Everything about Martin Mcguinness totally explained

James Martin Pacelli McGuinness (; born in Derry on 23 May 1950) is the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.
A Sinn Féin politician and former Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader, McGuinness is the MP for the Mid Ulster constituency, the seat once held by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. Like all Sinn Féin MPs, McGuinness practises abstentionism at Westminster. He is also a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the same constituency. Following the St Andrews Agreement and the Assembly election in 2007, he became deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland with Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley as First Minister of Northern Ireland on 8 May 2007. He served as Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland Executive between 1999 and 2002.
First Minister Ian Paisley announced his resignation in early 2008; it's due to take effect in June 2008 and will trigger the removal of Martin McGuinness as deputy First Minister. However, McGuinness will remain in his position in a caretaker capacity until being renominated with the new DUP Leader Peter Robinson.

Provisional IRA activity

McGuinness joined the IRA around 1970 at the age of 20, after the Troubles broke out. 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.
McGuinness negotiated alongside Gerry Adams with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw, in 1972. He was convicted by the Republic of Ireland's Special Criminal Court in 1973, after being caught with a car containing 250 lb (113 kg) of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition. He refused to recognize the court, and was sentenced to six months imprisonment. In the court he declared his membership of the Provisional Irish Republican Army without equivocation: 'We have fought against the killing of our people... I'm a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann and very, very proud of it'.
After his release, and another conviction in the Republic for IRA membership, he became increasingly prominent in Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Republican Movement. He was in indirect contact with British intelligence during the hunger strikes in the early 1980s, and in the early 1990s. He was elected to a short-lived assembly at Stormont in 1982, and was then banned from entering Great Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Chief negotiator and Minister for Education

He became Sinn Féin's chief negotiator in the time leading to the Belfast Agreement. He became MP for Mid Ulster in 1997, and after the Agreement was concluded, was returned as a member of the Assembly, and nominated by his party for a ministerial position in the power-sharing executive, where he became Minister for Education. One of his controversial acts as Minister for Education was his decision to scrap the 11-plus exam, which he himself had failed as a schoolchild. He was re-elected to the Westminster Parliament in 2001, but along with the rest of his party has refused to take his seat there (see abstentionism).
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. 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 the British. 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.

St Andrews Agreement

In the weeks following the St Andrews Agreement between Paisley and Adams, the four parties — the DUP, Sinn Féin, the UUP and the SDLP — indicated their choice of ministries in the Executive and nominated members to fill them. The Assembly met on 8 May 2007 and elected Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as First Minister and Deputy First Minister. On 12 May the Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle agreed to take up three places on the Policing Board, and nominated three MLAs to take them.
On 8 December 2007, while visiting President Bush in the White House with the Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley, Martin McGuinness, the deputy First Minister, said to the press "Up until the 26 March this year, Ian Paisley and I never had a conversation about anything – not even about the weather – and now we've worked very closely together over the last seven months and there's been no angry words between us. ... This shows we're set for a new course."

Claims of IRA activity

A claim was made at the Saville Inquiry that McGuinness was responsible for supplying detonators for nail bombs on Bloody Sunday where 14 civil rights marchers were killed by British soldiers in Derry. Paddy Ward claimed he was the leader of the Fianna, the youth wing of the IRA in January 1972. He claimed McGuinness, the second-in-command of the IRA in the city at the time, and another anonymous member gave him bomb parts on the morning of 30 January, the date planned for the civil rights march. He said his organisation intended to attack city-centre premises in Derry on the day when civilians were shot dead by British soldiers. In response McGuinness said the claims were "fantasy", while Gerry O’Hara, a Sinn Féin councillor in Derry stated that he and not Ward was the Fianna leader at the time.
   In August 1993, he was the subject of a two part special by the 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, an 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".
   In 2005, Michael McDowell, the Irish Tánaiste, claimed McGuinness, along with Gerry Adams and Martin Ferris, were members of the seven-man IRA Army Council. McGuinness denied the claims, saying he was no longer an IRA member.
   Experienced "troubles" journalist Peter Taylor presented further apparent evidence of McGuinness's active role in terrorism 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 which was behind the IRA's 1987 Enniskillen bombing which left 11 civilians dead.

Personal life

McGuinness married Bernadette Canning in 1974. They have four children, two girls and two boys. He is a fan of Derry City F.C. and the Derry Gaelic football team. His brother Tom used to play Gaelic football for Derry and has among his honours two Ulster Senior Football Championship medals.

References

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