Former IRA commander McGuinness dies

LONDON, Tuesday

Martin McGuinness, a one-time Irish Republican Army commander who later helped negotiate an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland, has died aged 66.

His Sinn Fein party, which opposes British rule in Northern Ireland and was long considered the political arm of the IRA, announced the death in a statement on Tuesday, expressing “deep regret”.

The BBC said McGuinness, who trained to be a butcher in his native Derry and went on to play a central behind-the-scenes role in a historic 1998 peace deal, 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 a statement.

“In doing so, he made an essential contribution to the extraordinary journey of Northern Ireland from conflict to peace,” she said. The violence in Northern Ireland killed around 3,500 people.

Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son Tim died in an IRA bomb in the English town of Warrington in 1993, told BBC radio that he could not forgive McGuinness but paid tribute to his “desire for peace”.

McGuinness was “a brave man, who put himself at some risk” from more hardline republicans, Parry said.

But British lawmaker Norman Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was paralysed in the IRA’s 1984 Brighton Hotel bombing, said the world was “a sweeter and cleaner place now” without McGuinness.

“He was not only a multi-murderer, he was a coward,” he said, adding that McGuinness only became a peacemaker to “save his own skin”.

Julie Hambleton, the sister of one of the 21 victims of two IRA bombs in pubs in Birmingham in central England in 1974, said McGuinness had been “selective with the truth” about his time in the IRA.