Paul Bew

This article is part of SpinWatch's Northern Ireland Portal.

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. He is a recognised authority on Irish History and politics.

BICO and the Workers Party

In the early 1970s, Bew and fellow historian Henry Patterson were influenced by the British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO) analysis, which argued that the British state could play a progressive role in the conflict. Both were at one time members of the BICO-allied Workers' Association for a Democratic Settlement in Ireland.

The Workers' Party's Eamonn Smullen subsequently invited Patterson to write a section of The Irish Industrial Revolution, and he and Bew eventually both joined the party.

Patterson and Bew were among the speakers at the Worker's Party's 1984 Marx Centenary Conference.

In a 1991 debate with Tomás Mac Giolla in the Workers' Party publication Making Sense, Bew argued that the Easter Rising had been an aberration that allowed the ideas of 'marginal radicals' to hold sway for 40 years:

Of course, the intimate Redmondite involvement in Westminster - which would have survived home rule - is impossible to recreate, but a more relaxed, less charged version of Irish political destiny already exists with Brussels to some degree playing the role Redmond envisaged for London.

David Trimble adviser

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."

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 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

Books

• Land and the National Question in Ireland 1858-82, Gill & Macmillan, 1979.
• The State in Northern Ireland, 1921-72: Political Forces and Social Classes, Manchester University Press, 1979.
• C.S. Parnell, Gill & Macmillan, 1980.
• Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland, 1945-1966, Gill & Macmillan, 1982.
• With Henry Patterson, The British State & the Ulster Crisis, Verso Books, 1985.
• Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890-1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians, Clarendon Press, 1987.
• With Henry Patterson and Ellen Hazelkorn, The Dynamics of Irish Politics, Lawrence & Wishart, 1989.
• With Gordon Gillespie, Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968-93, Gill & Macmillan 1993.
• With Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland, 1921-96: Political Forces and Social Classes, Serif, 1996.
• With Henry Gillespie, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1993-96: A Chronology , Serif, 1996.
• John Redmond, Dundalgan Press, 1996.
• With Henry Patterson and Paul Teague, Between War and Peace: The Political Future of Northern Ireland, Lawrence and Wishart, 1997.
• Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916., Clarendon Press, 1998.
• With Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921 - 2001: Political Power and Social Classes, Serif, 2002.
• Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, Oxford, 2007.
• The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, Liffey Press, 2007.

Affiliations

• Workers' Association for a Democratic Settlement in Ireland - former member
• Workers Party - former member
• Cadogan Group
• Henry Jackson Society