Martin Mc Guinness Passes Away at 66

[angermanagement]

Did Mike Nesbitt not state several times that Unionists throughout history could've learned something from McGuinness and extending the hand of friendship.

[J70]

I dont understand why people talk ill of the dead, when Thatcher died many people went wild with happiness at the death of a frail old woman, I detested her in life but felt nothing like happiness at her death, I felt nothing at all actually, the last thing I would do would be to badmouth someone who just died yet facebook has the haters out in full force, bad craic to be at, I had no time for Martin but I respect the work he did to stop the killing in this neck of the woods.

RIP Martin.

As someone who grew up in it stew, do you think he was justified in his hardline pursuit of war?

It's easy for us from the south (I grew up a few miles from the border, as the crow flies - might as well have been 50) to condemn and disapprove, but we didn't grow up in a unionist security state with the British army and loyalists thrown into the mix.

Was the current day resolution only achievable as a result of the Troubles, or inevitable in Western Europe? If it was inevitable, was that foreseeable (I'd say probably not, if even Sunningdale was rejected by Paisley and the unionists/loyalists).

Can we celebrate 1916 and 1919-20 and our ancestors roles in it while being horrified by what the modernIRA did, just because  the horror of the murder and callousness was observable  in real time and not romanticized?

Always a dilemma, at least for me.

RIP Martin.

To me the IRA were a necessary evil, we were being treated like shite by arrogant british b**tards and they pushed the nationalists too far, I hated the way they made you feel, when I was seven we were burnt out of our home in portadown by loyalist scum, in 1997 there was a device set that blew up my parents downstairs in Lonsdale Villas in Armagh, my mother insisted both times they the family move house, much to my fathers chagrin!

Something had to be done, I just wish they had hit military and government  buildings instead of blowing up butchers shops and ordinary Protestants going to work in a mini van etc, they did a brilliant job of keeping drugs off the streets but yet you would go to a gaelic match and they would have vermin collecting money for the prisoners wives and they would slabber at you if you walked on by.

McGuinness to me was a bad b**tard until he forged, along with Paisley and co the relative peace we enjoy today, I respect the hell out of him for that but I also remember he was a butcher, he was enigmatic b**tard thats for sure and like yourself I am vexed by the RA and MMG.

That's the shit that we from the south have no understanding or experience of.

Great post stew. And I'm sorry for what you and your family were put through.

[seafoid]

I see Arlene is undecided whether or not she's attending the funeral...

It's maybe not that surprising. There might be some political theatre by the boys in front of the coffin.
Maybe the DUP heads will go to the removal or find some other way out.

[seafoid]

The right wing response to the death of McGuinness is interesting. I was reading an article by George Monbiot

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/06/10/the-values-ratchet/
"We are not born with our core values: they are strongly shaped by our social environment. These values can be placed on a spectrum between extrinsic and intrinsic. People towards the intrinsic end have high levels of self-acceptance, strong bonds of intimacy and a powerful desire to help others. People at the other end are drawn to external signifiers, such as fame, financial success and attractiveness. They seek praise and rewards from others.
Research across 70 countries suggests that intrinsic values are strongly associated with an understanding of others, tolerance, appreciation, cooperation and empathy. Those with strong extrinsic values tend to have lower empathy, a stronger attraction towards power, hierarchy and inequality, greater prejudice towards outsiders, and less concern for global justice and the natural world. These clusters exist in opposition to each other: as one set of values strengthens, the other weakens.
They tend to report higher levels of stress, anxiety, anger, envy, dissatisfaction and depression than those at the intrinsic end. Societies in which extrinsic goals are widely adopted are more unequal and uncooperative than those with deep intrinsic values. In one experiment, people with strong extrinsic values who were given a resource to share soon exhausted it (unlike a group with strong intrinsic values), as they all sought to take more than their due.
As extrinsic values are strongly associated with conservative politics, it's in the interests of conservative parties and conservative media to cultivate these values. There are three basic methods. The first is to generate a sense of threat. Experiments reported in the journal Motivation and Emotion suggest that when people feel threatened or insecure, they gravitate towards extrinsic goals. Perceived dangers – such as the threat of crime, terrorism, deficits, inflation or immigration – trigger a short-term survival response, in which you protect your own interests and forget other people's"

Right wingers think differently and are motivated by different values.
Freedom, security, rule of law and flag always work as dog whistles

The Unionists of the 70s played on these themes. Tebbit still thinks like that.

