Ulster's A.J.P. Taylor gets his just reward

Paul Bew is regarded in No. 10 as the most influential thinker in 'the island of Ireland'. Dean Godson pays tribute to a remarkable historian who has been elevated to the peerage Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots' successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen's University Belfast, had been elevated to the peerage. Far from being the cue for an orgy of resentment, the news was greeted with almost universal pleasure.

Until 15 years ago, Bew was an obscure Marxist historian at a provincial university. Today, he is the A.J.P. Taylor of the Northern Ireland peace process. He has become well-nigh ubiquitous on the airwaves and in the corridors of power — on both sides of the Irish Sea. Above all, he was the key supporter in academe of the former Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. As a senior No. 10 official told The Spectator, 'He is, quite simply, the most influential academic in the affairs of the island of Ireland today.'

Bew has taught almost everyone in Ulster, from Ian Paisley Jr to the former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre, editor of the Blanket and one of Gerry Adams's most articulate critics within republicanism. They all respect him for his impartiality — another remarkable achievement for one so politically committed. With his unique admixture of innocence and cunning, no one knows better how to charm the serpents in the Queen's snake-pit.

Henry Patterson, Bew's main academic collaborator, observes that one of the keys to understanding his success lies in his background as the product of a mixed marriage: very few specialists in Northern Ireland have an equally strong grasp of the political dynamics of Belfast, Dublin and London.

Bew was born in Belfast in 1950 to a northern Protestant father and a southern Catholic mother from Co. Cork. Through his schooling at Campbell College, Belfast, he came to know the Unionist upper-middle classes — and rebelled against the mores of that hearty breed. Maternal family connections in the Republic bequeathed Bew a feel for the 'national bourgeoisie' — the ruthless but ultimately conservative force behind the drive for independent Irish statehood. His grandfather had been at school with de Valera; he is a kinsman of the Kents of Fermoy, the only Cork martyrs of the Easter Rising.

Bew's years at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania introduced him to the calculations of the great metropolitan powers that so affected Ulster. A key feature of his pitilessly realistic outlook has been the contention that Ulster was never in control of its destiny, at least in the way that Unionist mythology would have it. But impatient as he was with Provincial delusions, he always returned home — unlike so many of Ulster's 'best and brightest'.

Bew deviated from the Unionist middle classes in another key respect: he did not opt out of politics. He joined the Northern Ireland Labour Party Young Socialists while at school and was swept along with the demands of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement for equal rights for Catholics. This brought him into contact with fellow young radicals such as Michael Farrell: among their first joint activities was a projected hairdressers' strike in Belfast.

Bew soon joined Farrell in People's Democracy, which sought to emulate the 'freedom rides' of the American civil rights movement. It burst on to the world scene in 1969, when its march from Belfast to Deny was violently ambushed by Loyalists at Burntollet in rural Co. Londonderry. Bew and his Campbell College and Cambridge contemporary, Bruce Anderson, then in his Trotskyist phase, escaped largely unscathed. 'God looks after fools and public schoolboys in these situations,' he quips. Later, he cut the leaflets produced by the PDs in support of the Ballymurphy riots and appeared in numerous security-force files of the period.

The explosion of atavistic violence on both sides caused Bew to reassess simplistic narratives blaming the crisis exclusively on British imperialism and Protestant reaction. Bew now had a choice: either to join the Provisionals, which had recently split from the Official IRA (Stickies'), or pull out altogether.

Bew pulled out — but joined the Workers' party, the political wing of the Stickies. The former was then weaning the latter off armed struggle: what chance of building a united, socialist Ireland on a heap of Protestant corpses? Bew duly became a supporter of the most far-sighted wing of the Workers' party, led by the head of its industrial section, Eamonn Smullen, and his dashing lieutenant, Eoghan Harris.

One of the key themes of Bew's academic work — as expressed in Land and the National Question in Ireland (1978) — is that oppression in Irish history was as much the consequence of capitalistic class interests as of British malignancy. Thus, the Famine would have taken place even if Ireland had been independent. Yes, there were victims — but the context of that `victimhood' had to be properly understood if it was not to be employed to justify brutal sectarian retribution.

Bew's opinion of the Unionists improved over time: from what he had seen in 1969, he could not have anticipated that they would withstand the ferocious onslaught with relative restraint. But after the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which accorded the Republic a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time, he also believed that the Unionists had to engage more closely with pro-Union forces in Great Britain.

Trimble, the quirky intellectual who was elected UUP leader in 1995 (and a former colleague at Queen's) answered Bew's prayers. Trimble had decided to do a deal with nationalist Ireland anyhow, but Bew lent his grand strategy a certain intellectual panache. He became a key conduit to No. 10, reassuring them of the seriousness of Trimble's wish to strike an accord.

Bew identified a vast, apolitical middle ground of pro-British opinion — neither the ultra-liberal pro-Agreement fanatics who backed the Alliance party, nor the dyed-inthe-wool reactionaries of the Orange Order. Rather, he dubbed this third grouping `the Prod in the Garden Centre'.

Bew sought to maintain Trimble's credibility with them. When Trimble entered government for the first time with Sinn Fein in 1999, he did so on the basis of a 'post-dated cheque': he would resign if the IRA had not begun to decommission its arsenal. The idea was Bew's. He urged that the exercise be repeated in 2001. Bew was disappointed in Blair for not 'minding' the Trimble project when the Prime Minister ditched the moderates and succumbed to the attractions of a DUP-Sinn Fein pact.

Bew's peerage comes too late to save the centre ground, but as one senior official observes, it does at least make good a 'debt of honour' to the man himself. Once again, his significance is mainly academic. Later this year, he will publish his magnum opus Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 in OUP's Oxford History of Modern Europe series. It is 'a meditation upon the Union' — and, above all, of the handling of Catholic emancipation. The rise of political Islam has placed the issue of how to integrate a large, discontented religious minority firmly back on the agenda. We may all be in need of one of his history lessons now.

Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange.