He has been named the second most powerful man in Britain after Rupert Murdoch by Esquire magazine. He has been named Britain’s number one terrorist. And a U.S. report identified him as a leader of the Provisional IRA. It doesn’t bother him at all.
Martin McGuinness, urbane, charismatic, self-assured, has the unadorned adulation of most of the Republican community in the North, no matter how the British describe him. He is believed to be a man of total integrity among Republicans, and he has earned their trust and respect on both sides of the Atlantic.
For more than twenty years he has been at the forefront of “The Troubles;” he was a member of the top secret Sinn Fein delegation flown to London in 1972 to meet Northern Ireland Secretary of State, William Whitelaw. He has spent time in prison, is everything the British despise and fear, and is totally, irrevocably committed to removing British rule from Northern Ireland.
Martin McGuinness is now Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator in the talks with the British government. The 44-year-old Derry native, officially a member of the party’s national executive, or Ard Chomhairle, is the man expected to deliver a settlement agreeable to the North’s Nationalists.
The talks with the British, he told Irish America, must include the issues of demilitarization, prisoners, Sinn Fein’s electoral mandate, discrimination, and political vetting.
Despite the fact that his movements are tracked constantly by the RUC and the British army, Martin McGuinness feels quite safe as he wanders around the streets of Derry. His mother still lives there; his father, who worked in a local foundry, has died. His parents were moderate Nationalists, and of their seven children, six boys and one girl, Martin is the most public. His wife and four children also manage to live normal lives, attending local schools and shopping in local areas. But his life cannot be characterized as normal, by any means.
1968 was the year of global revolution, but while most countries settled into an uneasy alliance with the newly fledged civil rights movement, Northern Ireland remained firmly entrenched in the grip of the Unionist power base.
Protesting students were beaten and abused courtesy of the reigning government at Stormont, and the historic Battle of the Bogside in 1969 marked a turning point for Catholics, when they decided to fight back and set in motion the irreversible tide of events in Northern Ireland, which was to continue until the IRA ceasefire of August 1994.
In 1968 Martin McGuinness was only 18; an impressionable age, but one at which he decided that fighting was better than knuckling under to the Unionists. He was there as a stone thrower during those two bloody days of the Battle of the Bogside.
When the British army was sent in in response, the young McGuinness decided to become what he called “a part of a strategy to put the backbone into the nation….” His name, along with that of Gerry Adams, has become synonymous with calls for a united Ireland ever since.
So is he, or was he the IRA Chief of Staff? The leader of a guerilla army which has wreaked havoc in Britain and by doing so has finally brought the government of that country to the negotiating table; something which British Prime Minister John Major said would sicken him to his stomach?
“I have never denied that I have played a role in defense of the Nationalist people,” said Martin McGuinness. “In 1970 I decided that civil rights wasn’t going to do it and I decided to fight the state.”
He is not licensed to carry a gun, of course, even though he applied for a license after being elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1982. He attended the funerals of many IRA volunteers killed on active service, and shrugs off criticism from Unionists and politicians alike. He is prepared to die himself for what he believes in. He is convinced his life has taken the correct course.
“I have no doubts,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I had been part of a community which went back into itself after 1968 and lay down. I couldn’t have lived with that. It’s just totally unacceptable to me.”
When he left school at the age of 15, McGuinness worked as an apprentice butcher in Doherty’s, a local shop. It was then, he said, he realized there was something seriously wrong in Northern Ireland.
His subsequent involvement in the Republican movement, he said, was a responsibility imposed on him by his peers.
“Internment took away many older Republicans,” he said. (Internment was the British government policy of jailing as many Republicans as possible without charge or trial, and holding them indefinitely.) “The young people became involved and there was a massive influx of people into the Republican movement. Many of those arrested had positions of leadership within the city and I got into organizing Republicanism in the city in the aftermath of internment and I did the best I could,” he explained calmly.
A few years later, he was negotiating with the British in London. Two years ago, further secret negotiations were carried out, a fact which the British tried to deny. Then there was Stormont late last year, and now open ministerial talks. McGuinness has taken it all in his stride, and is confident that this time he is negotiating from a position of strength.
Being driven into Stormont in a black taxi, he said, while an historical occasion for a devoted Republican entering a Unionist bastion, was not in the least overwhelming.
“It was historical because it was the first up front public acknowledgement of discussions between Republican representatives and the British government since the treaty negotiations in the 1920s,” he said. “There was no way we were overawed by the occasion. I think we have fairly level heads on us and we recognized we were there to add momentum to a process which has presented the people of Ireland, and indeed the people of Britain and all the governments who are involved, with the first real opportunity in over 70 years to resolve this conflict.”
The talks, of course, stalled while haggling occurred over the “decommission” of weapons and Sinn Fein’s insistence on a “demilitarization.” The word on the ground is that the IRA will never surrender its weapons, unless there is a concrete deal for British withdrawal and the disbanding of the RUC.
“We are asking the British government to end its jurisdiction in Northern Ireland,” McGuinness said. “We have said all they have to do is resolve the causes of conflict — all they have to do is remember the reasons why people resort to force. I think the British government recognizes that there’s no possibility whatsoever of the IRA surrendering to them. What has to be remembered is that unlike other situations in the course of history this IRA has not been defeated, this IRA has not surrendered, and the British government which failed to get a surrender from the IRA cannot expect Sinn Fein to get that surrender for them. And there is no way Sinn Fein is going to become embroiled in that type of nonsensical discussion,” he added.
“What we have to do at the end of the process is to decommission all weapons. The question is timing, as to when that will happen.”
Though the weapons issue has dominated the process recently, an issue which gains more attention in the North is the release of prisoners — both Republican and Loyalist. Many suspected that a secret deal had been agreed with the British in advance of the ceasefire regarding an amnesty for prisoners. McGuinness denied this.
“You won’t get people to the negotiating table if they feel there’s a secret deal. When we get a resolution the issue of prisoners will be easily resolved. We are also saying to the British government to follow the example of the Dublin government and begin to release as a sign of good faith all the prisoners — not just Republican prisoners.”
Prisoners, he said, are a very important part of the process — but not the most important. “The prisoners themselves would say that the chief area which has to be resolved is the constitutional area. The Republican struggle for the past 25 years hasn’t been about the release of prisoners — they would be the first to acknowledge that — the struggle is about ending British rule in Ireland and about bringing about a process which will see that occur. As part of that we must talk to the British government and to Loyalists.”
McGuinness instantly dismissed rumors of grassroots unease and a possible split by those allegedly opposed to the ceasefire.
“I’m absolutely 100 percent satisfied that there’s no possibility whatsoever of a split in the Republican movement — I’m certain about that,” said McGuinness. Such reports are part of the British government’s strategy of divide and conquer, he added, and Sinn Fein would have expected no less from the British.
“Any unease is not unease with the Republican leadership, it’s with the British government’s attitude to the peace process, and the two should not be confused. We share that unease. We share that dissatisfaction. It has to be said that the British government has been dragged screaming to this process, and we were always of the opinion that the British government would attempt this strategy to try to slow down the process,” he explained.
McGuinness, though he indulges in a certain amount of verbal dancing, appears to believe implicitly that only through dialogue, with the Unionists and the British, can the battlegrounds of the North remain calm.
There were no secret contacts with the political representatives of Loyalist paramilitaries before the ceasefire was announced, he said, in fact there have been no contacts, secret or otherwise.
“They have refused to meet with us,” he said. “We are prepared to meet with anybody. The attitude they are taking (the Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionists) you’d think they were the ones with more than five percent support. They are a party whose mandate basically came from the fact that they kill Catholics and that they had assistance in doing so from elements within the British military establishment.”
Where Adams is now described as a statesman, McGuinness is not known for mincing his words. “We have tried incessantly over the years and made a very determined attempt to speak to people within the Unionist community because they are an important part of the equation,” he continued. “We’ve had behind the scenes contacts with Unionists but we’ve had no contact between Sinn Fein and representatives of the UDP and DUP because they have said they are not ready to speak with Sinn Fein.”
