Presidential race as much about hindsight as vision

How Martin McGuinness would love it if the past really was a different country – but the reality is that the self-confessed IRA man will spend the duration of this Presidential election campaign, answering infinitely more questions about what happened in the past than what might happen, if he were elected, in the future.

Ditto, David Norris, who must have searched long and hard to find legal advice that tied in with his wish to not release any more of these letters seeking mercy for his former boyfriend who had been convicted for the statutory rape of a fifteen year old boy.

We may like to shake off the darker days of our history, but life – and particularly a political one – is the sum total of all of the decisions we’ve made through our days, be it a link to brutal sectarian murder or interventions on behalf of child sex offenders.

We’ve seen Presidential campaigns in the past where candidates were vilified for far less; remember Adi Roche who was targeted on two fronts? One suggested that she wasn’t as nice as she was painted – an accusation that would rule 90 per cent of the population out of any race – and the second damned her by association, because of her brother’s unorthodox departure from the Defence Forces.

The same stick will be used to beat Mary Davis too – she will face question after question over her payments for participation on state boards, because there is very little else to attack her with, given that most of her public profile is down to her work with Special Olympians. 

When the spin meisters kick into action, they can bring their dubious talents to work in a variety of ways – although you wouldn’t need a degree in the dark arts to target the weaknesses that will blight McGuinness and Norris over the next month.

The election campaign was officially one day old when Martin McGuinness was challenged by one of his Northern Ireland executive colleagues to reveal what she claims he knows about the Enniskillen bomb atrocity.

Arlene Foster, the North's trade and industry minister, said there had been speculation for decades that it was the IRA from Derry which was involved in the 1987 bombing which killed eleven people as they gathered at the town's cenotaph.

A day later, an even more damming piece appeared in the Irish Times alleging that McGuinness had a role in luring so-called IRA ‘informer’ Frank Hegarty back to Derry to his death in 1986 – an allegation the Sinn Féin MP vehemently denied.

McGuinness admits IRA membership but claims he left the organisation in 1974 – the only one believing that story appears to be the Deputy First Minister himself.

His history will continue to haunt him until the die is cast at the end of October – and rightly so. Because if, per chance, he were elected, that past would cast a long, dark shadow over his entire term of office.The reality for McGuinness is that – short of announcing that he was indeed the IRA chief of staff – there is little he can about it.

If, hypothetically, he were to acknowledge a role in murders or bombings, he would be subjecting himself to the full rigours of the law. And even if the Good Friday Agreement would ensure he never served a sentence, his position – in southern politics at least – would be utterly untenable.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.