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Good Morning, Growing up in 1970’s Britain, the IRA were as much a part of the cultural noise as power cuts or the Bay City Rollers. The name was always in the news, and the news was always bad. My stepfather was in the British Army at that time, and did several tours of duty in Northern Ireland at the height of the violence. For my family, news reports had added tension and the IRA was a name I came to fear and loath. I was fourteen when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten, and eighteen soldiers at Warrenpoint the next day. The violence seemed to have this unstoppable momentum. And I remember complaining -will there ever be a day when the news doesn’t contain those three letters or the penetrating sound of an angry Northern Irish accent? Forty years on and the death of Martin McGuinness - a former Provisional IRA chief of staff and initiator of the ‘cutting edge’ violence responsible for these deaths - gives a striking and unexpected answer to that question. For, as his obituary tells us, McGuinness dies not as the terrorist I thought he always would be, but as a former deputy minister of Northern Ireland. A man who was key to brokering the Good Friday Agreement and helping bring a peace that, back in the 1970’s and 80s, seemed about as likely as McGuinness shaking hands with Mountbatten’s niece, The Queen. For whether we like it or loath it, McGuinness’ life-story maps a journey from violence to peace and demonstrates a transformation that is as heartening as it is difficult for some to take. For those directly affected by the violence he once condoned, perhaps he can never be forgiven. But I think that we all struggle with the idea that someone can change, especially when that someone is an enemy; what happens to us when our enemies stop behaving as enemies and change their ways? Does it mean we have to change too? And is that just? Even though we may prefer reconciliation to strife, it’s hard to let go when our identity is bound up in conflict. Whatever we think of the man, McGuiness’s journey echoes a gospel truth that a ministry of reconciliation is impossible if it’s conditional upon our crimes forever being held against us. After all, we only make peace with our enemies. When I asked my step father how he felt about the news of McGuiness’s death, he said his abiding image of him was the photograph of McGuinness laughing with his once bitter enemy, Ian Paisley. ‘I still can’t believe that actually happened, he said.’ ‘And it’s unbelievable to me, even now.’ Thank God we live in a world where such unbelievable things are still possible.