If the Unionists’ political representatives are not ready to speak with members of Sinn Fein, community members are, McGuinness said. Though he had no Protestant friends growing up, and obviously many in the Protestant community do not agree with his political convictions, there is a massive groundswell of opinion in the six counties that it is now time to talk.
“If I walk through town I’m stopped on a regular basis by men and women of the Loyalist tradition who say ‘I’m not a Republican or a Nationalist, I disagree with your politics, but I think you made a contribution to the peace process. It’s time to talk and we wish our political leaders would come together.’ And they are very genuine and sincere about that,” McGuinness remarked.
“There has to be a coming to terms with the new situation within unionism. We want to see the end of British rule in Ireland, not the end of the British in Ireland. We want those people who regard themselves as British to be part of this nation. If they regard themselves as British I’m prepared to concede that. I have no squabble with that. We’ll talk to them about how we can create a new Ireland. It’s accepted that the Unionist community has all sorts of fears and reservations about being swallowed up basically in an Irish Catholic state. Mostly the British government has to be honest with Unionists — they need a frank discussion with Unionists about how they see the process progressing.”
Rumors of a possible electoral alliance between the SDLP and Sinn Fein were not dismissed out of hand by McGuinness, who said it was something which could be considered. If so, he is likely to hold political office again, in a pact which would give the SDLP four seats and Sinn Fein two.
But then every possible scenario will be considered by Republicans at the negotiating table, according to McGuinness. But people have to recognize that “we are going there as representatives of a community which has been humiliated and degraded by the British government and Unionists since the foundation of this state.”
What, then, will Republicans concede in talks, I asked. “At the end of the day, what have we got to give?” McGuinness fired back. “We haven’t got anything. We are the people who have been treated as second class citizens in our own country for over 70 years. We don’t have anything to give. And I think that’s the reason the British government and Unionists are resisting coming to the negotiating table. They know the eyes of the world are on them and they know the world knows we have nothing to give. The people who have to give are the British government and the Unionists… all of us at the end of the day have to give something.”
There is a new sense of confidence in Republicans. The contacts Gerry Adams made in the U.S., the economic conference organized by President Clinton, the Sinn Fein office in Washington, all of these have combined to make Republicans feel secure in the knowledge that they will no longer be ignored.
“Back at the beginning of all this, the Unionist community was a very confident, assertive, sure of itself community,” McGuinness said. “The Nationalist community was the opposite. Now we are confident, assertive, sure of ourselves, and the Unionists are the opposite. I take no pleasure from that, I take pleasure from the fact that our community has got up off its knees. I’m proud to be a part of that. But I take no satisfaction from the predicament that the Loyalists find themselves in at the moment. We all had to go through this. If Nationalists went back into their houses in 1968, 25 years later our living conditions would have been no better than they were then. The young people of this generation of Republicans just could not accept the humiliation and degradation by Unionists and the British government. We were prepared to fight it and we accepted death,” he said calmly.
Many people, I pointed out, would find that frightening. McGuinness characterized it as totally natural. “We fought back and I think we did the right thing and I don’t apologize to anybody. I think Nationalists have been very courageous for the last 25 years, fighting the might of the British army, the RUC, the RIR and the Loyalist death squads,” he emphasized.
McGuinness is articulate and extremely sharp — while sticking within the party lines. Despite the possible pact with the SDLP, he said he no longer has personal political ambition. He certainly does not wish to become president of Sinn Fein, he said.
After his stint in the Northern Ireland Assembly from 1982-86, he failed to secure a seat at Westminster when he ran against SDLP leader John Hume in 1983, 1987 and 1992.
Ironically, he collects the dole from Her Majesty’s government, a fact which does not bother him in the least. “They owe us a lot more besides,” he quipped. Reputedly a staunch Catholic, McGuinness is the epitome of a good Republican: he doesn’t drink or smoke and he commands instant respect among Republicans.
He remembers the details of every wrong suffered by Nationalists, and the lowest points for him personally in the last 25 years were the hunger strikes and Bloody Sunday. He can expound relentlessly on Irish history, and is considered an excellent strategist. He is compared repeatedly to Michael Collins; while Gerry Adams is compared to Eamon de Valera. Martin won’t sell us out, the grassroots believes.
