Political Celebrity Martin McGuinness

James Martin Pacelli McGuinness played a leading role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and subsequently became Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister (2011 -2017). A senior Republican politician who as a teenager in Londonderry’s Bogside, was fully aware of his proud Irish Identity and the intrinsic belief that the Island of Ireland would one day become one. He was a visionary in every sense of the word, with teenage stamina and an astute awareness of the existence of two major identities living in Northern Ireland. His thinking patterns were very precocious even at that early age, as an uneducated schoolboy struggling to pass the 11 plus examination to grammar school, but like thousands of other children was unsuccessful. Brought up as a Roman Catholic in his Bogside neighbourhood Martin would have been seen as a conformist to religious ideological beliefs in God. In his early adolescence, he would like his peers, have been in a state of identity moratorium facing.