The Peacemaker With Blood on His Hands.(Brief Article)

He is an elected member of the new Northern Ireland Assembly and the province's [pound]75,000-a-year Education minister. With two office suites and a car and driver at his disposal, the high-school dropout and former butcher's apprentice runs a department with a [pound]1 billion budget and 500 employees. A key figure in the peace process that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, he was always something of an enigma. But last week Martin McGuinness lifted the veil a bit: he was ready to testify at a special hearing, he said, that he had served as an Irish Republican Army leader during the 1972 spasm of violence known as Bloody Sunday. For two decades, says Kevin Toolis, the author of "Rebel Hearts," an authoritative book about the IRA, "there was no living person who was a greater threat to the British State."

McGuinness's revelation shocked no one; the outlines of his terrorist exploits have been known for some time. But his decision to go public is a measure of how profoundly the so-called hard men of the IRA have changed. They began their political lives disdainful of compromise, respecting bullets over ballots. "Put it this way," says Richard English of Queen's University, Belfast. "If 10 years ago McGuinness had been seen in the grounds of Stormont [seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly], someone would have called the police." Now leaders like McGuinness and Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, hold elected office and enforce the peace process they helped give birth to during the 1990s.

McGuinness's conversion from man of violence to man of peace didn't happen overnight. By the early 1970s he was the IRA's second in command in his hometown of Londonderry. He helped plan and carry out a two-year IRA campaign that left more than two dozen members of Britain's security forces dead and the city's Protestant-dominated commercial center devastated. On Bloody Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, soldiers of Britain's Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil-rights march, allegedly believing they were being fired upon, killing 14 Catholics-- and focusing the world's anger on the paras. It would be more than 20 years before any kind of political solution was a real possibility in Northern Ireland. Now a tribunal is trying to determine who fired the first shot.