And he constantly communicates this fact to Republicans, he said. While Gerry Adams toured America, garnering support for Sinn Fein, McGuinness’ brief was to stay close to home ground and reassure Republicans that their aims would be fulfilled.
“Most of my time is taken up making sure people are aware of what is happening,” he said. “We decided it was important to tell them exactly where we stand, and that people will not be told lies. I would be totally opposed to that, as most people would know. They know Gerry Adams or myself are not going to tell them lies. The general mood of Republicans has been very good as a result of doing that.”
There is no time set for a “review” of the ceasefire, he said. “Our policy is we’d like to see an end to the British rule and an end to British parliament in the North. Republicans are not looking for the situation to be resolved next week or next month, or even next year. We recognize it will take time. I’m open for up to ten years for the process to evolve as long as everyone was agreed that the end resolution would be the end of British jurisdiction.”
Republicans have targeted the U.S. as allies to try to make sure this happens. Irish Americans, McGuinness said, have played a crucial role in helping the process along.
“The visa for Adams was very important indeed. It opened up new avenues for Republicans and brought all srocess along.
“The visa for Adams was very important indeed. It opened up new avenues for Republicans and brought all sorts of people together. It gave him access to Capitol Hill and the heart of the government. People within the American community like Bruce Morrison, Niall O’Dowd, Bill Flynn and Chuck Feeney have made a massive contribution. It complements the work being done in Ireland,” McGuinness said.
The concrete results from Adams’ trips, McGuinness said, lie in the greater knowledge which people in Washington now have. “There’s no doubt that the interest they have will be important in terms of the economic conference in May in Washington to which Sinn Fein will be invited.”
McGuinness does not like to travel. But if he is invited to Washington, and if Sinn Fein agrees, he will attend the conference. He has never applied for a visa to enter the U.S. “If needs be I will,” he said.
An avid fisherman, McGuinness pictures himself on a sea trout farm in the West of Ireland when this is all over. Someone might give him a job there in the new Ireland, he joked.
He would like to be remembered, he said, as a freedom seeker. That is what Martin McGuinness would like as his epitaph.
Northern Ireland is British, but not as British as Finchley. So said Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Ken Maginnis. It’s as British as one million Unionists in varying shades and complexities can make it, he said.
He was referring to the unforgettable statement made by the then English prime minister Margaret Thatcher as she tried to sell the Anglo-Irish Agreement to Unionists in 1986. They weren’t having any.
And now they have categorically rejected the Framework Document published earlier this year, seeing in it a blueprint for a united Ireland. The rest of the country doesn’t see it that way.
But Ken Maginnis, the 57-year-old white haired politician who counts among his friends the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) John Bruton, and plays poker in the winter at his home with a number of Catholics, firmly believes that if Unionists adopt the possibilities contained within the Framework Document they will be led inexorably towards a united 32-county Ireland.
The principle of consent, the consent of the majority, is so inextricably enshrined in the document that Unionists, comprising the majority, have a triple lock against having any settlement they view unfavorably forced upon them.
This is dismissed by Ken Maginnis. “There’s only consent to step on the escalator, but the escalator takes you inextricably on and you can’t get off,” he said. “If you put into practice these processes … each individually seems like a small step but cumulatively they take you de facto to a united Ireland.”
The cross-border bodies suggested in the document, he argued, could be used as leverage, as a stepping stone to a united Ireland. And that is something Ken Maginnis rejects wholeheartedly.
He is not an integrationist, either. Direct rule for Northern Ireland from London is not acceptable to Maginnis. “I’m a devolutionist,” he said. “I don’t believe in total devolution or independence” he hastened to add. “But I want to run my own schools and hospitals on a devolved basis.”
Growing up, Maginnis was not immersed in fundamental unionism, and lived beside a large Catholic family. He described how the woman next door would give birth regularly — she had eight children — and how the rest of her children would be sent to the neighboring Maginnis’s to be cared for when the baby was arriving.
