In The Evening

By AM Thursday, January 20, 2011

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Last Friday, in the evening, I sat and watched Martin McGuinness being interviewed by Ryan Tubridy on the Late Late show. I had fallen asleep earlier on the settee when the show began and headed off to bed. But I had hardy settled down before my son came up and told me ‘it’ was starting now. He made it sound like something out of a Steven King novel. It was worth the watching as it proved to be entertaining. The Sinn Fein politician is obviously hoping to enhance his party’s appeal in the South at a time when an opportunity exists for any Master and his servant and to get elected. If Sinn Fein does not make the breakthrough in this unique and unprecedented set of circumstances it never will.

McGuinness comes over as affable in a way that his oleaginous party leader does not. I found myself laughing when he described his engagement to his then girlfriend Bernie. She was in jail, he bought an engagement ring in Donegal and had a friend take it to the prison to Bernie and place it on her finger. Now if the other fella had told the same story the instant reaction would be ‘porkie, it never happened, he made it up.’

It was strange to watch the exchange between Turbridy and McGuinness which was much less strained than it was when the Late Late host had the Sinn Fein boss in the chair. Such is Adams’ reputation for incessant lying that even McGuinness – who has stood over some dubious claims in his time - couldn’t stand over his boss’s denials of IRA membership. He felt compelled to duck and dive, bob and weave every which way. Adams’ insistence on denying the obvious has placed his senior colleagues in a no-win situation. If they say they believe him they pull ridicule down around them; if they say they don’t believe him, they pull ridicule down around him. He would rather they were ridiculed than he but McGuinness didn’t take him up on that offer. And while the North’s Deputy First Minister might argue that people don’t care about whether Adams was in the IRA or not, there is a view in the South, at a time when politicians cannot be trusted, why one promising honesty would lie about something so obvious.

The irony was hardy lost on viewers when McGuinness referred to the British ministers, including prime ministers, who had sat in the Late Late hot seat and had not been grilled about their past in the same way as he was being taken to task. For Martin McGuinness is a British minister, much the same as Peter Robinson is one. He might be a decent British minister, good at his job, that is all for opinion. But he is a British minister nonetheless.

When asked about both Fine Gael and Labour stating that neither would share power with Sinn Fein, McGuinness said maybe that was because he would not share power with them, or with Fine Gael at any rate. Some in the audience clapped but not many. I thought there would be more given the climate but there is a sense down here that the party will jump into bed with anybody and sacrifice any policy or principle to do so.

Not long ago Martin McGuinness could be found claiming, to the mirth of unionism, that Ireland could be united by 2014, deducting two years from the usual guff prediction. Now it is more likely to be bankrupt. Yet the Late Late interview was instructive in that it showed how far he had moved from his unity is nigh position. When asked would he see a united Ireland in his lifetime there was no answer in the affirmative. A favourite phrase of Martin McGuinness’s has been ‘the reality is.’ The reality is that not one volunteer who fought in the ranks of the Provisional IRA will see a united Ireland in their lifetime. Martin’s party secured us that much.