Number One vote for McGuinness

COMMENT

I IMAGINE the argument about whether or not Martin McGuinness is a fit person to be President of Ireland because of his IRA past will go on and on.

Nothing anybody has said to oppose McGuinness will convince me that I am wrong in my belief that he is at least as good as any of the other candidates. I suppose also that people who believe his IRA past disqualifies him from the Presidency will not be convinced by me.
I remember when I was young, a lot of people in this country believed Eamon de Valera was a murdering so-and-so, who should have been strung up by the neck until dead. Perhaps there are some who still believe it but when I was growing up, there were thousands of people in this country who were convinced de Valera had blood on his hands.
On one occasion, I refused to shake Dev’s hand because I thought of Charlie Kerins, the boy from Tralee who was executed by his Government in the 1940s. In case you don’t believe me, check this out with the Fianna Fáil Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú, who was present on that occasion.
However, I grew up eventually and while I might not have agreed much with Dev, there is no way I would call him a murderer today. Neither would I ever call Dick Mulcahy, Michael Collins, Tom Barry or Dan Breen murderers. However, their foreign and Irish enemies would and nothing I might say would ever convince them otherwise.
I had a very interesting email on the subject this week from Aidan McNamara of Sixmilebridge.
The main point that Mr McNamara makes is that there is a distinct difference between the campaign McGuinness was involved in and that of the IRA of the 1919-21 period.
He says, “The IRA of McGuinness saw innocent people, men, women and children, who had nothing to do with the conflict, as legitimate targets, as if somehow the murder of ordinary people, because murder is what it was, would endear those outside the Republican movement to the ideals of Sinn Féin and the IRA. That tactic was one that was never adopted by the IRA from 1919 to 1921.”
Now, I am not going to defend the tactics used by the IRA during the struggle against the British. I have already said I was opposed to it. I have already said it caused a lot of misery among the people it was supposed to protect.
However, who am I to criticise it when the people themselves came out in their tens of thousands to vote them into the Dáil, the Assembly and the British Parliament?
However, I certainly agree with Mr McNamara when he said further on in his long letter, “the murder of innocents is never justified, regardless of the cause”.
I only wish governments all over the world would agree with us. How could anybody, for instance, justify the bombing of innocent men, women and children in Dresden towards the end of the Second World War? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Hanoi? Baghdad?
The IRA will argue they issued warnings prior to setting off their bombs, in order to allow innocent people to get away. However, they didn’t always let people know in advance and sometimes, as far as I know, the warnings were so obscure they might as well not have issued them at all.
However, apart from killing people, war does other awful things. It warps people’s minds and convinces them that because their cause is just, they can do anything they like. The longer a war goes on, the more cruel it gets, as each side tries to outdo the other in atrocities.
Mr McNamara also tells me I should not judge the events of 90 years ago with the same values we use to judge the present. I again agree 100% but neither should he. How does he or I know how cruel the IRA leaders of the 1920s might have become if the War of Independence and/or the Civil War had continued into the ’30s, the ’40s and the ’50s? (We do get some idea from the atrocities committed during the Civil War).
My point is that war, and especially modern warfare, dehumanises people and causes them to do bloody awful things to each other. During my lifetime, there have been so many leaders of democratic states who started out as murdering terrorists that I have lost count of their number.
Some of the leaders of the modern state of Israel stand out in the ferocity of their former years. Innocent civilians were regarded as legitimate targets in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. Did anybody, apart from a few cranks, say their membership of the Irgun disqualified them from being prime ministers of their country?
We like to make exceptions of people like Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. However, they were young men growing up on the streets of Belfast and Derry, who saw their people treated as second-class citizens. They could have ignored the plight of their neighbours, settled into good jobs, got married, raised children and got on with their lives but they choose not to do so. They saw that peaceful protest was getting nowhere and they took up arms.
As soon as they saw they could not drive the British out through armed resistance, they changed their tactics, pursued the peaceful protest and convinced the large majority of their comrades to do likewise.
That’s something de Valera and Collins failed to do and that’s why I think Martin McGuinness deserves my number one vote on election day.