He said he never heard a bitter or sectarian word from his parents or grandparents, even when “something unpleasant” happened. His parents never attended a Unionist meeting. So what made Ken Maginnis become one of the most prominent advocates of continuing the union between England and Northern Ireland?
He was born in Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, a part of the country which is now considered the heartland of staunch Republicanism. His earliest memories are of his grandfather and father, tailors, sitting at the table hand-sewing shirts. His grandfather, under whose influence Ken was mostly reared, had a small farm.
During the war, his father and two brothers applied to join the services, but only one brother, George, was accepted. His father was rejected because he suffered from varicose veins, so he joined the Home Guard and went to work in an aircraft factory at what is now the Maze prison, but ultimately ended up working for the imperial civil service in London.
Ken Maginnis’s mother worked as a cashier in Moygashel Linens, where the family moved when Ken was 11. From that time on his contact with Catholics almost ceased, until he left teacher training college some years later.
“Once we moved to Moygashel it was a 90 percent Protestant village,” he explained. “I would have come into very little contact … I was into rugby, shot putting, running… all of that was with my own, and then I went to Stranmillis teacher training college, which was Protestant, because all the Catholics went to St. Joseph’s or St. Mary’s.”
The fact that he was segregated from a large part of the community was not an unusual occurrence. Now Maginnis counts a number of Catholics among his friends. He was returning from a rugby match in Limerick, where Dungannon, a Tyrone team, had beaten the Young Munsters, when I met him in Dublin.
John Bruton was also at the match, and spent some time with Maginnis. “You know,” Maginnis said, “I would think of John Bruton as many things but I wouldn’t think of him as a Catholic. Exactly the same if I sat with Dick Spring [Irish deputy prime minister]. I would sit with [the SDLP’s] Seamus Mallon and I wouldn’t think of him as a Catholic. Strangely enough, I would sit with [SDLP leader] John Hume and I would, and I don’t know why.”
Maginnis tends to ramble, though he tries to sound decisive. “In Northern Ireland you wouldn’t be sitting weighing up whether someone is a Catholic or Protestant. It’s not something that preoccupies me at all. If I’m going to tell you something I’ll tell you, irrespective of what you are.”
He berates what he calls “narrow Nationalism” but professes to have “nothing whatsoever against Republicanism.” He has nothing to hide, he claims, about his advocacy of Unionism. But he never really says just why he is a Unionist.
Maginnis joined the Ulster Defense Regiment — the Ulster equivalent of the British army — 25 years ago, and wound up as a company commander. This is how he became politically involved, he said. “Over the 12 years that I served as major and company commander my pride was that people weren’t being killed in my area. I planned all the operations, and I managed to sustain a fairly low death rate during that time,” he said. “I was very fortunate; despite the fact that a lot of my friends were murdered, I never had anyone under my command killed. I am still proud of the 12 years that I served.”
Maginnis cited law and order as his reason for joining the UDR. “I believe that the constitutional government should be supported. I believe that people should abide by the rule of law, that nobody has the right to take the law into his own hands.”
Maginnis said he always winds up in positions of responsibility. “If I was playing rugby I seemed to finish up as the captain of the team, if I was teaching I finished up principal, it’s something in my nature that drove me into positions of responsibility,” he said.
“I don’t think it was any particular subconscious thing, where I had to lead, I’m not really sure. I never felt that I was terribly ambitious — I lack one thing as far as being ambitious is concerned and that is the ability to compromise in terms of where I honestly believe we should be going or what we should be doing,” he said.
Like most Unionist politicians, Maginnis is seen to be totally opposed to compromise. And more than anything else, compromise is needed if a sustainable peace is to be achieved in Northern Ireland.
As part of a democratic process, Maginnis said, he will talk to Sinn Fein — when the arms question is settled — and he will talk to John Bruton and the Irish government.
“It should be for the six counties to decide,” he said. “That doesn’t preclude me sitting with John Bruton — when it comes to the bit we’ll actually do business. I’m not against doing business. I’m against him calling the final game when I’m a bit player.”
This dichotomy appears again and again — let’s talk, Unionists say, but at the end of the day let’s not rock the boat because we are still going to have a majority and while we may make slight concessions to Nationalists, we will still be in control. Unionists do not seem to trust anyone, and Maginnis is no exception.
