Leadership Quote by Martin McGuinness

A peace process lives or dies on whether symbolism can be made operational, and McGuinness packs both into a single, domestic image: the door. “Let everyone leave all the guns” isn’t just a plea for calm; it’s a demand to relocate power. Guns belong to the street, the barracks, the back rooms of movement politics. The door marks a threshold into something closer to civic normality, where arguments are supposed to be settled by speech, votes, and compromise rather than fear.

The line’s most surgical move is the symmetry: “British guns and Irish guns.” McGuinness, long associated with the IRA before becoming a central architect of negotiation, refuses the moral comfort of one-sided blame. He flattens the hierarchy of legitimacy by putting state weaponry and paramilitary weaponry in the same pile, outside the same door. That’s deliberate provocation, but also an invitation: if each side can see its own weapons named, each side can imagine disarmament as reciprocal rather than surrender.

The subtext is practical politics. “Outside the door” implies a room where the future is being drafted - a negotiating space that can’t function if anyone arrives with the option of coercion tucked under the table. It’s also a message to spoilers: no one gets to keep a private veto enforced by violence.

Contextually, it sits in the Northern Ireland peace effort, when “decommissioning” was both technical and existential. McGuinness frames it not as humiliation, but as a shared act of entering adulthood after decades of armed adolescence.