The Ruthless Ira Commander Who Helped Broker Peace

On 27 August 1979, the Provisional IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten while he was on a family holiday in Sligo, said Henry McDonald in The Guardian.

Martin McGuinness 1950-2017

The explosion, on his boat, also killed the 83 year-old dowager Lady Brabourne, the earl’s teenage grandson and a local boy. A matter of hours later, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers near the Irish border. To Martin McGuinness – the IRA’s chief of staff at the time – such violence was the organisation’s “cutting edge”. Yet by the time of his death this week, aged 66, McGuinness had been transformed: the feared IRA commander whose voice had been banned from the British airwaves was now a mainstream political figure, a former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, and a passionate defender of a peace he’d helped bring about.

“Few men have travelled as far, personally and politically, as Martin McGuinness,” said The Times. A poor boy from the Bogside who failed his 11-plus, he was received in the White House by three successive US presidents. He directed, and perhaps perpetrated, pitiless violence in the republican cause, but then put down his gun, and persuaded hard liners in the IRA to do likewise. As a minister in the power-sharing assembly, he remained committed to his goal of a united Ireland, yet formed such a friendly relationship with the DUP leader Ian Paisley – formerly his most implacable enemy – that they were dubbed the Chuckle Brothers.