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25 January 2001 Edition

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An Irishman in Berlin

Mr. Bewley in Berlin: Aspects of the career of an Irish Diplomat, 1933-1939

By Andreas Roth

Four Courts Press.

Book reviews for me generally fall into three categories. One lets you know why you should rush out and get a book. The reviewer knows that just about anyone will love this or that book. It is well written, original, and has popular appeal - in the opinion of the reviewer. Then there are other reviews, where the reviewer is fairly certain that most people won't go and get the book, but it is useful to know what the book contains, because one day, you might want to fish it out. Then, of course, there are the stinkers, so bad that the humble reviewer feels obliged to wave the red flags of warning.

This book review is of the second variety. It is a political biography written by an academic about a member of the Irish diplomatic corps in the early decades of the Free State. I would consider it a valuable addition to any decent course on Irish-German history. It is excellently referenced, indeed the footnotes sometimes dominate the page.

The book deals with the life and times of Charles Henry Bewley. Born into a Dublin Quaker family, his education was English, educated at Winchester and New College Oxford. He was ``called to the bar'' in 1914. During the Tan War he defended republican prisoners and was active in the Sinn Féin court. He took the Pro-Treaty side in the Civil war and prosecuted IRA prisoners on behalf of the fledgling Free State. Between the truce and the ending of the Civil War, Bewley had actually been in Berlin, where he was appointed consul with special responsibility for mutual trade.

Bewley was clear that he saw his future career in the diplomatic service and not in the courts. He spoke German fluently and was clearly drawn to the place - especially its darker side. He was openly anti-Semitic and pushed this line.

The book's strength is in detailing the attitudes of the various European states to the new polity in Dublin. The Weimar Republic, for example, was wary of dealing with the Irish for fear of antagonising the British. Bewley was eventually dismissed by the Free State in 1939 as a loose cannon that they could ill afford to be representing them in Germany. He stayed on in Germany and Roth details the clandestine propaganda and intelligence work Bewley did for the Nazis. He applied for a salaried position with the SS security service the Sicherheitsdienst, but was refused.

Roth states in his conclusion that had the Germans trusted Bewley then he could have been an important asset to them. He correctly assessed that de Valera would be neutral in favour of the Allies and this the Germans did not believe.

BY MICK DERRIG


Biased, unenlightening, lightweight



A farewell to arms? From `long war' to long peace in Northern Ireland

Edited by Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen,

Manchester University Press

£16.99

Perhaps the best that can be said about this substantial volume - undoubtedly intended for students and other academics - is that it is useful, particularly in respect of the appendices. The editors have assumed no prior knowledge on the part of their readers, and every major document of the peace process is included, beginning in 1992 with Sinn Féin's `Towards a Lasting Peace' (although only the brief section on Armed Struggle) through a complete copy of the Good Friday Agreement, up to Senator George Mitchell's statement concluding his review of the process in November 1999.

As for the rest, Cox, Guelke and Stephen have gathered together an august body of academics, a few politicians and heads of various community and social projects to consider the context, negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, its social and economic effects and the international dimension of the peace process. The contributors cover almost the whole range of political opinion; Paul Bew and Aurther Aughey offer a unionist perspective, Martin Mansergh writes on behalf of Fianna Fáil, Sean Farren for the SDLP and Kate Fearon for the Women's Coalition. Amazingly, in a 350-page, 22-chapter volume, no space could be found for a first-hand republican analysis of the peace process, a bizarre and inexcusable omission.

As with the appendices, most contributions fall into the useful rather than enlightening category, although one or two essays do offer occasionally interesting insights. Authur Aughey, for example, in `The 1998 Agreement: Unionist Responses', remarks: ``Criticism of anti-Agreement unionists for having `no alternative' met the initial response that the alternative to a bad deal is simply to say no. That disposition, of course, has a respectable historical lineage in unionist politics.'' He then goes further with this implausible claim that unionist intransigence is somehow honorable, insisting that the sneering anti-Agreement idiocy of the likes of Peter Robinson and Robert McCartney represents ``respectable arguments'' which are ``not lightly to be dismissed''.

Marie Smyth, in ``The human consequences of armed conflict'' makes some shrewd observations about the nature of victimhood and the way in which victims are placed on a pre-determined scale of suffering by the media and, by extension, large sections of society. Victims who conform to specific and very rigidly applied criteria, she writes, ``are often held up to us, implicitly or explicitly, to point to some higher state that we should strive for, some feat of self-transformation that we should attempt to achieve. Their stories lead us to marvel at the resilience of the human spirit, and perhaps see something of ourselves in them''. Using L M Thomas' analysis of Holocaust survivors and the experience of African Americans, she explains how individuals become, or are intended to become, ``moral beacons'' to the rest of us and she cites Gordon Wilson as an example of such a ``moral beacon''.

But, as Smyth goes on to point out, suffering loss is not in itself a ``sufficient qualification for such a role - The suffering must be recognized as `undeserved' according to dominant values''. However, whilst listing some of those who would fall outside the recognised categories of suffering - prisoners' partners for example, at no point does Smyth acknowledge that victims of state violence and their families are wholly undeserving of the suffering that is heaped upon them.


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