I’ve just read an extract (from THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT?) of a review entitled “Failure of Intelligence”
of a book by one Alistair Kerr called “BETRAYAL – The Murder of Robert Nairac G.C. Bew is fulsome in Kerr’s
praise and elsewhere Kerr records that he is “Cock-a-Whoop” about the review, because “Bew is a serious, heavyweight Irish and military historian, and it is an honour for a first-time author to be noticed, let alone reviewed
by the TLS.”
Whoops! Wikipedia gives Bew’s nationality as British.
But I would be more inclined to describe Bew as a flyweight rather than a heavyweight historian or, perhaps a mere gadfly – “an irritating or harassing person.”
I quote the Professor “What is it about the British and their attitude to those who fall in the intelligence war against the IRA? In November 1920 when Michael Collins’s hitmen killed eight British Intelligence agents in Dublin one night, Winston Churchill reacted not with sympathy but in grudging exasperation.”
For a supposed historian specialising in 20th Century Irish History and military history Bew hits a number of bum
notes. In 1920 when Dublin slept under a British Military Curfew the Crown’s “hitmen” struck by night. For example, on the night of 16 September 1920 Captain Jocelyn Lee Hardy and Captain William King murdered
the shopkeeper Peter O’Carroll and on 22 September 1920 British Lieutenant MacMahon, a.k.a “Lt.Angliss”
and Captain G.T.Bagally murdered John Aloyssius Lynch, a Limerick County Councillor and Republican Judge,
in his bed in Dublin’s Royal Exchange Hotel about 100 yards from British Headquarters at Dublin Castle.
At 9.00 AM bright in the morning of Sunday 21 November the Irish Republican Army acting under the authority
of Dail Eireann elected by the Irish people, hit back at the Crown’s “hitmen” in various houses and hotels in Dublin..
They shot dead Lt.MacMahon aka “Angliss”
Captain G.T. Bagally.
Lieutenant Peter Ashmunt Ames
Lieutenant George Bennett
Major Dowling
Captain Leonard Price MC
Lieutenant D.L.McLean
Captain W.F.Newbury
Lieutenant Murray
Colonel Montgomery
Colonel Woodcock D.S.O.
Captain Fitzgerald
Though Captains Hardy and King were on the IRA’s “hit list” they got away.
A more interesting study of Paul Bew’s activities might be into his part in the Boston College Project which has collapsed so acrimoniously.
His former close connections with David Trimble and the UUP would suggest that, if as has been claimed, the idea originally came from him, it is unlikely that any forthcoming information would have been for purely historical purposes.
He certainly seemed to lose interest in the project when it started to go belly-up.
Was he involved, along with the British government, in a fishing exercise?
YES,, and of that there can be no doubt as for Niaric he its alleged was the master of glenarm farm from which he ran a UVF/UDR gang who planted the Dublin monaghan bombs and the murder of the miami showband members along wit numerous other nationalist people it also alleged he had a hand in the kingsmill ambush
Nothing for the British to crow about there but that is if they can ever tell the truth about their dirty war of which Naric played a significant part
Bew was once a member of the WP ,an organisation which one journalist accurately described as “the biggest lie in the history of Irish politics”!