Paul Bew
Paul Anthony Elliott Bew, Baron Bew is professor of Irish politics at the Queen's University of Belfast, a position he has held since 1991.
A native of Belfast, Bew attended Campbell College, Belfast before studying for his Masters and PhD at Cambridge University. He was active in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement, and participated in the 1969 Belfast-Derry march which was attacked by loyalist protestors at Burntollet. A recognised authority on Irish History and politics, Professor Bew was at one time associated with the Workers' Party/Democratic Left (associated in the 1970s with the Official Irish Republican Army). More recently, he was an unofficial adviser to the former Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. Though he has this to say about such labels:
- He rejects his frequent designation as an "adviser" to Trimble. "This is misleading because it does an injustice to the people who are employed as his advisers and also implies regular contact, whereas I sometimes go months without contact." However, he accepts "informal adviser" as a reasonable description of a relationship that has grown from the late 1970s, when Trimble was a member of the interviewing panel that gave him his first job at Queen's. "There were two historians on the panel, but David was the only person who had read something I had recently written about Irish history, and asked a number of penetrating questions." [1]
He is a member of the Cadogan Group, a loosely-organised unionist think-thank. Like Trimble, he is a signatory of the Cambridge neocon think tank the Henry Jackson Society Project for a Democratic Geopolitics.
In February 2007, it was announced by the House of Lords Appointments Commission that he will be made a life peer and will sit as a Crossbencher. His title was gazetted as Baron Bew, of Donegore in the County of Antrim on 26 March 2007.
Publications
- The State in Northern Ireland 1921-72
- Paul Bew. Land and the National Question.
- Paul Bew (1980). Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland: C.S. Parnell.
- Paul Bew. Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890-1910.
- (1997) Between War and Peace: The Political Future of Northern Ireland. (with Henry Patterson and Paul Teague)
- The Dynamics of Irish Politics (with Henry Patterson and Ellen Hazelkorn);
- (1997) Northern Ireland 1921-97: Political Forces and Social Classes.
- Paul Bew (1994). Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916.
- Paul Bew (1996). John Redmond.
Notes
- ^ Paul Bew: Belfast's history man Paul Bew's labour of love is to put the politics of Northern Ireland in its real historical context. Huw Richards met him, The Guardian Tuesday March 9, 2004.
