Skeletons in the closet

Britain must publish the truth about Irish presidential candidate Martin McGuinness – before it’s too late

Martin McGuinness is standing for the presidency of a cash-strapped Ireland. Soon after this paragraph is printed he may be among the world’s heads of state. If so he has promised to refuse the €250,000 salary and subsist on the minimum wage. It is ‘high time’, he has stated, that ‘those at the top shared the pain’. That McGuinness has had a lifelong interest in so doing is a point that should not need making. But, like his old colleague Gerry Adams, he is now trying to change history — not the future, but the past — by professing amnesia about his role in many murders over a 30-year period. Shamefully, this country is helping him do this. John Major’s government deliberately withheld the truth about McGuinness. It is time this was put right.

Last February Gerry Adams managed to win a seat in the Irish parliament for Louth.