The Mendacity of Martin McGuinness

By AM Monday, September 26, 2011

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Tonight the Pensive Quill carries an article that was originally published on John Smart's website.

The Mendacity of Martin McGuinness

The Irish presidency as an issue of international concern has no standing when compared to its US presidential namesake. It lacks political clout and comes sans razzmatazz.  But then we are not comparing like with like. In the US the White House is the seat of power. In Ireland the presidency is largely a ceremonial affair. Presiding over Ireland from ‘The Aras’ means holding the presidential tongue, avoiding controversy, and observing the niceties of diplomatic protocol to the letter. Executive power is not displayed on the side of the tin, not even in small print. Yet…

…for all that the current Irish presidential election campaign has generated a public discourse that is every bit as sharp as we might expect from a US contest. And it may yet cause ripples that extend beyond the Irish shoreline. What started out as a slow dance of the dullards has suddenly become a quick step energised by a booster in the hip called Martin McGuinness, a senior figure in Sinn Fein, the party that was the Siamese twin of the IRA throughout its years of armed struggle.

For the past few years McGuinness, courtesy of the Sinn Fein garnered vote, has been the Deputy First Minister in the Northern Irish Executive, a body set up by the British state to which it has devolved some powers which allows the 6 counties of Ireland still under British administration to be ruled from London via an agency in Belfast. By most accounts he had settled down well in the job winning the respect of many erstwhile critics.

Now McGuinness has ‘temporarily’ stood down from that position so that he can devote his time to campaigning in that part of the country not called Northern Ireland and not ruled by Britain. There alone, paradoxically, a section of the nation is permitted to vote and decide who shall be the President of all-Ireland.

Mundane stuff to the uninitiated, but what makes the intervention of McGuinness interesting is his IRA history. What makes it electrifying is his denial of his IRA history. Not that he has lied outright about IRA membership, as his party leader Gerry Adams has done for thirty years, but rather that in his public pronouncements he seeks to limit his membership of the organisation to 1974 at the latest.

This jars with a widespread and deep rooted public perception. In the public mind McGuinness and the IRA have been synonymous. To extricate him from the IRA history is akin to imagining the history of the Catholic Church without the pope playing any part. To get some sense of the mendacity of Martin McGuinness in his claim to have left the IRA in 1974 it would be worth considering a hypothetical but similar claim by Joseph Goebbels to have left the Nazi Party in 1933. It flies in the face of comprehensive public knowledge. There would appear to be no journalist or academic who has studied the Northern Irish conflict who would risk their reputation by endorsing the assertion that McGuinness discontinued his IRA membership in 1974. There is a virtually unchallenged academic and journalistic consensus that he served as chief of staff of the IRA, its foremost leader. His years of incumbency have been recorded as 1978 to 1982.  There is also a widespread assumption, neither journalistically nor academically undermined, that he served on the IRA’s governing army council until 2005. Sprinkled liberally throughout media coverage of his IRA role there is open discussion of his alleged responsibility for killing on a mass scale.

McGuinness has responded to this with something approximating the snarl of a cornered beast, lashing out at his accusers with ill concealed hatred, all the time seeming to ignore that there is nothing like denial of the obvious for spurring interest. The more that Martin McGuinness insists that the law of gravity has determined that apples fall up rather than down when uncoupled from their tree, the greater the likelihood that the claim will be probed. Accused in Tuesday’s Irish Times, the country’s ‘paper of record’, of war crimes, he was forced to endure the following blistering critique:

"The question, to put it starkly, is whether we should have a head of State who would, in principle, be liable to arrest for war crimes under international law … The IRA’s “armed struggle” was what the fourth Geneva Convention defines as an “armed conflict not of an international character”. Under the convention, the parties to such a conflict are bound to respect certain standards in their treatment of “persons taking no active part in the hostilities”, including former or non-active members of opposing forces. Such people must not be subjected to violence, “in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilized peoples”. It should go without saying that the IRA, partly under the leadership of Martin McGuinness, consistently breached every one of these provisions."

One does not have to subscribe to this view of McGuinness to understand the problems ahead that it flags up. If he does becomes President of Ireland the international media is likely to have a Kurt Waldheim type figure to focus on. Waldheim, the onetime Austrian president, when accused of war crimes responded, a la McGuinness, by accusing his detractors of engaging in ‘pure lies and malicious acts.’ The Austrian government appointed an international committee of historians to investigate the claims. It cited evidence showing he must have been aware of war crimes.

Can Ireland afford to have its president tracked around the globe by this type of interest, accompanied by demands that he should be detained in The Hague rather than installed in The Aras?




First published by John Smart.