War & Peace Quote by Martin McGuinness

McGuinness is pushing back against a convenient story the British and Irish establishments often preferred: that the Northern Ireland conflict could be “solved” by getting guns off the table. By calling it “a mistake to reduce” the peace process to decommissioning, he’s arguing that disarmament is not the peace itself, just one visible metric that can be demanded, televised, and policed. It’s a line aimed at an audience addicted to proof of progress, and it quietly indicts that appetite as shallow.

The wording matters. “Reduce” frames the decommissioning obsession as a kind of political downgrade, a narrowing that lets deeper issues escape scrutiny. “Always” adds a historical rebuke: this isn’t a temporary misunderstanding, it’s a persistent bad faith habit. And “process” does double work. Decommissioning is presented as a mechanical checklist; peace is a messy, human negotiation about legitimacy, identity, policing, prisoners, and power-sharing. McGuinness wants the frame widened back to those fundamentals.

Context sharpens the intent. As Sinn Fein’s leading negotiator and later Deputy First Minister, McGuinness was regularly pressured to deliver IRA decommissioning as a precondition for political movement. Unionists and British governments could treat it as a moral test and a bargaining chip; republicans could experience it as humiliation if detached from reciprocal change. His line is a tactical defense, but also a philosophical one: peace in Northern Ireland was never going to be secured by symbolic surrender alone. It would be secured by redesigning the state so fewer people felt they needed weapons in the first place.