“I believe a final solution is not a long process whereby Nationalists become more aggressive and Unionists more defensive and vice versa. To use John Major’s expression — it might sicken me to sit with a ruthless killer like Martin McGuinness or Michael Stone [convicted UVF murderer] but at the end of the day I cannot preclude people who play by the rules from the democratic process,” he said.
John Major, when he made that famous pronouncement, was secretly negotiating with the very people he said would sicken him.
Maginnis continued. “It doesn’t mean I am going to sit down with Adams tomorrow, mind you, he could make it very embarrassing for me if the guns all came in within the next six months. I’m going to have to face up to that reality and I would have no difficulty doing that.”
An Ulster Unionist Party position paper, published just before the Framework Document, calls for an immediate election to a fixed two-year interim assembly, established on a responsibility-sharing basis with membership, chairs and vice-chairs being allocated prorata with the number of seats won by each party. At the end of two years, if the community voted in favor of the assembly, it would continue for a further two years before an election was due.
This arrangement would be preferable to a combative talks process, the party said. Nationalists, however, see this as an internal settlement, and it is doomed because of that. Unionists do not seem to be aware of the extent of dissatisfaction among the Nationalist community at Unionist domination.
But, the position paper continues, Ulster Unionists will not allow themselves to be intimidated into working to a strictly Nationalist agenda just because IRA/Sinn Fein are able to exercise a veto on democracy through the barrel of a rifle.
The continuing Unionist veto is not mentioned. The paper condemns equally the British and Irish governments, with the party pointing out that former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds’ idea of the supreme insult was to refer to John Bruton as “John Unionist.”
Though Maginnis sees considerable tolerance for Unionism in the Irish Republic, he personally will not tolerate the thought of a union with anyone in the Republic. “We don’t particularly want you,” he told me. “We’ve enough difficulties without you people. It would be nice if we could all work together, and live together have normal communication and trade and interaction, but if people give the Catholics a fair show, and I think many people do give them a fair crack — we’d be happy enough to leave the border where it is for the next 100 years.”
Catholics, however, have the temerity to demand more than a “fair crack” — they are seeking parity. But the IRA have only held the ceasefire, Maginnis said, because they had no excuse to return to violence when the Loyalist killings stopped.
Maginnis said sending Gerry Adams to the U.S. was a mistake — for Sinn Fein, not anyone else. The U.S. put Adams on the world stage, Maginnis said, and he flubbed his lines. Adams then had to flee to Belfast to conjure up another strategy to appease the grass roots and hard-liners.
“The IRA’s problem with the Downing Street Declaration was consent,” Maginnis said. “Now the American administration said to Adams, we have let you on the world stage — have you forgotten your lines? He came back to the IRA and said he had no political platform, and that’s why the IRA called a ceasefire. It was only supposed to be a three month ceasefire,” Maginnis insisted.
Now, however, he said, the IRA has re-established its political credentials. “I don’t acknowledge them,” Maginnis said.
His own political credentials were established when he was elected to the city council in 1981. In 1983 he was elected to Westminster, the seat of British government.
“I actively campaigned for election,” Maginnis said. “Unionism wasn’t like that — this was new. I was totally politically naive. I wasn’t thinking about securing jobs, I was thinking about terrorism.”
He remembers, he said, some of his party members talking about security. He would hear them say that the Catholics in a certain housing estate should be “rousted.” Maginnis said he didn’t believe that was the way to deal with it.
“I’m not a softy — I’m anything but as far as terrorism is concerned, but I believe there is a different way of dealing with it instead of saying that community has got to be made to pay for the sub-elements within it,” he said.
The fact is such things did happen, and frequently. But Catholics are now calling for the predominantly Protestant police force, the RUC, to be disbanded or at the very least substantially changed.
Maginnis is against this. He believes, he says, in changing the composition to encompass more Catholics, but not the structure.
“That can lead to chaos,” he said. “What we are then doing is saying society does not need what has taken 70 years to establish. You’re saying we can do better in six weeks than in 70 years.”
