Hume – the missing hero of McGuinness James Bradshaw

Hume – the missing hero ofMcGuinness by James Bradshaw

The recent RTÉ documentary, McGuinness, was a triumph for all involved in making it. Wri�en by Harry McGee of The Irish Times, it was a gripping account of the life of one of the most important poli�cal figures in modern Irish history. While Gerry Adams has been the undisputed leader of the Republican movement since the 80s, his junior colleague Mar�n McGuinness was always more compelling. Unlike Adams, McGuinness was not born into the IRA, and the oversized role which Derry played in the early days of the civil rights movement coupled with the appalling slaughter on Bloody Sunday adds to the sympathy which ordinary people felt towards him.

Overall, the focus of the documentary was admirably balanced. A wide array of leading figures in the Peace Process were featured. Some of the interviewees clearly revered him while others like the DUP’s Gregory Campbell were deeply hos�le. Vic�ms of IRA violence were understandably cri�cal about the omission of key details, such as the role which McGuinness allegedly played in luring the Republican informer Frank Hegarty to his death in 1986. The late Bishop of Derry Edward Daly believed McGuinness played a direct role in Hegarty’s murder by encouraging him to return to Derry, and told an Irish government official as much some months a�er the killing. The bigger flaw within the

documentary related not to the failure to address every IRA atrocity – a mini-series would be needed – but to how it framed the overall narra�ve of the Troubles. What we saw resembled too closely the revisionist view of the conflict which the wealthiest and most dangerous party in Irish poli�cs constantly propagates. Their po�ed history runs as follows:

• In the late 1960s, disenfranchised Irish

Catholics living in a bigoted state began a powerful people’s movement for civil rights. (This is true.) • Faced with no alterna�ve (here the lies begin), a group of Irish revolu�onaries – the moral equals of those who founded the Irish State –took the fight to the

Bri�sh Army and RUC. • A�er decades of armed struggle, courageous leaders such as Gerry

Adams and Mar�n

McGuinness were finally able to bring the Bri�sh

Government to the nego�a�ng table. • Thanks to their courage, and some minor assistance provided by the previously uncoopera�ve

John Hume et al, the newly-created Peace

Process ensured that Irish unity could now be achieved by non-violent means.

Sinn Féin have become the most powerful force in Irish poli�cs par�ally on the back of this narra�ve. Whenever they are challenged about their bloodsoaked past, this is the story they return to. This historical narra�ve rests on certain building blocks: if one underlying assump�on or component of the argument gives way, the whole structure collapses. The most important underlying claim is that a nonviolent path towards changing Northern Ireland did not exist before the Good Friday Agreement. This is an absolute falsehood and must be challenged at every turn. In 1973, moderate na�onalists, moderate unionists and the Bri�sh and Irish governments signed up to the Sunningdale Agreement which required power-sharing in the North, along with the crea�on of a 32-county Council of Ireland

aimed at promo�ng peaceful coopera�on between North and South.

McGuinness and the IRA rejected this outright. A�er four years of hellish violence, they s�ll would not give up. Granted, a large segment of the unionist popula�on (such as Ian Paisley) also rejected Sunningdale, and militant loyalism played a key role in collapsing the agreement. Yet a significant fac�on of unionists (such as Ian Paisley) also rejected the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. A key difference is that the IRA had halted their campaign before the Good Friday Agreement made it obvious that they were unlikely to resume their offensive. If the IRA

had been willing to abandon violence in the 70s, two decades of pointless conflict would have been avoided.

Not for nothing did the late, great Seamus Mallon – a ceaseless cri�c of the IRA campaign and leadership – call the Good Friday Agreement “Sunningdale for slow learners.” By the late 1990s, the IRA leadership – with Adams and McGuinness at its heart – was willing to accept less than what was on offer at Sunningdale a quarter of a century earlier, provided that hundreds of Provisional IRA members would walk free from jail. And provided, of course, that the Sinn Féin leadership would play a central role in the new poli�cal and social order.

Seamus Mallon Members of the Real Irish Republican Army attending an Easter Rising commemoration ceremony in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 2010.

There are other parts of the IRA/SF version of history which need to be challenged too, but which got hardly a men�on in McGuinness – a documentary which gives far too much credit to Adams and McGuinness as if they had been nego�a�ng in the late 90s from a posi�on of strength. In the early 1970s, the IRA’s campaign was an insurgency, and there was a real possibility that the Bri�sh Government could be forced to withdraw from Ireland. Twenty years later, there was no such possibility, as the security forces had gained the upper hand. “No-go” areas were a distant memory and the IRA’s freedom of ac�on in majority Catholic areas had been greatly curtailed, even in the previously-impregnable South Armagh. The IRA of the 1990s was heavily infiltrated by the security forces, a point which Father Denis Faul used to hammer home when urging young Catholic boys in his County Tyrone school not to become foot-soldiers in their war.

“If you're lucky, you'll spend twenty years in jail. And if you’re not lucky, your mother will be handed a folded Tricolour at your graveside,” the priest who sat by the bedside of dying hunger strikers would tell them.

“And if you go to jail or die, it will sooner or later emerge that your commanding officer was a tout, and that his commanding officer was a tout too. And whilst you're ro�ng away, they will be ge�ng off scot-free.”

Unsurprisingly, the IRA came to hate Father Faul for speaking such truths, and this widespread infiltra�on prevented the IRA from causing anywhere near as much damage as they had previously, as an examina�on of the casual�es suffered by the Bri�sh Army shows. Over 100 Bri�sh soldiers were killed by the IRA in 1972, for example. But in the final eighteen months of the “war,” a�er the IRA broke their ceasefire by bombing Canary Wharf in London, the same “army” could only inflict a handful of fatali�es on the Bri�sh army. Faced with con�nuing a lowintensity and completely fu�le armed campaign, the IRA’s leadership chose peace and their organisa�on was gradually wound down in a manner which ensured that dissident splinter groups were never more than a minor threat. For accomplishing this much, Mar�n McGuinness deserves a good deal of acknowledgement, but not much gra�tude.

The greatest shortcoming of McGuinness can be summed up in one word: Hume.

The references to the real leader of Northern na�onalists over several decades in this documentary were far too limited. We are told in McGuinness that John Hume finished well ahead of McGuinness in elec�ons in Derry in 1982 and 1983 – results which were repeated again and again, results which give the lie to the no�on that the IRA’s campaign had majority support among Northern Catholics.

We are shown a video of McGuinness in the 80s, lamen�ng the fact that violence was necessary to bring about change. “I wish it could be done in another way. If someone could tell me a peaceful way to do it, then I would gladly support that. But no one has yet done that,” he says. Of course, there was a peaceful way. John Hume showed this by example every day from when the civil rights struggle began, and every day Mar�n McGuinness ignored this. There is even some evidence that the IRA considered murdering Hume because of his non-violence. There is another aspect to the life of both men which the documentary makers hinted at without examining in detail, and that is the ques�on of religious faith. Modern Ireland is some�mes too firmly a�ached to its secularism to delve into such ma�ers, but the Derry which McGuinness and Hume were born into was a very different place indeed.

Hume le� his na�ve city to enter the seminary in Maynooth, before returning home to get married and be a teacher. McGuinness had no priestly ambi�ons, but his family’s religious ins�ncts were obvious: his middle-name was Pacelli, in honour of Pope Pius XII. At an early stage in the documentary, one of the interviewees discusses the young McGuinness’s reputa�on as a man of strong morals while the viewer is shown a faceless young man at prayer. Much later on, we are shown a video of McGuinness as he blesses himself at a funeral, perhaps that of a Republican comrade. We then hear words he spoke in the la�er stage of his illness, as the camera slowly zooms out from the Derry graveyard where he is now interred.

Any historical documentary about a deceased poli�cal figure could conclude with an image of a graveyard. A documentary �tled Hume could end with the same image of the same graveyard, but this would not have the same meaning for a man who never caused another human being to die a premature death, and who never encouraged others to pursue a violent path when a peaceful one was available.

Sinn Féin’s false narra�ve is undercut by the existence of John Hume. For decades they wanted to be rid of him, and in their version of history, Hume is barely present at all, just as he is absent throughout most of the McGuinness documentary. There is a reason for this and it must be challenged. Ireland is at peace now. But it might not always be, par�cularly given that the Northern Irish state is so structurally unsound and prone to division. Wherever the tempta�on towards the use of violence exists, the need to exercise moral responsibility in poli�cs is all the greater. When assessing the past, the achievements of Mar�n McGuinness in the la�er period of his life should be acknowledged, but they should always be juxtaposed against the consistently peaceful example of John Hume.

When Derry’s two most famous sons are compared against one another, McGuinness falls very short indeed.

James Bradshaw

James Bradshaw works for an interna�onal consul�ng firm based in Dublin, and has a background in journalism and public policy. Outside of work, he writes for a number of publica�ons, on topics including poli�cs, history, culture, film and literature.