[gallsman]

I've plenty of my own faults with McGuinness and Sinn Fein, but I find it laughable how the media are trying to portray McGuinness as having tried to atone for his sins in the IRA with his good work in the Peace Process. I've never read McGuinness ever say he was ashamed of his past or that he was trying to make up for it, and why would he, the IRA did some horrible things for sure but it was a war and an entirely legitimate one at that

That's because he wasn't and, in my opinion (as a comparative moderate), had no need to be. There were many horrific, inexcusable acts committed by the IRA - Kingsmill, Mountbatten, Enniskillen etc. but I certainly don't think McGuinness ever insinuated that he did not wholeheartedly believe that, as a whole, armed resistance/uprising was an acceptable response to the contemporary circumstances. There's very much the hanging implication from some Unionists (Jeffery on Spotlight last night for example) that his "rehabilitation" in their eyes could never be complete without footage of him completely renouncing every IRA operation as unacceptable and prostrating himself at their altar and begging forgiveness.

[The Trap]

I lived through the 70s 80s and 90s in Tyrone........as a young boy I remember the check points, the harassment, town centres being closed off, rioting and of course the violence on the news everyday, sometimes very close to our home. I was lucky that my parents were not political and tried their best to shield us from all that was going on. As this is a GAA board I can assure you that wearing GAA colours, carrying a GAA bag or a hurl, going to a match etc made you a target for loyalists but especially RUC and UDR patrols who delighted in treating young Catholics like dirt. At that stage I was not fully aware of the unionist state that we lived in, the gerrymandering, jobs for the boys, council and civil service domination. I did grow up to learn of all this and I could see why people rebelled against it but I could never get my head around the atrocities that took place. But as someone said earlier maybe the IRA were a necessary evil to get to where we are now, I don't know, its a very difficult one especially for those who suffered including lots of catholics at their hands.
When I saw Martin McGuinness announce his retirement and saw how frail he was I did feel for the man. When I woke to the news yesterday I prayed for the man. I don't know all about his past but I do thank him for the journey he took. My kids have a better chance at life that I did.

[gallsman]

It is striking how many on the Unionist and victims side portray the conflict here as being solely the fault of the IRA and hence Martin McGuinness. It would appear that you can only be a victim if it was at the hands of the IRA.

Brian Feeney touched on that last night on The View last night on why did he believe Martin McGuinness never apologised with Jeffrey believing that McGuinness should have. Feeneys thoughts were entirely right in that Martin McGuinness didn't believe he did anything wrong and an apology was never going to be forthcoming and then came the sting from Feeney when he said Unionists have never felt the need to apologise for the 50 or 60 years of systematic sectarian government ( I can't be sure of the exact words, but that was the jist of it).

That was exactly it - Noel Thompson (playing devil's advocate in fairness to him) suggested last night that Trimble's "NI was a cold house for Catholics" comment was sufficient to cover that off. Feeney basically laughed at him.

[Applesisapples]

I will repeat, read James Kelly's Bonfires on the Hillsides.

[Jim_Murphy_74]

I see Arlene is undecided whether or not she's attending the funeral...

It's maybe not that surprising. There might be some political theatre by the boys in front of the coffin.
Maybe the DUP heads will go to the removal or find some other way out.

Any political/military theatre would be wrong but I don't think it will happen.

It would be appalling indictment on Foster if she cannot bring herself to attend her working colleague's funeral.  Using a fear of what others will do it is an excuse.  She might find Martin's actions over his life distasteful or wrong (lots of discussion here) but she has a duty as outgoing First Minister to represent the people whom Martin represented. 

It's like the famous soccer matches in France.  She is entitled to be an OWC supporter and have no private interest in the Republic but as First Minister she has a job to represent all of Northern Ireland.  Going to the match would have been a small thing but would reflect that.

Since devolution, that penny only seemed to have dropped for Paisley.  To me it's a failure of Unionist Leadership.  Martin at least tried to reach out (whether it was accepted/believed is another question) to all his constituents.

For a lot of people it would be just one more blot on the copy book of Foster if she doesn't go.  Also I hope that Sinn Féin leadership reflect on what Martin McGuinness brought in terms of leadership and in coming weeks, follow his example.

Ar dheis dé go raibh a anam.

/Jim.

