Martin McGuinness personally set up the rendezvous which led to the brutal murder of a suspected IRA informer, the Government was told in 1987.

BreakingNews.ie
29 Dec 2017



Previously secret files in the Department of Foreign Affairs reveal the then Bishop of Derry Edward Daly made the damning claim seven months after the killing of Frank Hegarty.

Bishop Daly said Mr McGuinness normally did not get his "hands dirty" but had run out of henchmen in the city.

Mr Hegarty, a Provo quartermaster in Derry, was abducted from Buncrana, Co Donegal, and shot in the head in May 1986 after he had been lured home with claims he would be safe.

His body was dumped on the side of a border road with his eyes taped.

A typed letter, marked secret, was filed to the Department of Foreign Affairs by an official who had met Bishop Eddie Daly and talked about the execution.

Released under the 30 year rule, it said: "The Bishop understands that, far from using a henchman (as he would ordinarily do), McGuinness personally arranged the rendez-vous with Hegarty from which the latter did not return."

Bishop Daly said the former IRA commander turned peacemaker had been doing "reckless things" at the time.

He said these actions would make Mr McGuinness "vulnerable if he were to come under media scrutiny".

Over the years Mr McGuinness, who died last March, faced repeated questions over the Hegarty murder but always insisted he had "no role whatsoever".

The dead man's family have said the former Deputy First Minister persuaded Mr Hegarty to come home. And Bishop Daly believed them.

It is understood Mr Hegarty fled to England, protected by British intelligence, and is reported to have given information on a dump of IRA arms smuggled from Libya before being lured home.

Bishop Daly said Mr McGuinness assured relatives on a number of occasions that Mr Hegarty would not be harmed.

The Bishop was reported to have said: "McGuinness would usually try to 'keep his own hands clean' in an affairs of this sort but, with the number of Provo volunteers in Derry reduced... by rumours that Hegarty had 'squealed', McGuinness was left in a position for several months last year in which he had to do much of 'the dirty work' on his own."

Bishop Daly said he was certain Mr McGuinness was a Provisional IRA Chief of Staff "at least for the North-West if not for the entire North".

The letter was dated January 22 1987, about seven months after the murder.

It was sent to Dublin and copied to the Tánaiste and the Ambassador in London, as well as the secretary of the Irish Government's Anglo-Irish Secretariat.

It has been reported Mr McGuinness met Mr Hegarty's mother Rose on numerous occasions as he tried to coerce him to return home, including a claim he went down on bended knee.

A sister of Mr Hegarty is also said to have unwittingly driven him to the rendez-vous in Buncrana.

The documents can be read in the 2017/20/17 file from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Martin McGuinness also threatened to hold a dead IRA man's body for a week amid tensions over paramilitary shows of strength at funerals, the state papers have revealed.

He personally delivered the chilling message to Bishop Cahal Daly's secretary as a stand-off ensued over the burial of Larry Marley in Belfast in April 1987.

Marley, the mastermind of the 1983 Maze escape, was shot dead by the UVF in front of his wife and newborn son at their home in Ardoyne.

Amid a huge security operation, his funeral was delayed for three days and there were two failed attempts to bury him as a heavily armed police cordon stepped in each time to stop shots being fired.

At one point during the stand-off Marley's body had to be embalmed for second time while in the family home and the RUC threatened to seize the remains under public health laws.

Documents released from the Department of Foreign Affairs reveal Mr McGuinness issued the warning to the bishop's emissary Fr Hugh Starkey as he mediated between the Marley family and the RUC.

He said McGuinness told Cahal Daly's secretary: "We have the body and will keep it for a week, if necessary, until the Bishop speaks."

The papers claimed Mr McGuinness was smarting over comments made by Bishop of Derry Edward Daly about restricting IRA funerals amid paramilitary shows of strength.

Bishop Edward Daly had raised concerns that he had to say "enough is enough" and feared that if he did not take "strong and dramatic" action that some Provos might be emboldened enough to fire shots inside a church rather than outside.

A Foreign Affairs official said Mr McGuinness wanted to force Bishop Cahal Daly to make a public statement, "preferably a rebuke to the police and sympathy with the predicament of the family".

He noted that the Bishop "wisely refused to be drawn into this trap".

"Bishop Daly's refusal to act according to Sinn Fein's bidding has created a resentment towards the Church in that section of the nationalist community which Fr Starkey hopes will only be temporary," the file said.

Marley's funeral and burial lasted seven hours. A Foreign Affairs official watching the events said it was the "biggest propaganda coup since the 1981 hunger strike".