But the fact is, I pointed out, that Catholics do not have confidence in the RUC, and that will continue to be the case unless there is change.
“If you think of it in terms of society and take politics out of it for a while,” Maginnis responded, “you will realize that’s not ever going to happen. The police and the judiciary and the structure of society cannot change, not in terms of what that little sub-group and that little sub-group …” he trails off.
“They are saying two communities when they should be saying two traditions. Then they are adding qualifying terms like local, like Protestant, like Nationalist, like alienated, like deeply divided — you try and take all that and throw that into a pot and mix it up and say there’s our policy — you’re going to have nothing,” he finishes.
“If the political violence disappears you would find two things — there would be lots of young people from both traditions who will believe that it is a good job and they’ll do it if they’re allowed to do it. And the other side, the criminals, those who have for 25 years been anti-society, will find other outlets.” Such as racketeering, prostitution and pornography, Maginnis claimed.
The arms have to go, Maginnis maintained, before a permanent peace can be announced. “I’m assuming peace is going to be permanent,” he said. “It’s [decommissioning] a signal being sent to the operatives in both paramilitary organizations which has never, ever happened before: Chaps, the war is over.
“It’s symbolic but it’s also tangible. The war is over, not the war is being put on hold for another 20 years — the war is over. That’s really what the whole thing is about,” Maginnis claimed.
Stopping the war is what it’s all about, but it’s also about realizing what caused it in the first place. And that was Nationalist alienation, and Unionist domination. So what are Unionists prepared to concede to Nationalists? I asked.
“If you begin with this sort of wheeling and dealing it goes on,” Maginnis said contemptuously. “Some of my friends down in the government in the Dail here would understand that my great complaint is that Nationalists want to talk about processes, and to hell with solutions. I don’t think in terms of processes; processes are only a means to an end — I think of solutions.”
That dichotomy rears its head again. Are they not thinking of a process to reach a solution? I asked. “The process I have seen for the last 25 years has almost become an end in itself,” he retorted. “The violence became an end in itself. It was obvious that no one was going to be shot or bombed into a united Ireland. It was patently obvious to everyone. In fact, every death was a nail in the coffin of a united Ireland.”
Surely then, every Loyalist killing was going to make the IRA equally determined to continue.
“I don’t think there is the exact reciprocal as far as that is concerned,” Maginnis said. “There is a significant element of Roman Catholics who are not looking for a united Ireland. One day, if it happens in an ideal way, the garden of Eden, yes. I have Catholic supporters who tangibly support me, who say here’s £100 for the election,” he continued.
In fact, he said, this is so much the case that the Ulster Unionists are examining ways to see how they can attract what Maginnis described as Roman Catholic Unionists into the party. The problem is, he admits, people see it as a Protestant club rather than a political movement.
“We don’t have any Roman Catholic MPs yet, or a Roman Catholic councilor, but I think that I will actually see that within my political lifetime,” Maginnis said.
While Republicans insist they are dealing from a position of strength, Unionists seem to see bogeymen in every corner. They fear a sell-out by the British government, as evidenced in the treatment given to party leader James Molyneaux, who thought threatening the orange card in Westminster would give him a say in the Framework Document. They fear the chicanery of various Dublin governments will result in John Major being let down after getting too close to the political fire.
While deriding the tactics of Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, they fear being ignored by the White House. Ken Maginnis dismissed the contribution of Irish Americans to the peace process. He has no great feeling for Irish Americans one way or the other, he said. He defined one group of “sentimental” Irish Americans as the “Galway Bay” type. “Though they could send millions to the IRA they are of no significance,” he said.
“What is significant is Clinton, a one-term President who against advice allowed the IRA fundraising operation. That’s been achieved through the influence of Senator Kennedy and some heavyweights in the Democratic party. I think he’s made a mess of it and it will come back to haunt him,” Maginnis ventured.
People such as Tip O’Neill bother him, as does the American Ireland Fund. But he shrugs it off. “If people want to be starry-eyed about my part of the country and build a factory or two, I’m happy for them to be starry-eyed,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May/June 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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