Mick Clifford: Peacemakers Museum offers a distortion of history

John Hume needs no introduction. He was, to the greatest extent, the leader of nationalist Ireland in the North during the Troubles. His SDLP party was always far more popular than Sinn Féin and Derry was an SDLP heartland. Hume was central to the peace process and was duly awarded with David Trimble a Nobel Peace Prize in 1998.

Mitchell McLaughlin was a Sinn Féin politician. He was in various party delegations involved in the peace process. Retrospectively elevating his role to the point where he features in a museum is, by any standards, a little over the top.

That brings us to one of the problems that John Hume’s family have with this museum. The family has issued a statement distancing itself from the project and pointing out issues raised by John’s wife, Pat, in 2021 which were not addressed. These included that the exhibition was not “inclusive” and it features two Sinn Féin politicians along with Hume, despite the SDLP having been the main political force in the city during the period in question.

The museum received public funding, including £1.8m from Northern Ireland’s Executive Office. The office now admits it didn’t carry out “sufficient due diligence” on the project and has apologised to the Hume family and commissioned an independent review on the matter.

All visitors to the facility, and particularly those from outside Derry, will remain completely ignorant of this background.

'Peacemaker' McGuinness

Apart from any of that, portraying McGuinness primarily as a “peacemaker” is to stretch credulity to breaking point.

McGuinness had personal qualities. In the years before the ending of the IRA’s campaign of violence, and particularly after it, he made serious efforts to advance politics and even reconciliation. He showed that he was a politician of substance.

However, there is now no dispute about his status during the conflict as one of the leading figures in the IRA and the effective leader of the group in Derry.

During that time the Provos in Derry undertook some depraved operations. In April 1981, Joanne Mathers, a mother of one, was going door to door to collect census forms when a masked man ran up to her, put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, killing her.

In October 1990, Catholic baker Patsy Gillespie was taken from his home, strapped into a car containing a bomb and told to drive to an army checkpoint or his family would be murdered. He did as he was ordered, the bomb was exploded and he and six solders died.

There were many other operations in McGuinness’s bailiwick in which civilians were treated as pawns in spreading terror. He is reported to have given the go ahead for the murder of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, an operation in which two teenage boys were also murdered.

According to a new book, the potential for McGuinness to become a peacemaker was spotted in the early 1980s by the British Security Services. Four Shots in The Night by Henry Hemming traces McGuinness’s evolution from killing to using exclusively democratic means to pursue his aims. The British, through their network of intelligence agents in the IRA and Sinn Féin, saw that McGuinness and Gerry Adams were men who one day might leave the gun behind.

Thereafter these two figures were to a large extent protected by the British, Hemming writes. They weren’t agents, as some have speculated, but senior elements in the security services wanted to see them kept in place as they were the best bet for the Provos ending their campaign. What this in effect means, in McGuinness’ case, is that he was sending young men and women out to kill and die for a united Ireland which he knew was unattainable, while the British did what they could to ensure he stayed alive and in a position of power.

Four Shots hones in on McGuinness’s role in the killing of Frank Hegarty. Hegarty was recruited as a British agent in 1980 and six years later was whisked out of Derry when it became apparent his cover was blown. While he was away McGuiness repeatedly visited Hegarty’s mother Rose and assured her that her son would be left alone if he returned. He did return and a few weeks later met by appointment senior IRA figures. His body was found on the other side of the border, his eyes taped, gunshot wounds to his head.

Subsequently, MI5 shut down a criminal investigation into McGuinness for the murder as the police honed in on him. The IRA leader had to be protected.

So McGuinness was a peacemaker but he was much more. He was a leader in an organisation that John Hume at one point characterised as those who saw themselves as “keepers of the holy grail of the nation” in which “that deep-seated attitude, married to their method, has all the other hallmarks of the fascist”.

You won’t see that quote in the Peacekeepers Museum, nor other disparaging observations from Hume or his colleagues during the years when the vast majority of the people of Derry were opposed to the campaign of killing for a united Ireland 

You won’t see reference to the debate within the upper echelons of the IRA in the early eighties on whether or not they should murder Hume.

What you get instead is a distortion of history in which a minor figure like Mitchel McLaughlin features prominently in a museum in order to present Sinn Fein as the main drivers for peace.

What intrigues is why the so-called Republican movement insist on these distortions. If they believe, as they claim to, that they were representing the nationalist people, if they believe that the Provos were correct to kill anyone whose death might advance the cause, why not come out and own it? Surely it’s not because they know that any such moral argument was then, and even today remains, entirely bankrupt. Surely it’s not because they know deep down that Hume’s characterisation of their campaign as fascist is far closer to the truth than their benign portrayal of some redundant and savage fight for freedom.

Henry Hemming is this week’s guest on the Mick Clifford podcast