Paul Bew

Monday

Paul Bew

John Hume: a fighter for decent values

From our UK edition

John Hume emerged in 1964 as a modernising voice within the stale and defeated world of Catholic Nationalist politics in Northern Ireland – a world in which the Unionists seemed to hold all the cards, including their relative prosperity on the island of Ireland. His first major intervention was to insist that the credo of Unionism could not be reduced to sectarian bigotry. It was, at that time, a liberating and progressive notion. When the archaic elements of Unionism were exposed by the civil rights movement in 1968-69, Hume emerged as an articulate spokesman for reform. In 1970 the reformist politics of the Civil Rights Movement were displaced by the rise of political violence and the IRA.

Saturday

Paul Bew

And thereby hangs a tale

From our UK edition

The heart sinks when news breaks that an already distinguished novelist is trying his or her hand at the Irish revolution. The track record is uninspiring. Anthony Trollope lived many years in Ireland and knew senior nationalist leaders like Isaac Butt; even so, The Land Leaguers (1882) is very disappointing. Iris Murdoch had deep roots in the Northern Irish middle class; despite, or because, of this The Red and the Green (1965) is again a failure by the standards of middle-period Murdoch. Raymond Queneau’s sado-erotic satire on the Easter Rising, We Always Treat Women Too Well (1947), was perhaps unfairly excluded from the official Gallimard edition of Queneau’s oeuvre until 1962. George V.

Saturday

Paul Bew

Terrorism is back in Northern Ireland

From our UK edition

Even the dissidents have now spawned their own heavily armed dissidents. The bomb defused by army experts at Forkhill this week was the work not of the Real IRA but one of its own breakaway groups, Oglaigh na hEireann. The bomb was bigger than the Real IRA bomb in Omagh which killed unborn twins, six men, 12 women and 11 children. It brings into sharp relief the problems now facing the security services. Another illustration of these problems came last month.

Saturday

Paul Bew

Not the place it used to be

From our UK edition

Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism (1990), but it is fair to say that no previous set of Wiles lectures witnessed the excitement and large audiences attracted by the Carroll Professor of Irish History on his return to his home country. It may be that some of those attending were attracted by the guilty pleasure of seeing Dublin — after so much hectoring the other way — being ‘lectured’ from a Belfast podium.