[brokencrossbar1]

A few weeks after I got my driving licence, and a few weeks before the IRA ceasefire of 1994, I was driving along a country road in mid-Armagh, with no particular place to go. I came to a British Army checkpoint. Such checkpoints were routine; in fact, during my driving test, the Army stopped and searched the boot of the car on the way back to the test centre (the test centre was right beside an army base). Here, again, they asked to search the boot. No problem. The soldier -carrying a rifle, of course- called in the registration number on his radio. He then asked me to pull over. So I did. Then he asked me to get out of the car.

He walked back a few yards up the road to the rest of the patrol, who were waving other cars on. I stood waiting. To begin with, it was no big deal to me. Five minutes passed. Then ten. It felt like longer. At first I put the delay down to my new driver's licence and cross-checks or something. It was not as if I had ever been involved in anything. Then I started to wonder if they were taking the piss. Then, wondering whether they were waiting to see if I would react in some way. I remembered what had happened to Karen Reilly, shot dead at a checkpoint in West Belfast, and what had happened, maybe back in the 80s, when my father had his boot searched by the soldiers one night. "How do you explain this, sir?", asked the soldier, returning from the boot to the driver's window, holding a rifle he had supposedly found in the boot. "How many people have you tried that on tonight?", my father asked, not before it crossing his mind that maybe he had been driving a car with a gun in the boot. The soldier laughed, and let him pass.

All this went on in my head, but I was trying to make sure I was showing no outward signs of unease, anything that might mean having to stand there even longer. I figured that if I asked what was keeping them, it would only make them more inclined to make me stay put for longer. And they were the ones holding the guns.

After about 25 minutes, I was told I could go. There was no "thank you", no "sorry for the delay", nothing.

On a scale of individual acts of military repression conducted by British armed forces in Northern Ireland, this delay must rank down somewhere between the infinitesimally trivial and the non-existent. But it lies nonetheless on a continuum: I had no intention of doing harm to anyone, but I was made to do what I was told for no apparent reason other than the presence of a group of armed men with guns. In my head there was resentment beginning to simmer, a feeling, in addition, of weakness at having to submit.

It isn't hard for me -now- to understand how others, on witnessing or experiencing things that were immeasurably worse, or on joining all the little things and all the big things together and seeing them as part of an overall picture of repression and domination, might have opted to join the IRA.

At that point, the airwaves in Northern Ireland had been saturated for as long as I can remember with ways of speaking about the conflict that divided the place into a peaceful majority and a violent minority. A majority, you were told, wanted peace, but the violent extremists 'on both sides' were engaged in a 'tit-for-tat' 'cycle of violence'. In the midst of this was the British Army and RUC, who were apparently defending society againg 'the terrorists'. 'BLAME THE TERRORISTS' is what a sign read at a checkpoint in the middle of Cookstown. Absent from this, of course, was the violent role of the British State, whether in the form of internment, torture, operating death squads, or just a generalised presence of armed groups of men patrolling the streets with guns.

This morning, the airwaves and newspapers have been full of analysis of Martin McGuinness, following the announcement of his death. Many commentators are, in a a regurgitation of cliché, classifying him as someone who began as a 'man of war' who then became a 'man of peace'.

And now I'm wondering: what makes you a person 'of peace'? From what I can recall, being in favour of 'peace', back in the 80s and 90s, simply meant that you abided by the rule of law. You would frequently hear statements from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland or Conservative Party and Unionist MPs to the effect that the majority of Catholics were 'law-abiding'. All this meant is that as far as they were concerned, they did not mount any challenge to the rule of law, and the rule of law, day-to-day, meant things like that whenever a soldier with a rifle told you to get out of the car, you got out of the car, and you kept quiet. To be 'peaceful' in this regard does not mean that you have rejected violence: on the contrary, it just means you have accepted its imposition as a self-evident necessity.
I wonder about other things too. I have yet to hear any analysis, nearly 23 years on from the IRA ceasefire, about how the Britain has moved from being a 'State of violence' to a 'State of peace'. For many opinion-formers, the guiding assumption, still, is that it has only ever been the latter, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Is the re-imposition of a hard border in Ireland, brought about as part of a drive to 'take back control' in Britain, likely to test that assumption? Somehow I doubt it.

When you hear the Norman Tebbits of the world this is the type of thing I reflect on. How many of us have experienced this type of situation?  This mans experience resonates with me significantly as it was round then I had just got my licence and was subjected to this type of behaviour all the time. Coupled with the fact that round April to August 1994 Crossmaglen was basically surrounded by a military ring of steel as there was repeated work being carried out on the barracks. We grew up in a militarised zone. It's remarkable that there were not greater numbers in the IRA but that is testament to our parents and our education system. Martin McGuinness was a brave man both with a gun in his hand or the pen. He fought a long fight to bring us to a safer place. There is still a lot to do but his legacy and influence will hold him in the same light as many other rave men who fought back against the British government before and after 1920.

