Our Martin : Irish Republican Martin McGuinness by Jim McVeigh

Description

As a teenager growing up in Derry’s Bogside area in the 1960s, Martin McGuinness quickly became aware of the injustices heaped upon his community by decades of unionist rule since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s.

And when people began to campaign for basic civil rights, he saw that they were met by both loyalist and state violence, including killings. This had a profound impact upon the people of the Bogside and the Creggan, including a young Martin McGuinness, and he developed a burning desire to see an end to inequality and injustice. Like many others of his generation, he saw no alternative but to join the IRA.

So began the career of one of the foremost and iconic political leaders of his generation. At the age of 22 he was already chosen as a republican representative for secret talks with the British in London in 1972. The twists and turns of the IRA campaign, the rise of Sinn Féin as an electoral force and the development of a peaceful strategy for the achievement of a united Ireland, are here described alongside Martin’s family life: his marriage to Bernie Canning, their four children together and many happy times at home and on holiday in Donegal. After ten years as deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness resigned in the face of ‘the most crude and crass bigotry’ within elements of political unionism. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement were becoming unworkable.

Even so, he never lost sight of the importance of national reconciliation and, to the very end, he remained committed to healing the divisions of the past.