In the days after the funeral, Cahal Daly, then Bishop of Down and Connor, called on the RUC to rethink its approach to dealing with paramilitary funerals.

The documents also state that Fr Starkey reported suspicions that Marley had been "set up by his own people" as part of an internal Provo feud.

The priest recalled one visit to the Marley home during the stand-off as "unsettling and macabre".

With the coffin in the house, Fr Starkey said prayers while an IRA guard of honour stood by.

The funeral eventually took place with the RUC keeping three feet from the mourners who flanked the coffin.

Fr Starkey told Foreign Affairs he felt he pulled a "master stroke" just before the coffin was taken from the house when he told everyone in the house to get on their knees and recite the rosary.

He said it reminded them it was a religious ceremony not a political event.


- PA

By Conor Humphries | BELFAST
Reuters
21 March 2017



Martin McGuinness, the former Irish Republican Army commander who laid down his arms and turned peacemaker to help end Northern Ireland's 30-year conflict, died on Tuesday after a decade as deputy first minister of the British province.

As a young street fighter in Derry and later as a politician and statesman, McGuinness saw his mission as defending the rights of the Catholic minority against the pro-British Protestants who for decades dominated Northern Ireland.

But for his critics, that cause was never enough to justify the IRA's campaign of bombings and shootings that killed hundreds of British soldiers and civilians.

In his later years McGuinness was hailed as a peacemaker for negotiating the 1998 peace deal, sharing power with his bitterest enemy and shaking hands with the Queen, though the gestures were condemned by some former comrades as treachery.

He was forced to step down in January, a number of months before a planned retirement, because of an undisclosed illness.

At the time a frail and emotional McGuinness told a large group of supporters gathered outside his home in the Bogside area of Northern Ireland's second city that it broke his heart that he had to bow out of politics.

"I don't really care how history assesses me, but I'm very proud of where I've come from," McGuinness told Irish national broadcaster RTE.

He is survived by his wife, Bernadette, and four children.

IRA COMMANDER

Born on May 23, 1950 in Derry, McGuinness in childhood experienced the contempt which many of the pro-British Protestant government had for the Catholic Irish minority who dreamt of joining with the Irish Republic to the south.

A trainee butcher, McGuinness abandoned his apprenticeship in 1970 to join the IRA as the guerrilla group began its 30-year campaign against British rule that Catholics found increasingly intolerable. He swiftly rose to become a senior commander.

McGuinness later admitted he was second-in-command of the IRA in Derry on "Bloody Sunday" - the day in 1972 when British troops in the city killed 14 unarmed marchers, ushering in the most intense phase of the Troubles.

A British government inquiry found McGuinness was probably armed with a sub-machine gun that day, but that he did nothing to justify the troops' decision to open fire on the marchers.

In 1973 he was convicted by the Irish Republic's courts of being an IRA member after being stopped in a car packed with explosives and bullets and was briefly jailed.

Fellow nationalist inmates recall him as a fierce football player in the exercise yard.

He spent years on the run and was banned from entering Britain in 1982, during the IRA's bombing campaign there, under the prevention of terrorism act.

POLITICS AND PEACE

During the 1980s McGuinness emerged alongside Gerry Adams as a key architect in the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political ally, advocating a strategy of combining the use of the ballot box with that of the Armalite rifle.

First elected as a member of the Northern Ireland assembly in 1982, McGuinness played a crucial role in keeping the more militant wing of the IRA on board as elements of the leadership secretly probed the possibility of a negotiated settlement.

Following the IRA's second ceasefire in 1997, McGuinness became Sinn Fein's chief negotiator in peace talks that led to the landmark 1998 Good Friday peace accord.

Nine years later, the rise of Sinn Fein to become Northern Ireland's largest Irish nationalist party allowed McGuinness to become Deputy First Minister in the power-sharing government with bitter enemy Ian Paisley, the firebrand preacher many Catholics see as a key player in the genesis of the conflict.

McGuinness surprised many by forming a close working relationship with Paisley, the media dubbing the pair "the Chuckle Brothers". In 2012 he shook hands with Queen Elizabeth at a charity event in Belfast.

Such gestures alienated many former comrades who call him a traitor for helping to run the province while the Union Jack was still flying over it. McGuinness countered it was a stepping stone to their goal of a united Ireland.

Over the past decade, Sinn Fein has focused much of its resources on the Republic of Ireland, where it has grown from five to 23 seats of the 166-seat parliament in a decade.

