As the bomb went off in Manchester, Martin McGuinness, a key leader of Sinn Fein, was in Northern Ireland giving an interview to NEWSWEEK’s London bureau chief, Daniel Pedersen. Predictably, McGuinness blamed British Prime Minister John Major for the IRA’s decision to end its previous ceasefire with a string of bombings that began in London last February. He claimed that Major had ganged up with Irish Prime Minister John Bruton to prevent the nationalists from “taking our place at the [negotiating] table” by demanding that the IRA surrender some of its weapons. McGuinness has been identified several times by British news organizations as a member of the IRA’s ruling council, a secret, seven-member group that decides when to bomb and when to make peace. He has repeatedly denied the charge, and he did so again in his talk with Pedersen. McGuinness said he didn’t want to see any more bombs go off, but he warned about “the gulf of distrust that still exists between the leadership of the IRA and the British government.”
After the interview, as McGuinness walked out into the streets of Londonderry, Pedersen remarked on Ulster’s glorious weather. “It’s a beautiful day for a ceasefire,” he said. McGuinness stopped, wheeled around but said nothing.
The attack followed a pattern. A man with an Irish-sounding accent called a local television station to warn about a bomb in a van outside the mall. The police began to clear people out of the area, and the bomb squad was called in. Before it could be disarmed, the device went off with a great roar, throwing a pregnant woman 15 feet through the air. Scores of people were injured as broken glass rained down. Rounded up on a Saturday afternoon, the usual politicians issued the usual denunciations. “This has nothing to do with Irishness,” lamented Irish President Mary Robinson, who had been Clinton’s guest at a state dinner in the White House two nights before. Gerry Adams said he was saddened by the injuries, but he refused to criticize the IRA for the bombing.
Including Sinn Fein in the peace talks was the only real hope for a quick peace agreement in Northern Ireland. “The central truth is that if these talks are about peace, they might as well not go ahead without Sinn Fein,” said Tim Pat Coogan, an Irish writer and authority on republican politics. But IRA leaders evidently rejected Adams’s hurry-up approach to peacemaking and instead took a longer view of how to achieve their objectives. McGuinness spoke of the “age-old conflict” between the Irish and the British, seeming to imply that the IRA was prepared to let things drag on. Some analysts think the IRA intends to wait until Major and Bruton are out of office; both men are in political trouble and could be gone in a year, possibly to be replaced by governments more congenial to Sinn Fein. If that happens, the IRA might be more inclined to give up some of its guns in exchange for a seat at the bargaining table. Until then, the “hard men” who run the IRA may think it’s a good time to bomb.
