Martin McGuinness: Peacemaker and poet

He's a poet, a fisherman, a chess-player, a family man described as considerate and thoughtful, somebody who cares about nature and the environment, passionate yet even-tempered.

He enthuses about nature, especially the rugged heaths of Donegal: "Purple-heathered hillsides clothe the peaty bogs, leaching streams of water, swimming pools for frogs." He's good at relationships and a conspicuous success at most things.

But no, this is not some dreamy, liberal luvvy: this is Martin McGuinness, icon of republican militancy. That poem, which is being auctioned this weekend in south Armagh, is dedicated to a republican who was shot dead. From Tuesday, McGuinness will be running Northern Ireland together with the Rev Ian Paisley. Unlikely is far too mild a word to describe this emerging partnership between two lifelong adversaries, the dedicated republican and the staunch loyalist.

Yet last week they astonished Belfast by conducting a news conference together - joking, joshing and exuding large amounts of twinkling geniality. Later they sat side by side in Edinburgh pressing Gordon Brown for more funds. "Martin is a people person," according to one who works closely with him. "People warm to him: they just do. It's early days, but he and Ian Paisley are just getting on with the business. It's astonishing."

The week brought extraordinary displays of an entirely new political tone. Circumstances have brought the two together in scarcely conceivable coalition and - so far at least - their relationship has proved uncannily amicable. Yet it should come as no surprise that McGuinness can forge close ties with people. His relationship with Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein, has proved crucial in persuading their republican movement to shed many outdated practices.

Together they have recast a party, previously hidebound by the past, into Ireland's most pragmatic political outfit. During many tense moments it was the McGuinness reputation for flinty, sea-green incorruptibility that reassured traditionalists Adams was not moving too far, too fast. In the past decade the two republicans forged a key working relationship with Tony Blair, becoming frequent visitors to Downing Street and Chequers. No one suggests complete trust exists, but Blair and the republicans have taken chances with each other.

McGuinness was not always in the business of twinkling geniality, or of making friends and influencing people. He began as a trainee butcher, packing bacon in a Derry butcher's shop. In the early 1970s, when Northern Ireland and Derry exploded into sustained violence, conventional life ended for him and he gave up his job packing bacon in a butcher's shop. He was still a teenager when he turned full-time to guerrilla warfare, rising quickly to a high position within the IRA. His units did a great deal of damage to the city with a campaign that made it look, in the words of one observer, as if it had been bombed from the air.

The British Army in particular had cause to regret his streetfighting skills: it lost more than two dozen soldiers, gunned down on Derry streets. He himself dodged many bullets, once admitting that he had been "fired at by the British army on countless occasions over 20 years". He also managed to avoid a determined loyalist assassin who was intent on killing him. He was good at evading the law, serving just two short prison sentences. He often, however, saw the inside of police interrogation centres, fending off detectives determined to make him crack.

He was high in the IRA from an early age, and was only 22 when the Government smuggled him and other republicans over to Chelsea for secret talks. The meeting was unproductive, the authorities saying he and other IRA leaders had presented "impossible demands and absurd ultimatums".

Many years went by without McGuinness budging, and with the IRA fighting its long war, the death toll mounted. Sinn Fein made limited political progress, but remained outcasts as IRA violence went on. McGuinness remained adamant that any ceasefire would be seized on by Britain as a sign of weakness. He once declared that no section of the republican movement "believes that the freedom of Ireland can be won only through political involvement in constitutional politics or in elections".

This was back in the days when Ian Paisley was fighting elections holding a sledgehammer under the slogan "Smash Sinn Fein". But that was then, this is now: today Paisley has no sledgehammer. McGuinness has no IRA any more, and is comm- ited to the idea that the freedom of Ireland can be achieved without it. Somewhere over the years he morphed from the icon of militarism into the politician of today who has been seasoned by meetings with British, Irish and American representatives.

Republicans retained their faith in his integrity and apparent refusal to compromise, but as time passed both he and they got deeper into politics, the business of negotiation, and give and take. It has brought him to this once inconceivable point where he will be No 2 in government. But no one believes he cares about reaching office for its own sake, or making money, or that he has given up on the republican goal of a united Ireland.

Life is hectic for him. About to become a senior minister, he is a Westminster MP, a member of the Belfast Assembly, and his party's chief negotiator. He is also spending much time in the south of Ireland where he is canvassing in the general election. In a previous Stormont administration he was regarded as the best of the 10 departmental ministers, impressing officials and political rivals alike with his performance as education minister. "He was the best of the lot," said a Unionist opponent.

The surprise at his success in the education brief was all the greater since, like Adams, he left school at an early age, without much education. His schedule leaves him with little time for fishing or chess, and little enough time with four children and five grandchildren. While his verse may not rival that of Seamus Heaney, he has shown versatility, proving proficient in IRA activities, politics, negotiation and now high public office.

His last spell in government did not last long, falling apart because of IRA misbehaviour. But now the organisation he once helped to lead seems to have gone away, with republicans now prepared to rely on McGuinness's political skills rather than his military prowess. When it became clear that a McGuinness-Paisley partnership was in prospect it was said it would be "a battle a day". But they are conducting themselves with good humour, without rancour.

Last week Paisley declared: "We have many problems but we are seeing a light and are directing our footsteps towards not just sunlight but I trust full sunshine." If this new rhetoric is any reflection of reality then the remarkable career of Martin McGuinness is about to enter yet another new phase, this time in a transformed political scene.