James Martin Pacelli McGuinness (Irish: Séamus Máirtín Pacelli Mag Aonghusa; 23 May 1950 – 21 March 2017) was an Irish republican politician and statesman for Sinn Féin and a leader within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) during The Troubles. He was the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from May 2007 to January 2017.
McGuinness served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster from 1997 until his resignation in 2013. Like all Sinn Féin MPs, McGuinness followed abstentionism in the Westminster Parliament. Working alongside US Special Envoy George Mitchell, McGuinness was also one of the main architects of the Good Friday Agreement which formally cemented the Northern Ireland peace process and established the Northern Ireland Assembly.
In 1998, McGuinness was first elected as the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Mid Ulster. He served as Minister of Education in the Northern Ireland Executive under First Minister David Trimble from 1999 to 2002. Following the St Andrews Agreement and the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, he became deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland on 8 May 2007, with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley becoming First Minister. In 2008 and 2016, he was reappointed as deputy First Minister to serve alongside Peter Robinson and Arlene Foster, respectively. He was Sinn Féin's candidate for President of Ireland in the 2011 Irish presidential election.
In the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly election, McGuinness was elected as the MLA for Foyle. On 9 January 2017, McGuinness resigned as deputy First Minister in protest over the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. He announced on 19 January that he would not be standing for re-election in the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election due to ill health. He reportedly suffered from amyloidosis, a condition that attacks the vital organs, and retired shortly before his death on 21 March 2017, aged 66.
McGuinness acknowledged that he was a former IRA member, but stated that he left the IRA in 1974. He originally joined the Official IRA, unaware of the split at the December 1969 Army Convention, switching to the Provisional IRA soon after. By the start of 1972, at the age of 21, he was second-in-command of the IRA in Derry, a position he held at the time of Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972, when thirteen civilians were shot and killed in the city by British soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment during a civil rights march, with a fourteenth victim dying four months later.
During the Saville Inquiry into the events of that day, Paddy Ward stated he had been the leader of the Fianna, the youth wing of the IRA at the time of Bloody Sunday. He said that McGuinness and an anonymous IRA member gave him bomb parts that morning. He said that his organisation intended to attack city centre premises in Derry on the same day. In response, McGuinness said the statements were "fantasy", while Gearóid Ó hEára (formerly Gerry O'Hara), a Derry Sinn Féin councillor, stated that he and not Ward was the Fianna leader at the time.
The inquiry concluded that, although McGuinness was "engaged in paramilitary activity" at the time of Bloody Sunday and had probably been armed with a Thompson submachine gun, there was insufficient evidence to make any finding other than they were "sure that he did not engage in any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire".
McGuinness negotiated alongside Gerry Adams with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw, in 1972. In 1973, he was convicted by the Republic of Ireland's Special Criminal Court, after being arrested near a car containing 250 pounds (110 kg) of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition. He refused to recognise the court, and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. In court, he declared his membership of the Provisional IRA without equivocation: "We have fought against the killing of our people... I am a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann and very, very proud of it".
After his release, and another conviction in the Republic of Ireland for IRA membership in 1974, he became increasingly prominent in Sinn Féin, the political wing of the republican movement. He was in indirect contact with British intelligence during the 1981 hunger strikes, and again in the early 1990s. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont in 1982, representing Londonderry. He was the second candidate elected after Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume. As with all elected members of Sinn Féin and the SDLP, he did not take up his seat. On 9 December 1982, McGuinness, Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison were banned from entering Great Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act by the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw.
In August 1993, he was the subject of a two-part special by The Cook Report, a Central TV investigative documentary series presented by Roger Cook. It accused him of continuing involvement in IRA activity, of attending an interrogation and of encouraging Frank Hegarty, a British informer, to return to Derry from a safe house in England. Hegarty's mother Rose appeared on the programme to tell of telephone calls to McGuinness and of Hegarty's subsequent murder. McGuinness denied her account and denounced the programme saying "I have never been in the IRA. I don't have any sway over the IRA". The editor of the Cook Report accused the British government of failing to prosecute McGuinness, which resulted in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) launching Operation Taurus; an investigation into McGuinness's IRA activity. Following the IRA ceasefire in August 1994, detectives were refused permission to arrest and question McGuinness due to an RUC internal memo stating "that the UK government may soon be meeting senior members of Sinn Féin, including Mr McGuinness". On 10 March 1995 the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland, Alasdair Fraser, stated there was insufficient evidence against McGuinness to ensure a reasonable chance of obtaining a conviction.
In 2005, Michael McDowell, the Irish Tánaiste, stated McGuinness, along with Gerry Adams and Martin Ferris, were members of the seven-man IRA Army Council. McGuinness denied this, saying he was no longer an IRA member. Experienced Troubles journalist Peter Taylor presented further apparent evidence of McGuinness's role in the IRA in his documentary Age of Terror, shown in April 2008. In his documentary, Taylor alleges that McGuinness was the head of the IRA's Northern Command and had advance knowledge of the IRA's 1987 Remembrance Day bombing, which left 12 people dead.
Chief negotiator and Minister of Education
He became Sinn Féin's chief negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement. At the time of his death, former US president Bill Clinton noted that McGuinness was the one who personally oversaw the agreement's arms decommissioning phase. Former British prime minister Tony Blair also acknowledged the leading role which McGuinness had in ensuring the agreement would be enforced.
He was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996 representing Foyle. Having contested Foyle unsuccessfully at the 1983, 1987 and 1992 Westminster elections, he became MP for Mid Ulster in 1997 and after the agreement was concluded, was returned as a member of the Assembly for the same constituency. He was nominated by his party for a ministerial position in the power-sharing executive, where he became Minister of Education. One of his acts as Minister of Education was his decision to scrap the 11-plus exam, which he had failed as a child. He was re-elected to the Westminster Parliament in 2001, 2005 and 2010.
In May 2003, transcripts of telephone calls between McGuinness and British officials including Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, were published in a biography of McGuinness entitled From Guns to Government by Kathryn Johnston and Liam Clarke. The tapes had been made by MI5, and the authors of the book were arrested under the Official Secrets Act. The conversations showed an easy and friendly relationship between McGuinness and Powell. He joked with Powell about unionist MPs while Mowlam referred to him as "babe" and discussed her difficulties with Blair. In another transcript, he praised Bill Clinton to Gerry Adams.