MARTIN McGuinness’s resignation letter had a quirky opening: the address of ‘Robin a chara’ to DUP speaker Robin Newton, whose resignation is at least as necessary as for party leader Arlene Foster to stand down.
McGuinness’s time as a leading politician has been marked by sure-footedness as well as what mostly looked like effortless, instinctive personability.
The omission of any reference to his own health in his letter might have looked like an uncharacteristic mis-step but the sureness was back in front of the TV cameras.
Despite obvious frailty he delivered crisp answers. The voice was diminished, not brain or determination.
Foster’s political weakness, merely pointed up by macho posturing, ironically also highlighted the skills of her disregarded job-sharer.
Though it stuck in many craws to admit it initially and could never have converted some, the man known first as an IRA leader of clinical ruthlessness became an able front-of-house performer.
Small wonder the personability wore out. Even without a medical problem or the checkmate over the RHI scandal, Sinn Féin’s best northern performer by some distance has carried too much expectation for too long.
His departure ahead of Gerry Adams, now an uncertain performer who does more harm than good, is a blow to the party.
Their collective leadership may have insisted that to emphasise the political crisis he omit any personal reference, though it may be a personal choice.
Acknowledgement of his health problems as a secondary reason for resignation would have let McGuinness leave with a grace, and strength, that he showed at his best.
Foster has rarely missed an opportunity to sketch in McGuinness’s past by mentioning the IRA attacks on her father and her school bus driver.
Almost incidentally in one of her recent performances, she referred to his health not only without any pretence of sympathy but as allegedly the cause of Sinn Féin internal jockeying, and thence their pressure on her.
He has earned sympathy and respect in part because of his opponent but of his own volition.
The moment when he stood beside chief constable Sir Hugh Orde and Foster’s predecessor Peter Robinson on the Stormont steps to call dissident killers “traitors” damned him in dissident hearts.
For the history books it redeployed to good purpose the steel for which he was once renowned.
Cooperating with Arlene Foster would have been difficult enough.
Supposedly sharing a job and title with her meant being up close to a practitioner of inflexible self-righteousness who refused to work the structures agreed in 1998, even as modified to hook in DUP founder Ian Paisley. Martin McGuinness served a hard last sentence.
Watch: who is Martin McGuinness?
