Martin McGuinness

remember Jefferies, the legendary manager of Linfield, You know, going up and trying out Hurling, for example, preaching a message of, look, cross-community, cross-community, cross-community.

I mean, Peter Robinson, in no time at all, became a very close personal friend of Martin McGuinness and began to talk the language of a secular, civilised, modern society.

before he was destroyed by the Never Never Never Brigade in the DUP and swallowed up.

So there were those opportunities, but they had to be taken then.

And when people started talking at the table about the problem, they started talking about their experience and the difficulties that there have been in relationships.

Martin McGuinness, I remember famously saying, and he said it whenever we were out in Iraq working together on stuff there, he said, you know, when I was 16, But one thing I wanted to be more than anything else was a motor mechanic.

So I went along to a garage nearby

and I said to

And then the devastating thing that he said after that was, I often think to myself, if that guy had given me the job, would I ever have gone on to do the things that I did? By which he meant invent the human bomb, run the IRA campaign, ensure the killing of a whole bunch of people.

And you've got the picture in your mind of this guy in this little garage saying, He has a responsibility for those deaths because he wouldn't give this young guy a job just because he was a Catholic.

So what did that tell us about relationships? It told us that Martin McGuinness didn't go down the road he went because he sat down and examined the political science of it.

He did it because he felt humiliated and disrespected, that he'd been treated unfairly, that there was no way the structures of society were going to allow him to get beyond that.

Brendan O'Carroll and Mrs. Brown's boys win a BAFTA in 2012.

Martin McGuinness and Queen Elizabeth II shake hands.

Katie Taylor's Olympic gold.

Then the lows include Mick Wallace's unpaid VAT bill, the silencing of priests by the Vatican and so on.

In late summer, about six months after the double bomb discovery, I sat in the bar at Vauxhall Barracks with Dooley, Kidman, Fisher, Boyce and others who had worked on the two operations.

It was a wood-panelled room with a blue patent carpet, the wall adorned with regiment photos, and a framed private eye cover of the Queen meeting Martin McGuinness in a bomb disposal suit.

As I pressed for details, they found their recollections blurring.

Was a particular memory from the 14th of January? Or was it the 250kg Plymouth bomb that was found in April outside an Aldi? The one found in June at a business park in Coventry? So much has happened since then, said Boyce.

I'm not really sure.

But it was, the views around my family, we sat directly behind Martin McGuinness and his family, which is

just a coincidence.

So you'd see people, and I think it was for a lot of people, it was obviously you had that social function.

The manager's not really there.

whoever does the commentating for Dice City matches on the radio just sounds identically like Martin McGuinness there you are I don't know who it is it's just the same match

League of Ireland is it aye and they must live

two doors away

Catholic town.

It's funny, and you don't like sort of... you know, sort of times making jokes of the wrong thing, right? But to this day, if my wife meets anybody and they'd say, you know, a certain name, like, you know, Albert, she would joke and say, you would have got a job in the Guildhall.

Was that sort of thing, you know, our people, Martin McGuinness tells the story, applying for, they become a car mechanic.

What school do you go to?

We're seeing quite a lot of them, aren't

we? And the two posts to which you referred, the Children's Hundreds and the North Dead, have seen a mixture of holders of the posts, including, I think, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, former Prime Minister, as Tony Blair certainly was.

All of, I think, the Northern Ireland MPs at one stage were, because all the unionists, because they resigned en masse.

And what happens, just to explain, and it's slightly bizarre, in that... you're appointed to one of these posts and then someone else resigns and they're appointed to post and it's a rolling process whereby these two posts are held by whoever and you can obviously look up if you want to the full list of them all and it is formally the Chancellor Exchequer who nominates people to those posts so Rachel Reeves nominated Keir Starmer to the post and Starmer resigned.