As his supporters mourn Martin McGuinness, I think of the people he mercilessly sent to an early grave. People such as Patsy Gillespie, whom McGuinness turned into a human bomb.
It was soon after midnight on October 24, 1990, that the IRA men arrived at Gillespie's house. That he was a Catholic was irrelevant. Under McGuinness's leadership of the terrorist organisation, the list of '˜legitimate targets' '” those deemed fair game for murder '” had been expanded to include civil servants and anyone working for the security forces or supplying them with services of any kind.
Gillespie's misfortune was to be a 42-year-old cleaner at an Army barracks in Londonderry.
The IRA took his wife Kathleen and their daughter Jennifer hostage, and bundled him away separately. '˜[He] said: 'Everything will be all right, don't worry,' ' Kathleen recalled later. '˜I think I knew then that he wasn't coming back.'
Gillespie was strapped into a van full of explosives and ordered to drive to an Army border checkpoint. When he got there, he tried to escape to warn the soldiers of the bomb, but the IRA had linked a detonation device to the courtesy light that came on in the van when the door opened.
Five soldiers were killed and the largest part of Gillespie left for Kathleen to bury was half a hand.
Conducting Gillespie's funeral, Bishop Edward Daly of Derry said the IRA had '˜crossed a new threshold of evil '¦ Some of them may even still engage in the hypocrisy of coming to church, but their lives and their works proclaim clearly that they follow Satan'.
Practising Catholic though he was, McGuinness was unmoved. Like all fanatics, he was convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Anyone and everyone who got in the way was expendable.
The IRA statement said they did not regard Gillespie as a civilian, but as '˜a part of the British war machine', and McGuinness said that the death was an inevitable consequence of Britain's refusal to accept Ireland's right to self-determination.
No one was ever brought to justice for Patsy Gillespie's murder. But since the Republicans were ambitious to do well in politics at the time, they could not ignore public revulsion.
That is why, reluctantly, McGuinness did not repeat his human bomb experiment. (However, when in 2001 the IRA set up a training camp in Colombia for the FARC guerilla movement, in exchange for a substantial amount of drug money, they taught them about turning humans into '˜proxy bombs' just like poor Patsy.)
This is the Martin McGuinness who is today the subject of glowing tributes as a peacemaker '” a man who insisted he had left the IRA in 1974 even as he was still authorising murders as one of its leaders well into the Nineties.
Anyone speaking ill of him will be labelled a purveyor of hate who is anti-peace '” something I've often been accused of by IRA members, apologists and fellow travellers, including McGuinness himself.
But I'll take that abuse on the chin, for I want the world to know the truth. Martin McGuinness '” a man of ability, certainly, as well as courage and charm '” was a stony-hearted mass murderer, who killed, tortured and destroyed for a futile cause and got away with it.
I met him a few times and can testify to his remarkable ability to convey friendliness with his smile '” as well as menace with his eyes.
Bishop Edward Daly after his retirement described McGuinness as, in many ways, '˜an exemplary man . . . a good father, a good husband, a strong churchgoer . . . my only quarrel with Martin was with the legitimacy and morality of using violence for political purposes'.
The trouble is that it was a very big quarrel. From the early Seventies, McGuinness, his comrade-in-arms, Gerry Adams, and their little group of ruthless fanatics set out to bomb and shoot Unionists into a United Ireland.
In the process they set back any hope of unity for decades, they killed and injured thousands, sowed hate among neighbours and then set about creating a great lie to cover up their past.
Over many decades of writing about Northern Ireland, I have come to know several people who were drawn into terrorism as youngsters. Many later underwent a conversion, but for McGuinness it became a lifelong vocation.
Even when at 66, as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, he was stricken with the debilitating disease that killed him, he was still one of those directing the remnants of the IRA as well as Sinn Fein, their political wing.
Though it suits the self-deluding to claim he opted for peace rather than war in the Nineties for entirely admirable motives, in fact, by then, the IRA had been defeated by a combination of the British Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary and MI5, and its leaders knew the game was up.
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