LONDON // Martin McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army commander who led his underground paramilitary movement toward reconciliation with Britain, died on Tuesday. He was 66.
Turning from rebel to peacemaker, McGuinness served as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister for a decade in a power-sharing government.
He played a central behind-the-scenes role in negotiating a peace deal in 1998 which brought to an end three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland which killed more than 3,500 people.
“It is with deep regret and sadness that we have learnt of the death of our friend and comrade Martin McGuinness who passed away in Derry during the night,” his Sinn Fein party, which is opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland, said.
The BBC said he had died of a rare heart condition.
“While I can never condone the path he took in the earlier part of his life, Martin McGuinness ultimately played a defining role in leading the Republican movement away from violence,” prime minister Theresa May said.
“In doing so, he made an essential contribution to the extraordinary journey of Northern Ireland from conflict to peace,” she said.
Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son Tim died in an IRA bomb in the English town of Warrington in 1993, said he could not forgive the IRA but paid tribute to McGuinness’s “desire for peace”.
McGuinness was "a brave man, who put himself at some risk" from more hardline members of the republican movement, Mr Parry was quoted by the Guardian newspaper as saying.
Irish president Michael D Higgins said: “The world of politics and the people across this island will miss the leadership he gave, shown most clearly during the difficult times of the peace process, and his commitment to the values of genuine democracy that he demonstrated in the development of the institutions in Northern Ireland.”
McGuinness’ transformation as peacemaker was all the more remarkable because, as a senior IRA commander during the years of gravest Catholic-Protestant violence, he insisted that Northern Ireland must be forced out of the United Kingdom against the wishes of Protestants.
Even after the Sinn Fein party – the IRA’s legal, public face – started to run for elections in the 1980s, McGuinness insisted as Sinn Fein deputy leader that “armed struggle” remained essential.
“We don’t believe that winning elections and any amount of votes will bring freedom in Ireland,” he told a BBC documentary team in 1986. “At the end of the day, it will be the cutting edge of the IRA that will bring freedom.”
Born May 23, 1950, he joined the breakaway Provisional IRA faction in his native Londonderry – simply “Derry” to Irish nationalists – after dropping out of high school and working as an apprentice butcher in the late 1960s. At the time, the Catholic civil rights movement faced increasing conflict with the province’s Protestant government and police.
He rose to become Derry’s deputy IRA commander by age 21 as “Provo” bombs systematically wrecked the city centre. Soldiers found it impossible to pass IRA road barricades erected in McGuinness’ nearby Bogside power base.
McGuinness appeared unmasked at early Provisional IRA press conferences. The BBC filmed him walking through the Bogside discussing how the IRA command structure worked and stressing his concern to minimise civilian casualties, an early sign of public relations savvy.
In 1972, Northern Ireland’s bloodiest year, McGuinness joined Adams in a six-man IRA delegation flown by the British government to London for secret face-to-face negotiations during a brief truce. Those talks got nowhere and McGuinness went back on the run until his arrest on New Year’s Eve in the Republic of Ireland near a car loaded with 250 pounds of explosives and 4,750 rounds of ammunition.
During one of his two Dublin trials for IRA membership, McGuinness declared from the dock he was “a member of the Derry Brigade of the IRA and I’m very, very proud of it”.
* Associated Press and Agence France-Presse