming weeks and right up to polling day, but again Sinn Féin strategists believe the Stormont Deputy First Minister is well up to such challenges. As they say, it isn’t as if he hasn’t had to answer questions about his past before.
On the issue of how McGuinness will canvass as Deputy First Minister, Sinn Féin points to how First Minister Peter Robinson temporarily stood down in the face of the Irisgate convulsions last year. Democratic Unionist Party Minister for Enterprise Arlene Foster doubled up as Minister and Deputy First Minister, and such a move is what Sinn Féin will make now.
Party officials said they understood only a sitting Sinn Féin Minister could “act up” as Deputy First Minister, so the candidates are Sinn Féin Ministers John O’Dowd, Carál ní Chuilín and Michele O’Neill, and possibly junior minister Martina Anderson. The issue of who his temporary stand-in will be is expected to be sorted out at the Sinn Féin ardchomhairle meeting tomorrow.
Sinn Féin was not laying much focus on this element of the story yesterday evening, but were McGuinness to actually end up in the Áras, there is a large question over what this would mean for affairs at Stormont.
McGuinness worked well with former bitter adversaries such as Ian Paisley and Robinson in a fashion that Gerry Adams could never emulate – which was one of the reasons he rather than the Sinn Féin president took the Deputy First Minister post.
He has been a stabilising and positive figure in Northern politics in recent years, and were he to move South there has to be some concern about whether the Northern Executive and Assembly would be damaged by his absence.
Sinn Féin sources make two points here: one, that the party has plenty of capable personnel to replace him and – this said more quietly – while it is campaigning to win the seat, and believes it could shade the election, the emphasis is on how his running would benefit the party across the island, rather than on an actual expectation he will win.
Even regardless of his past, how will the southern electorate react to another northerner seeking to be Irish head of State? It didn’t work so well for Austin Currie when he stood against Mary Robinson and Brian Lenihan, but if there were negatives to being from the North, Mary McAleese certainly rose above them.
In many ways it is down to McGuinness’s personality and how he deals with his paramilitary past. At 61, he is MP and Assembly member for Mid-Ulster, as well as being Deputy First Minister. He was originally in the Official IRA in the late 1960s but shifted to the more militant Provisional IRA. He was jailed in the South for IRA activities.
Since the very early 1970s, according to senior security, republican and political sources, he has been an IRA leader, whether in Derry or at army council level. The IRA killed some 1,800 people throughout the Troubles, and regardless of his protestations or elisions, he is viewed both in the Republic and the North as an IRA figurehead, and therefore in a sense answerable for all that death, carnage and suffering.
Over the course of the presidential campaign, through the media and on the doorstep, he will be questioned time and again about his IRA history.
There will be questions over the IRA in his native Derry. He will be asked once again, as was alleged 18 years ago, whether he encouraged alleged IRA informer Frank Hegarty to return to his home in Derry in 1986, only to be murdered by the IRA? He will be asked about the circumstances of how in 1990 the IRA in Derry turned a civilian, Patsy Gillespie, into a human bomb, and how that bomb was detonated, killing Gillespie and five British soldiers – an action the retired bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, termed as Satanic.
He will be asked many more questions, including, as was also alleged, whether he doubled as a British agent during the Troubles? McGuinness has dealt with all these matters before, but perhaps more so for a northern audience. With McGuinness running, southerners will be asked to look back on the Troubles in a manner most of them previously shied away from.
But McGuinness and Sinn Féin over recent weeks have factored in all these matters. They are girded and prepared for the campaign. In fact they are fired up for what’s ahead.
“We are not naive political operators,” explained one Sinn Féin insider. “Martin has never run away from his past, and he took the lead in terms of republicans facing up to the legacy of the past.”
The source said the party was prepared for the “anybody but Martin” campaign, and would confront it head on.
The same insider said the party would have been mad to reject this opportunity: “The big losers are Fianna Fáil. Once they left the field we had no choice in the matter.”
McGuinness and Sinn Féin are entering this contest believing he has a personality big enough to overcome the long shadows of his IRA past.
PROFILE
MARTIN McGUINNESS (61) lists his favourite hobby as fly fishing. He has had little time to pursue it in recent years because of his political workload in Northern Ireland – he will have even less time now that he is embarking on what will be a bruising campaign for the Irish presidency.
The Derry native left school at 15 and spent virtually all his adult life in the republican movement, first in the Official IRA and then in the more militant Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. He was second in command of the IRA in Derry during Bloody Sunday in 1972.
As a measure of his standing in the IRA, he was, at the age of 22, part of an IRA delegation that was flown to London in July 1972 to meet then Northern secretary William Whitelaw, at a time when the organisation was on ceasefire. He served periods in prison in the Republic over IRA activity. He was an alleged chief-of-staff of the IRA, a claim he has denied, and served on its army council. He has remained a close ally of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.
For some 25 years he and Adams have been viewed as the de facto leaders of the broad republican movement. He became a supporter of the policy of the "Armalite and the ballot box", and was one of five Sinn Féin members elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly of 1982 to 1986, although he did not take his seat.
With Adams he supported the growing Sinn Féin focus on political advancement. Both are viewed as the pivotal figures in the IRA's decision to call its ceasefires in the 1990s.
He was Sinn Féin's chief negotiator during the talks leading to the Belfast Agreement in 1998. It was his and Adams's leadership that saw the IRA and Sinn Féin through to decommissioning arms and supporting the PSNI. After the St Andrews Agreement he surprised many by his ability to work with former Democratic Unionist Party leader the Rev Ian Paisley when they led the powersharing Northern Executive of 2007.
He was Minister of Education in the first Northern Executive, being appointed in 1999. He is MP and Assembly member for Mid-Ulster. McGuinness married Bernadette Canning in 1974 and they have four children.