Bashing McGuinness

Since Martin McGuinness joined the race to the Áras, most of the commentary has surrounded his less than squeaky clean past. This has come from the media, bloggers and also the political arena itself. The latest is Fintan O'Toole's piece in today's Irish Times where he suggests McGuinness could be liable for war crimes.

I'm no fan of McGuinness and certainly won't be voting for him. The farce that is Northern politics has shown him to be fairly inept in an executive role. The actions of Sinn Féin in government up North have shown them to be a fairly right-wing, conservative party, quite at odds with the image they try to portray down here. His following Gerry Adams into southern politics also shows either a contempt for people who have worked hard for SF in the Republic or an effective evacuation of Stormont by the heavy hitters.

However, I strongly object to people relentlessly harping back to McGuinness' past involvement in the IRA from the 70s onwards. Sure, he carried out some pretty awful acts and refused to recognise the authority of the Irish Courts. But when we down south voted 94% in favour of the Good Friday Agreement, we effectively said that we accept that there was a war being fought, but that now we were entering the peace and that we were drawing a line in the sand. Therefore we have to live with our decision and allow those combatants to re-enter normal society and that includes electoral politics.