[AhNowRef]

Norman Tebbit didn't read the memo.

Every time you hear any mealy mouthing from the British Establishment (including the first ever RC prime minister) ask yourself how many innocents have been blown to smithereens, in the two decades since the IRA ceasefire, in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Yemen and marvel at the hypocrisy.

History will judge Martin kindly. RIP

Does anyone seriously think that any of Thatchers crew would speak favourably of Martin McGuinness? The Provos were responsible for terrible atrocities but at least when the opportunity arose they moved on. The Tories havent but would abandon the Unionists in the morning if it suited Little England

I always find it laughable to hear Tebbit and the likes talking about cowards when the real cowards sit in Whitehall sending some other poor sods son's to do their dirty work here and around the globe.

Too bloody right !!

[AhNowRef]

A genuine, charismatic, principled leader. As a nationalist in Derry, He was on the receiving  end of appalling injustice at the hands of unionism and the British state , and he took a path which many young Catholics felt they had no option but to take at the time .
The narrative still promoted by unionists and Tory Britain , and even among some in the 26 counties , that the conflict here was entirely the responsibility of one side, remains the single biggest barrier to progress here.
Nobody expects unionism, tory Britain, or their apologists here , to forget or forgive the IRA campaign but until we get a magnanimous leader of "greater unionism" in the mould of Martin mcguinness  to recognise their contributions to the conflict , we will never move on.
In my view , no politician in Ireland has done more for the peace process than Martin, and his contribution has been recognised today from many unlikely sources. The warmth of his personality , his Christian values and his genuine respect and empathy for unionists, have brought us a long way. I hope his legacy will be that in a "united Ireland" (which is inevitable in some form) , those from the British tradition will enjoy the respect , equality, and empathy that northern nationalists still don't fully enjoy. Go raibh Maith agat , a Mháirtín, Agus Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar do anam dílis

+1

[AhNowRef]

It is striking how many on the Unionist and victims side portray the conflict here as being solely the fault of the IRA and hence Martin McGuinness. It would appear that you can only be a victim if it was at the hands of the IRA.

Unfortunately .. thus it has always been and thus it will always be..

[seafoid]

I see Arlene is undecided whether or not she's attending the funeral...

It's maybe not that surprising. There might be some political theatre by the boys in front of the coffin.
Maybe the DUP heads will go to the removal or find some other way out.

Any political/military theatre would be wrong but I don't think it will happen.

It would be appalling indictment on Foster if she cannot bring herself to attend her working colleague's funeral.  Using a fear of what others will do it is an excuse.  She might find Martin's actions over his life distasteful or wrong (lots of discussion here) but she has a duty as outgoing First Minister to represent the people whom Martin represented. 

It's like the famous soccer matches in France.  She is entitled to be an OWC supporter and have no private interest in the Republic but as First Minister she has a job to represent all of Northern Ireland.  Going to the match would have been a small thing but would reflect that.

Since devolution, that penny only seemed to have dropped for Paisley.  To me it's a failure of Unionist Leadership.  Martin at least tried to reach out (whether it was accepted/believed is another question) to all his constituents.

For a lot of people it would be just one more blot on the copy book of Foster if she doesn't go.  Also I hope that Sinn Féin leadership reflect on what Martin McGuinness brought in terms of leadership and in coming weeks, follow his example.

Ar dheis dé go raibh a anam.

/Jim.

She is quite small minded.

Via the FT  :

"McGuinness said in 2013: "I am absolutely passionate about the peace process and passionate that we will under no circumstances see the situation slip back to where it was before ... And I'm still passionate about working with unionist leaders."
His task was made more difficult in January 2016 when Robinson, whose health had continued to be poor, retired and was succeeded by Foster, the legislative assembly member for the bitterly sectarian rural seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Their year of sharing office, through much of which McGuinness was increasingly unwell, did nothing to bring them closer."

[Walter Cronc]

Some serious stories here lads - crazy to think we lived through such times and as BCB1 says thank god for our parents and the education system during the time.

For me Martin McGuinness has given my generation the confidence to be a proud irish man from the north of Ireland. Working in London yesterday I got two jibes about Martin, looking a reaction from me but I refused to lower myself to that level.

He'll go down a hero in my eyes!