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BRIAN NELSON

Sir,—Please allow me to congratulate your contributor Ian S. Wood, ‘Brian Nelson—the rise and fall of a double agent’ (HI 31.2, March/April 2023), for managing to write a four-page article on an aspect of the recent Troubles in the six counties without once mentioning the word ‘Protestant’. But then, why would he, when the whole thrust of the piece is to divorce Ulster ‘loyalism’ from its entirely Protestant, sectarian, bigoted raison d’être?

Mr Wood states that Brian Nelson, while being a member of the Protestant UDA/UFF, served a prison sentence ‘for his part in the abduction, brutal beating and torture of a Catholic’—in other words, a Protestant ‘loyalist’ sectarian attack (shortly after which, by the way, the victim died). He continues: ‘This appears to have been no impediment to his later return to an active role in the organisation’. It wasn’t an ‘impediment’ to Nelson being recruited into the FRU either, a British Army unit that reported to the GOC and which paid and allowed him, Nelson, to be implicated in ‘as many as 29 murders, almost all of Catholics uninvolved in the IRA’. Apparently, at Nelson’s trial, he was afforded leniency following a glowing tribute from the CO of the FRU, who claimed that he, Nelson, had saved Catholic lives! One wonders why Nelson hasn’t been canonised and ‘loyalists’ aren’t the go-to source for members of the Swiss Guard?

Mr Wood says that Mr Finucane ‘had important IRA contacts but no operational role’, but that ‘his brutal death has become central to a republican narrative about alleged collusion between loyalists and elements of the security forces’. The assassination of a UUP party member and barrister/law lecturer, Edgar Graham, is described as having been forgotten because of this ‘republican narrative’. Is Mr Wood insinuating that the killing of Mr Finucane was a belated tit-for-tat reprisal for the death of Mr Graham? Or is he saying that, because the PIRA had been infiltrated and was awash with informers (Stakeknife (sic), for example, was an RUC informant before working for the FRU) who were passing information to the RUC and/or the FRU, Mr Graham’s death could have been prevented but wasn’t?

According to Mr Wood, ‘the real victims in this squalid story were ordinary Catholics, whom the IRA never had much success in defending’, a statement that begs the question as to why (and from whom) ‘ordinary’ Catholics needed to be defended in the first place? Was it perhaps against the likes of the RUC, BA, TA, SAS, UDR, UVF, UDA, UFF, LVF, PRF, UPV, UR, RHC, the Shankill Butchers and the Glenanne Gang—all Protestant ‘loyalist’ entities of one hue or another?

In the penultimate paragraph Mr Wood states that republicans ‘lost a war of their own making’, which means that Protestant loyalist sectarian murderers, and their state backers and sponsors, won that war. The most charitable view of this statement is that it is of the ‘Croppies lie down’ type.

In the final paragraph Kitson is alluded to but not mentioned by name, and Protestant ‘loyalism’s’ capacity for ‘autonomous action’ is highlighted. The entirely innocent people of Dublin and Monaghan, and other places in the 26 counties, who experienced Protestant loyalism’s ‘autonomous action’ mass-murder on their streets don’t give a fig (to put it mildly) whether there was alleged collusion in these atrocities; they know that it was the hard-men of Ulster Protestant ‘loyalism’ picking soft targets in ‘a foreign country’.—Yours etc.,

EUGENE HANDLEY
Roscommon