The Methodist minister who helped oversee the decommissioning of IRA weapons has described how an initial, forthright meeting with Martin McGuinness developed into a warm and lasing friendship.
Rev Harold Good, who along with Fr Alec Reid played a key role in the talks that led to decommissioning, said from their first encounter he knew Mr McGuinness was a ‘man who meant business’.
He also recalled his last meeting with Mr McGuinness shortly before his death in March 2017.
“I was very much friends with Martin McGuinness,” Rev Good told the BBC’s Sunday Politics.
“We became very close. It went beyond respect. It was a friendship, right up until shortly before he passed away from us when I went to visit him in his home.
“I was there as a friend, welcomed as a friend. We held each other, and it was in sorrow and grief. We knew it would be the last time that we would be together. It was very poignant for us both.”
Rev Good said his relationship with Mr McGuinness had been fostered from their very first meeting.
“For that first meeting we, the Methodist Council on Social Responsibility, a very small group of us, went to meet Martin McGuinness in his little office in a house above the Bogside,” he continued.
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“We went there with our strong, strong points that we wanted to put before him.
“He meticulously wrote down every question we asked him and answered them in such a way that we came out of that meeting thinking ‘you know, that guy means business’. We knew we would have to have further conversations with him.
“He clearly understood where we were coming from and we began to understand where he was coming from. That was the beginning of a very important journey with Martin.”
Rev Good has documented his own journey in a new book, In Good Time, and said that three decades on from the loyalist ceasefire, it remains vital that talks continue with those who remain reluctant to transition.
“Loyalism is a very broad spectrum,” he said.
“All I can say is that I have worked closely with some elements from within loyalism who in my view are totally committed in working towards resolving some of the issues, with parades and bonfires. I do hope they will show they are fully committed to transitioning from where they were and some of them still are.
“It’s going to be a challenge to bring them all on that journey.
“There are some who won’t want to, just as there are dissidents on the republican side, there are dissidents on the loyalist side who don’t have a commitment to a new way of living and sharing this place together.
“It will take much longer for us all to be in the place we’d like to be, and longer still for everybody to be in the place where we would like them to be.
“But we have to keep working on that and not give up on each other, still challenge each other. That’s why I don’t subscribe to the notion that we should not talk, even to those loyalists who are outside of the commitment to transition. We need to talk to everybody to try and bring them all.
“To leave anybody behind on any journey means we’re never going to arrive where we’d wish to be.”
In his memoir, Rev Good revealed that during the decommissioning process he helped facilitate secret meetings between the leaderships of Sinn Fein and the DUP around his kitchen table.
“In those days the ‘no no’ was to talk to anybody who was seen to be your opponent,” he said. “It was not considered okay to talk across the barriers.
“But some of us realised the only way forward was to begin to build some kind of engagement.
“I was never fearful, I knew there would be criticism, but we can all live with criticism. If you’re not getting criticism you’re wondering if you’re doing anything worthwhile at all.”
Rev Good said his time as director with the Corrymeela peace and reconciliation organisation in the early 2000s was key to the fostering of new relationships.
“One of the things we could offer was a safe space where people from all sorts of backgrounds could come together and speak openly and honestly, not be observed and build some kind of trust and relationship,” he said.
“We realised that we had to try and find some way of getting people to engage with each other.”