MARTIN McGuinness was always the hawk. Amongst us prematurely politicised youngsters there was a view that by the mid-1980s Republicans from our neighbourhoods in west Belfast had become their movement's 'thinkers'.
They had beards and dressed like teachers, were feted by London's Left and promoted international links with the ANC in South Africa and other 'national liberation movements'.
The cockpit of the IRA's campaign seemed to have moved to border areas and the daily street violence throughout the Hunger Strike period had migrated north to Derry. From a Belfast-centric view of our conflict, the personification of these wild men wedded to the ‘Armed Struggle’ was the new guy on the scene with the curly hair and tweed jacket, Martin McGuinness.
READ MORE: Martin McGuinness: The IRA commander turned peacemaker who shook hands with Queen
Constant speculation rooting him in the Provisional's Northern Command and Army Council only cemented the view McGuinness was Republicanism's arch militarist. To the 12-year-old me, his dress sense and regular church attendance pointed to a conservatism and piety far removed from his secularised comrades in Belfast.
(Ironically, his introduction to the wider British public came not from any atrocity but a 1985 interview in his kitchen with his wife and baby. The Tory Government and BBC governors were appalled at the "domestication of terrorists" and twice banned it. The corporation's director general, Alasdair Milne, father of Jeremy Corbyn's strategy chief Seumas, overturned it and screened the Real Lives documentary.)
Even by the time of the IRA's two ceasefires, in 1994 and again in 1997, and throughout the early stages of the Peace Process I could never shake the cliched notion of bad cop McGuinness standing in contrast to good cop Adams, already a figure afforded respectability by mainstream political figures in the US.
Surely his right-hand man had only been assigned the role of chief negotiator with the British Government as a constant and grim reminder to them of the need to "move the process forward"?
READ MORE: Son of IRA Enniskillen bombing victim 'will always remember Martin McGuinness as terrorist'
The truth, as always, is a bit more complicated. By the time of Adam's 1983 Sinn Fein takeover he already had a deep-rooted political partnership with McGuinness, the Derry man not only pushing the prioritisation of Sinn Fein over the IRA but maintaining links with British security agents from 1972 which would much later lead to the acceleration of the Peace Process. (Notably Derry was operating a de facto ceasefire since 1991, three years before one was officially declared.)
Some of the actions of the IRA’s Derry Brigade were amongst the most macabre of the era; the murder of Protestant census collector Joanne Mathers in 1981 and forcing army civilian employee Patrick Gillespie to drive a lorry with a bomb into a checkpoint while his family were held hostage come to mind. The name of Martin McGuinness will forever be associated with these atrocities and countless others. He has never apologised for his role in the IRA.
But the McGuinness persona has had two major impacts on the history of modern Ireland and indeed the UK's. No other figure in modern Irish Republicanism could have had the influence, standing and respect over its grassroots support to move from violence to embracing democracy, culminating in their unprecedented electoral successes earlier this month.
And the backdrop of decades in the IRA's engine room gives all the potency to the shared purpose of McGuinness and that other great titan of the modern Irish conflict, Ian Paisley, namely bringing down the curtain on conflict. Only McGuinness, who unlike Adams had no family Republican heritage, could have carried the symbolism of shaking hands with the Queen, the condemnation of more recent Republican violence as criminal or delivered an acceptance of the police service amongst most Northern nationalists.
In his illuminating chronicle of the peace process, Tony Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell lays to rest the notion of the hawkish McGuinness in contrast to Adams the dove. Both men, he explains, were an equal partnership. At times McGuinness was the more accommodating and receptive of the pair. There was never any sign of the militarist versus the diplomat.
Both Blair and Powell would come to regard the Sinn Fein pair as friends, the former prime minister in awe of how far they moved politically at great personal risk and taking their movements with them.
READ MORE: Lord Tebbit hopes McGuinness is in 'particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell'
History will record the duality of Martin McGuinness. It cannot fail to.
But anyone who lived through the dark years of the Northern Ireland conflict found themselves in a fairly ordinary part of the world thrust into decades of extraordinary events. Most are grateful for at least a partial restoration of the mundane. Martin McGuinness helped deliver that.
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