Jim McVeigh writes the apologia for Martin McGuinness’s life, while Danny Morrison’s revised memoir is emotional, sometimes mawkish.
Regardless of his actions in the IRA – ones he proudly admitted to, unlike some – Martin McGuinness was blessed with the gift of likeability, even by those who would have happily seen him dead in his earlier years.
In Our Martin, Jim McVeigh has written the apologia for the Derry man’s life, presenting the increasingly visible argument “that there was no alternative” – one directed primarily at a generation who were not born to see the horrors of the Troubles.
The book knows on which side of history it stands. “What politicised me was the Civil Rights protest. It wasn’t anything I heard in the house, or even in my grandmother’s house in Donegal,” McGuinness is quoted saying.
His political awakening is put down to an interview he had to become an apprentice mechanic in 1965, one McGuinness believed he did not get because he was asked which school he had attended.
Its defence of the IRA’s actions is absolute. There is no mention of Patsy Gillespie, forced to drive a car bomb into a British army checkpoint . . .
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