Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government

Rating:
Summary: Full of Misinformation and Unauthorised Testimony
Review: Be aware that this book is entirely compiled of statements and claims that are highly disapproved of by the man himself Martin McGuinness whom highly disapproved of the book's release.

I was misled by a review I'd read of the book and mistook it for a fair coverage of the man McGuinness.

I found this book to be tongue in cheek bias against it's claimed topic and not at all worthy of any attention whatsoever.
Too many references not based in truths to mention.

It is obviously a book to put McGuinness in a certain light and not at all to provide unbiased or balanced info.

More a work of dogma about the figure of the man than anything of historically accurate value.

A huge disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: A bad-tempered, bleak biography showing the futility of viol
Review: Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston are journalists who have covered the political conflict in Northern Ireland for many years. This is a biography of one of the central characters in the IRA. The authors give some description of the times - poverty, commercial discrimination, political gerrymandering - which convinced a significant minority of the nationalist population that Northern Ireland had to change radically. They give some coverage to the reasons given by various militant Republicans - McGuinness among them - for taking up arms, mainly that the reaction of the British (and Unionist) state to the struggle for Civil Rights was violent and had to be met with violence.
However it is plain that Clarke and Johnston see the thirty years of IRA violence and the thousands of lives which were lost as purely futile and corrupting. They have no basic tolerance for the reasons given for the continuation of armed struggle and, as such, their opinions become front and centre of this biography. Their basic argument is that the deal which brought about the Good Friday Agreement was little different from the deal on offer twenty five years previously at Sunningdale and that the intervening years had seen thousands of people killed, maimed and jailed. They further point out that the only difference between the two agreements was the participation of Sinn Fein and infer, therefore that the violence was really a struggle for power within the nationist community; which Sinn Fein won, at the price of given up their revolutionary aspirations.

While most or all of this may be true, this belief sets the tone for the book itself, and paints McGuinness as cynical, ruthless, effective mainly in self-preservation. The interviews serve mainly to emphasise these traits, and I think ultimately turns the reader away from the views espoused. I was also not convinced that McGuinness provided the key thinking on the various changes in strategy that the movement took over years, though the authors seem to think McGuinness greatly influenced these moves. I did not find the evidence convincing - indeed it seemed to me that McGuinness is more an executor (pun intended) than a strategist.

The book is extremely effective in highlighting the callous, ruthlessness of most of the IRA operations, the ineffectual nature of the campaign led to more and more civilian deaths, the effectiveness of the British authorities led to a widening of the catagories of IRA `legitimate targets' to encompass anyone who dealt with the authorities, and yet more and more innocents were being killed.
There is a book to be written on whether the Sinn Fein leadership are the ultimate cynical politicians, using violence for publicity for over thirty years , and ultimately using the promise of peace to extort votes and a measure of political power. There is also a view that a movement which started in rage and wanted revolution, moved slowly and painfully towards politics having exhausted every other possibility (and at a fearful price in innocent blood). It also needs to be recognized that that IRA did not possess the only (or even an effective ) veto on political progress in Northern Ireland, however their actions justified a Unionist veto for longer than it might otherwise have lasted.
This book is written from too convinced a political viewpoint to be an effective biography, and as such I am sorry I read it. A much more effective and convincing book on the evolution of Sinn Fein is `The Secret History of the IRA' by Ed Moloney, Read that instead.