Leadership Quote by Martin McGuinness

A single sentence that tries to reorder a room before anyone even sits down. Martin McGuinness isn’t asking for polite inclusion; he’s setting the terms of legitimacy. “Let us walk” is deliberately collective, a pronoun that turns a personal grievance into a communal mandate. The verb matters too: walk, not enter, not attend. It signals agency and self-possession, the idea that dignity is carried in on your own feet, not granted at the door.

The conference room is doing heavy symbolic work. It’s the clean, procedural space where conflicts are supposedly translated into agendas, minutes, and outcomes. For a figure shaped by Northern Ireland’s long argument over sovereignty, identity, and power, that room is never neutral. It’s a stage where who gets treated as a “partner” versus a “problem” decides what kind of peace is even imaginable.

“Equals” lands as both aspiration and warning. The line implies prior negotiations where Irish nationalists and republicans were expected to be compliant, grateful, or quietly subordinate - tolerated, but not respected. “Second class citizens” reaches beyond the table to the lived history of discrimination that made constitutional talk feel like theater to many people. McGuinness is folding that historical charge into a simple demand: no settlement built on humiliation will hold.

The intent, then, is tactical as much as moral. He’s preempting the oldest trick in political process: invite the other side to talk, then treat them as guests in their own future.