In
August 1996, Yasser Arafat decided that he could
not be criticised. To stop any criticism of his
government, the Palestinian Minister of Information,
Abd Rabbo, sent policemen to all of the bookshops
in Gaza and the West Bank. They confiscated every
single copy of any books written by Edward Said
that those bookshops happened to stock. Two weeks
later, writing in the London Review of Books,
Said protested: "I am now banned in Palestine
for having dared to speak against our own Papa
Doc." Arafat's move appeared desperate and showed
the world that, instead of providing Palestinians
with an enlightened government, the Middle East
peace process had installed a regime that stank
of feudal authoritarianism. Closer to home, on
August 21st this year, the Stormont education
minister, Martin McGuinness, released a statement
while he was on holiday, ordering people not to
help Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston write a
biography of him. He declared: "I have to point
out that those purporting to be writing autobiographical
accounts of my life are doing so without my co-operation
or approval." The education minister's inability
to distinguish between biography and autobiography
aside, his statement did point to a much more
disturbing feature of political life under Stormont.
In trying to stop this book from being written
McGuinness appealed to one of the unwritten rules
that make politics in the six counties so secretive
and so dangerous - he appealed to the old republican
policy of secrecy that he and his party have manipulated
and transformed into a semi-official political
culture that is designed to stop people from criticising
"the leadership". But his warning was ignored
and this book examines the secret history behind
the education minister, restoring, for the historical
record, some of the things that he would rather
make sure people do not know about.
In
an interview with the authors of this book, Dennis
Bradley commented on the breakdown of the I.R.A.'s
1974 ceasefire, stating: "I think the republican
movement settled in the Good Friday Agreement
for the same things that were achievable in 1974.
The difference between 1974 and the Good Friday
Agreement was 20 years of violence and so many
people dead in between." Bradley's opinion of
what the republican struggle actually achieved
in the end is also a reflection upon the career
of Martin McGuinness, who, along with Gerry Adams,
brought Sinn Féin and the Provisional I.R.A. away
from revolutionary politics towards reformism.
This culminated in Sinn Féin's holding two ministries
at Stormont and their sitting in government there
under the Union Jack. This transformation did
not happen overnight, however, and is, interestingly,
reflected through the authors' use of quotations
from the speeches and interviews given by McGuinness
down the years, beginning with hair-raising statements
justifying the killing of British soldiers and
ending with the Orwellian doublespeak of the peace
process that became the official language of Sinn
Féin. Gems from the 1970s, such as "This is a
war to the end," and "I am a member of the Derry
Brigade of the I.R.A. and very proud of it" are
juxtaposed with his later declarations, including
the often-repeated denial of I.R.A. membership,
made in 1992 - "I have never said that I was in
the I.R.A. I am not a member of the I.R.A. I was
a republican activist in Free Derry." If anybody
wants to find out about the truth, then they certainly
won't learn too much from the Stormont education
minister.
This
book also explodes some of the popular myths surrounding
McGuinness. For example, he did not come from
a republican family - Willie Breslin, a teacher
and member of the Derry Labour Party knew the
family as "good catholic people who probably would
have voted nationalist and when John Hume came
along they probably would have voted for him."
Behind another myth, that of the fearless boy
warrior, there was another, less heroic reality:
as one childhood friend noted of the young McGuinness,
"If anybody so much as looked crooked at Martin,
he ran in to get Tom (his older brother) out to
fight them for him." Another anecdote points out
how once, when an opponent lay safely on the ground
after being hit by other youths, the teenage McGuinness
kicked him while he was down.
For
somebody whose party is so fond of having people
attacked in their homes, McGuinness is very careful
to keep trouble away from his own doorstep. His
adoption of the role of policeman almost cost
him dearly when, during the 1974 ceasefire, he
ordered the disarming of an I.N.L.A. unit in Derry
City on its way to attack the British army. The
next day two I.N.L.A. men went to the local Sinn
Féin "incident centre" and demanded a meeting
with McGuinness. When he arrived one of the men,
whose brother was present at the previous day's
stand off, put a gun to the head of an I.R.A.
man, told McGuinness to sit down, pointed the
gun at him and warned him to leave his brother
alone. "How could these people claim to be republicans
when they were going to shoot other republicans
for shooting soldiers?" the I.N.L.A. man asks.
McGuinness also ordered Raymond McCartney to carry
out an attack on Patsy O'Hara, the I.N.L.A. member
who died on hunger strike in 1981, in which he
was very badly beaten. It seems then, in Derry
at least, that the phenomenon of so-called "punishment
beatings" actually originated in this brutal method
of political control. These incidents have a deep
significance within the history of Derry republicanism
because they show how McGuinness first used the
political space provided by an I.R.A. ceasefire
to install his reputation as an authoritarian.
Although he backed down on the first occasion,
the incident shows that he viewed any kind of
opposition to his authority from within his own
community far more fiercely than he did the activities
of the British army. Later on, when Sinn Féin's
war was over, he dealt just as ruthlessly with
people who criticised him or presented any kind
of alternative to his politics. As one of those
interviewed states, this was possible because
"McGuinness and some of his henchmen are a protected
species, they are safe from arrest as long as
they do not attack the British forces or the loyalists.
It is the price our community pays for the peace
process."
The
closing chapter of the book notes that a "smoke-screen"
still lingers over Bloody Sunday and the inquiry
being held in Derry: "Several I.R.A. members who
had been active at the time of Bloody Sunday were
'visited' after news broke that McGuinness had
decided to give evidence. After being politely
asked if they intended to follow McGuinness' example,
any who said they did were bluntly warned not
to proceed." As the chapter "Bloody Sunday" points
out, the truth about what happened in Derry on
30 January, 1972, has not yet been told. If McGuinness
has his way, it might never be told. Although
Martin McGuinness and Sinn Féin cannot close down
bookshops, as Arafat has done in Palestine, their
reaction to the publication of this book shows
that they do believe that they can close down
people's minds and deprive them of the freedom
to speak and to think for themselves. This repression
is an insidious version of that employed by the
Palestinian regime because it attempts to impose
self-censorship on anybody who might be thinking
about co-operating with authors by telling their
own stories about what has happened in Derry over
the past thirty years. But they failed to stop
this book from being published and the story that
it tells has created space within which more criticism
of Martin McGuinness and his authoritarian politics
can take place. We need more books like this one
because politicians like Derry's Papa Doc should
not have the power to tell people who they can
or cannot talk to, or what they can or cannot
read. When the day does arrive when people do
keep quiet, obey Martin McGuinness' warnings and
become too afraid to tell the truth, then that
will be the day when Sinn Féin will have the power
to take away our books.
