"Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Sinn Fein Ard Fheis speech on lasting peace (Martin McGuinness, 1994)
Evidence:
Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state. (Speech reported in The Independent article published February 28, 1994; no page number verified). The earliest primary-context source I could verify is not a book but a speech by Martin McGuinness during a key debate titled 'Towards a lasting peace' at Sinn Fein's Ard Fheis in Dublin on February 27, 1994. The Independent, in a contemporaneous report dated February 28, 1994, quotes the passage in context: McGuinness said, 'The British government says that for Sinn Fein to be involved in talks the guns must not be at the table, or even in the room. Fair enough, but I think we should go just a little further. Let everyone leave all the guns, British guns and Irish guns, outside the door. Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state.' ([the-independent.com](https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/call-to-drop-unionist-veto-on-irish-unity-sinn-fein-conference-delegates-back-peace-strategy-adams-keeps-ceasefire-option-open-poll-result-challenged-1396971.html)) A second contemporaneous source, Green Left Weekly, published March 9, 1994, presents the same wording while describing it as McGuinness's position coming out of the Ard Fheis, which supports the speech attribution rather than a later quote-compilation source. ([greenleft.org.au](https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/sinn-fein-interview-martin-mcguinness)) I did not find evidence that this line first appeared in a book by McGuinness. Based on the dated sources found, the best-supported conclusion is that the quote was first spoken publicly at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis on February 27, 1994, and first published in a newspaper report on February 28, 1994. |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
McGuinness, Martin. (2026, March 6). Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/lets-leave-beside-them-in-another-pile-all-the-166264/
Chicago Style
McGuinness, Martin. "Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state." FixQuotes. March 6, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/lets-leave-beside-them-in-another-pile-all-the-166264/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state." FixQuotes, 6 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/lets-leave-beside-them-in-another-pile-all-the-166264/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2026.
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