Our Martin Irish Republican Martin McGuinness

"What politicised me was the civil rights protest. It wasn't anything I heard in the house, or even in my grandmother's house in Donegal. There was no republicanism whatsoever in my background."

After ten years as deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness resigned in the face of 'the most crude and crass bigotry' within elements of political unionism. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement were becoming unworkable. Even so, he never lost sight of the importance of national reconciliation and, to the very end, he remained committed to healing the divisions of the past.