Martin McGuinness

Martin McGuinness was second-in-command of the Provisional IRA in Derry at twenty-one and deputy first minister of Northern Ireland at fifty-six. He was a butcher's assistant from the Bogside who joined the IRA after the events of 1969 and was, by his own admission to the Saville Inquiry, the Derry brigade's second-in-command on Bloody Sunday in January 1972. He was flown to London with Gerry Adams and others in July of that year for secret talks with William Whitelaw that produced nothing but established a channel that stayed open. He served sentences in the Republic for IRA membership and was later believed by both governments to have been the movement's chief of staff in the early 1980s, a position he never confirmed. He was central to the shift towards politics: Sinn Fein's chief negotiator through the talks that produced the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, then education minister, then deputy first minister from 2007. The image that fixed the change was his working partnership with Ian Paisley, whose Democratic Unionists had spent thirty years refusing to speak to him; the two were photographed laughing together so often that the press called them the Chuckle Brothers, and Paisley's family and McGuinness remained close after he left office. He shook hands with Elizabeth II in 2012 and attended a state banquet at Windsor, thirty-three years after the IRA killed her cousin Lord Mountbatten. He resigned in January 2017 over a renewable-heat subsidy scandal, which collapsed the power-sharing executive for three years, and died two months later of a rare heart condition. Relatives of his victims objected to the eulogies; Bill Clinton delivered one of them. He was never convicted of any offence in Northern Ireland. He stood twice for the presidency of Ireland and Westminster seats he won he never took, on the abstentionist principle Sinn Fein still keeps.

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