Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Like most of my colleagues, I look back over the past ten or 15 days as very black days in Ireland. My condolences go to all. I will have more to say tomorrow on an article in one of today's newspapers by Ger Aherne, a former general in the Irish Army.

A week after I was elected to the Seanad, I got a letter from a garda recounting for me the events that led to me leaving the British Army in 1974. My mother and father were put through an horrendous time with phone calls at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. telling them I had been shot or was going to be shot. There were all sorts of threats. They are a matter of public record.When I was elected, the media made a big deal of the fact that 11 Sinn Féin votes elected me.

Looking back over those 40 years, I note how far we have come, how far Martin McGuinness brought this country; how close he brought this country to full peace. I cannot let Martin McGuinness be passed over as an irrelevancy by anybody and nobody in this room or in politics has done that, thank God. There have been one or two serious attacks on him. Martin McGuinness brought us to a level of peace that many of us in this room could never have imagined. I sometimes wonder if we have been brought as far down the peace route in the Republic as they have in the North of Ireland.

I cannot begin to understand what it took for Martin McGuinness to cross the road and shake the hand of one of the most vile people who ever walked this planet, that is, Ian Paisley, but Ian Paisley also crossed that road, and between the two of them, they brought peace to Northern Ireland.

I am deeply grateful that this world had a Martin McGuinness, I am deeply grateful that he commenced the peace process. I pray to God he rests in peace alongside Ian Paisley but I pray to God more that the people who are left behind will continue on the legacy. We must move to a point of constitutional legality for everybody and one should remember the people who founded this State also were once regarded as terrorists.