February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The decision of the Northern Ireland minister of education, Martin McGuinness, to fess up in relation to his role in the Derry IRA in 1972 is to be welcomed. Republicans cannot get away with lecturing others on their responsibility for the tragic events of those years without also behaving like adults and accepting their part in the communal disaster that occurred in Northern Ireland.
Not that the minister will be expected to discourse on the role he and the IRA played in the general violence that engulfed the North in those dark years. His submission to the Saville inquiry, which is looking into the Bloody Sunday massacre, will be specific and focused on what, if anything, his organization — then the Provisional IRA — did on Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972.
This is essential if only because it is needed to dispel the years of doubt about whether there was IRA input into the shootings. Were the killings of the 13 demonstrators that day unprovoked, as most nationalists believed? Or did some errant gunman bring retaliation on the innocent for a pot shot he took? Who better to tell the world what the IRA was actually doing then than one of its leaders?