Terrorism: Glorification

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, for securing this important debate. I am well aware of her intense personal interest and, to be frank, at times her suffering on account of terrorism in Northern Ireland. I am very grateful to her for securing this debate. I am also delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, will be replying. He was a distinguished Minister in Northern Ireland. It is now, I think, 15 years or so since he was a Minister, and I am interested in reflecting on how he sees the evolution of this question of the public perception of the glorification of terrorism—how he thinks things have happened, whether he is surprised or whether it is pretty much what he was expecting when he was a Minister.

I was a civil rights marcher and I speak from the point of view of John Hume. There is no grievance in Northern Ireland that was worth the loss of a single life. Even more importantly, in terms of political structures, these were all clearly, essentially in place in the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement. There was absolutely no need for the thousands of lives that were lost. The largest single purveyor of death was the Provisional IRA in this period by some way, although there is a dreadful record of loyalist crime, and there were also instances where the British state forces let themselves down. But there is no question about who the largest purveyor of death was.

In recent times, there have been a number of cultural phenomena that tend to recreate and glorify that campaign. The most obvious example is the phenomena around the group Kneecap and their very successful film. The Sunday Times and the BBC—all these official organs of our culture—celebrate Kneecap and their work.

I cite the verdict of Professor Liam Kennedy from Tipperary—an old colleague of mine at Queens. What he says, and with some acuity, in his review of Kneecap’s film, is that

“in subtle ways … Kneecap serves to validate the Provisionals’ murderous assaults on their … neighbours and the British state”

and validates the idea that the decades of terror were

“inevitable and necessary, the last recourse of an historically oppressed people suffering from intergenerational trauma”.

I should say something else about my friend Professor Kennedy. More than any other academic in Belfast—I suspect that the Minister remembers this—he cared about the fate of those who were actually kneecapped in east Belfast in large numbers by the Provisional IRA. Nobody put themselves more at risk in speaking out against these crimes.

There is also the poem “The Knee” from this era by Ciaran Carson. I will read only the last section, which describes a kneecapping:

“It seems he was a hood, whatever, or the lads were just being careful.

Two and two were put together; what they added up to wasn’t five.

Visiting time: he takes his thirteen-month-old son on his other knee.

Learning to walk, he suddenly throws himself into the staggering,

Distance between his father and his father’s father, hands held up high,

His legs like the hands of a clock, one trying to catch up on the other”.

This is the cruelty which is now apparently a subject for critical acclaim in our mainstream media. This is why we are disturbed about the glorification of terrorism.

We have all made concessions, and the Minister was particularly important in defending the achievements of the Good Friday agreement when he was a Minister. But, as I say, I speak as somebody who was a civil rights marcher and who has never changed my mind on John Hume’s dictum that there is not a single political failing in Northern Ireland that justified or even began to justify the loss of a single life. But, somehow, Hume’s wisdom seems to be eroding now, and that is what is so worrying.