Our Martin. Irish Republican Martin McGuinness

“What politicised me was the civil rights protest. It wasn’t anything I heard in the house, or even in my grandmother’s house in Donegal. There was no republicanism whatsoever in my background.” As a teenager growing up in Derry’s Bogside area in the 1960s, Martin McGuinness quickly became aware of the injustices heaped upon his community by decades of unionist rule since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s. And when people began to campaign for basic civil rights, he saw that they were met by both loyalist and state violence, including killings. This had a profound impact upon the people of the Bogside and the Creggan, including a young Martin McGuinness, and he developed a burning desire to see an end to inequality and injustice. Like many others of his generation, he saw no alternative but to join the IRA.