War & Peace Quote by Martin McGuinness

Power, in McGuinness's telling, isn’t seized so much as administered - carefully, publicly, and with the right paperwork. The sentence has the plainspoken cadence of a man trying to make a revolutionary movement sound like a governing party, which is exactly the point. By foregrounding an "ongoing process" and a formal "decision", he frames Sinn Fein not as a faction improvising its way out of conflict, but as an institution capable of procedure, consultation, and restraint. That bureaucratic language is doing heavy political lifting: it normalizes a party long associated (fairly or not) with the armed struggle and recasts it as a vehicle for civic order.

The "peace commission" is a rhetorical masterstroke because it implies both humility and control. "Receive submissions" suggests listening, but also filters the chaos of popular grievance into something legible and manageable. It’s public input, yes, but on terms set by the organizers. Even more pointed is the phrase "also our opponents". McGuinness doesn’t say "our enemies" or "the other side"; he chooses the vocabulary of democratic competition, not war. That single word offers a quiet promise: disagreement is now meant to be processed, not punished.

Context matters: this is the language of the Northern Irish peace process era, when legitimacy was as crucial as ceasefires. McGuinness is signaling to multiple audiences at once - reassuring skeptics that Sinn Fein can handle peace, reminding supporters that the movement still leads the agenda, and inviting opponents into a new arena where dialogue itself becomes a kind of victory.