What the papers say: Why we shouldn’t mourn Martin McGuinness

Martin McGuinness’s death has sparked a wave of fawning and fury in the obituaries. So: ‘man of war’, peacemaker or something in between? The Sun’s verdict is clear: the ‘pious praise’ for McGuinness is nothing short of ‘revolting’. It’s true, the paper says, that the ‘second part’ of his life differed from his early days. And it’s also the case that McGuinness ‘risked his own neck’ to help bring peace in the end. But to hear the likes of Tony Blair play down McGuinness’s role as an IRA commander ‘turns the stomach’. McGuinness might have fancied himself as a ‘folk hero’, but there was ‘nothing noble about this “struggle’, says the Sun. We mustn’t forget the truth about McGuinness: ‘He was a vicious, merciless killer who wanted to unite Ireland under a hard-left government by force’. And for a generation of people in Northern Ireland, McGuinness brought nothing more than ‘daily carnage, terror, kidnappings, torture and punishment beatings’, the Sun says.