Leadership Quote by Martin McGuinness

The line reads like a tactical aside, but it’s really a power move: don’t interrogate my side too hard, because your side has blood on its hands too. McGuinness, speaking as a Northern Irish republican politician shaped by the Troubles, is deploying a familiar rhetorical weapon in contested histories - the balancing act. “Let’s leave beside them” isn’t reconciliation language; it’s triage. Put the inconvenient facts in “another pile,” not to be resolved, but to be kept available, like leverage.

The phrasing does two things at once. First, it relativizes wrongdoing. By invoking “all the injustices” in “the northern state,” he refuses a moral court where republicans alone are defendants. Second, it shifts the frame from individual acts to structures: “injustices” suggests systemic bias, discrimination, policing, prisons - the everyday machinery that republicans argued made violence intelligible, if not defensible. That’s the subtext: you can’t isolate bombs and bullets from the state that, in this narrative, incubated them.

Context matters because McGuinness spent his public life translating militant origins into political legitimacy. This kind of sentence is negotiation-speak: it signals to unionists and the British government that equivalence is the price of progress, while reassuring his base that conceding anything won’t become a one-way confession. It also exposes the brittleness of “moving on.” When the past is filed into piles instead of faced head-on, the argument isn’t settled; it’s postponed, with the folders kept close at hand.