A non-smoker, virtual teetotal and keen fisherman, McGuinness briefly moved south in 2011 for a failed run at Ireland's largely ceremonial presidency, wining just under 15 percent of the vote.

McGuinness leaves Northern Ireland at peace and hands over to a new generation with Sinn Fein a major political force across the island, and his dream of a united Ireland inching closer after the party recorded its best ever result in an election three weeks before his death.

(Additional reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Clarence Fernandez)

Suzanne Breen
Newshound
From: Sunday Life - 7 Dec 2014

A former top IRA man has branded Gerry Adams a "mendacious, lying b*****d" while praising Martin McGuinness as "a natural leader whom everybody respected".

But Kieran Conway, who was director of intelligence on the IRA's GHQ (General Headquarters) staff accused both men of "selling out republican goals and implementing British rule".

And, in an interview with Sunday Life, he said the peace deal for which the Provos settled "wasn't worth a drop of anybody's blood".

In his explosive new book, 'Southside Provisional', Conway- who is now a Dublin solicitor – gives an insiders' account of life in the IRA and the leadership figures with whom he rubbed shoulders.

He saw Gerry Adams as a cold, detached personality: "He was someone to whom I never warmed. If you were stuck in a room with him, he tended to flick through a newspaper rather than chat to you.

"Almost single-handedly, he pulled the movement in a certain direction by telling a lot of lies. It's clear now that the path he followed was a sell-out of republican ideals."

Conway – a law student from a middle-class Dublin family – dropped out of college to join the IRA in 1970. He left in 1975 but rejoined after the H-Block hunger-strike, remaining active until 1993.

As well as heading the IRA's intelligence department, he carried out armed robberies in Britain, and ran training camps in the use of firearms and explosives. He also engaged in paramilitary activity along the border and in Derry where he first met Martin McGuinness.

"Martin was a natural leader, a very impressive individual who cut a striking figure. I respected him hugely and looked up to him, everybody did," Conway said.

"There was a prissiness about Martin – he wasn't the sort you'd tell a dirty joke to – but I liked that. He kept a beady eye on our behaviour.

"He insisted on absolute politeness when we were mounting (IRA) roadblocks. We were under strict instructions to always say 'please' and 'thank you'."

Conway wasn't impressed with Provisional IRA founder member and former chief-of-staff, Joe Cahill.

"He couldn't make a decision to save his life. He was tight-fisted with the IRA's money to the point where it endangered volunteers' safety.

"I viewed Joe Cahill as a place seeker and a yes man who held onto power and prestige so long by always voting with the majority.

"In the 1980s and 90s as other veterans died, or followed Republican Sinn Féin, he became a virtual mascot behind whom the leadership could take cover before the older generation and Irish-America."

Conway served three years' imprisonment for arms' possession. In Crumlin Road jail, he knew Denis Donaldson, the Sinn Féin official turned spy who was shot dead in 2006.

"I liked Denis. In jail, he was on the extreme left of the republican movement like myself. I was greatly surprised when he was outed as a British agent. The word in republican circles was that he'd been blackmailed over sexual misbehaviour."

Conway said the Crumlin Road regime was remarkably relaxed with inmates making hooch and drinking smuggled vodka.

The situation got so out of control that Billy McKee, the IRA's prison commander, banned alcohol "after a couple of men were so drunk at our weekly film that they asked the screws to call them a taxi".

On another occasion, McKee – a devout Catholic – had to prohibit Ouija boards and bring in a priest to "decontaminate" cells where prisoners had used them.

"The game was judged a security risk because some prisoners were 'communicating' with dead soldiers who were supposedly naming other prisoners as their killers," Conway said.

As a member of IRA "staff" in Long Kesh, Conway held meetings with the UVF's Gusty Spence and the UDA's Jim Craig.

"I found Spence a pompous bigmouth. I despised his grandiose style. He called himself 'General Spence' and created dramatic situations, upping the ante, before capitulating meek as a lamb.

"I don't understand why the media or loyalists held him up as deep thinker. I'd much more time for Jim Craig. He was a wide boy who used his fists but he was likeable with none of Gusty's pretensions."

Conway left the IRA in December 1993 after Gerry Adams told republicans they could work with the Downing Street Declaration.

"That declaration, the Good Friday Agreement, and the Stormont power-sharing executive – they're not what people killed and died for," Conway said.

"I'm deeply disappointed that Martin McGuinness is Deputy First Minister, helping administer British rule."

(Newshound - 16 Dec 2014)