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BRIAN NELSON

Sir,—Eugene Handley’s letter (HI 31.3, May/June 2023) makes for some confusing reading. He castigates me for never using the word ‘Protestant’ in my article ‘Brian Nelson—the rise and fall of a double agent’ in the previous issue. I admit that it did not occur to me that History Ireland’s readers would need reminding that Ulster Loyalist paramilitaries were Protestants, or at least products of a Protestant community. I preferred the word ‘Loyalist’ because, as has often been said, Loyalism is simply working-class unionism.

He equates Loyalism with nothing more than sectarian bigotry. In fact, it’s part of a much more complex phenomenon than he allows for. I tried to show in my book Crimes of loyalty how an innately decent working-class Protestant community was twisted out of shape and driven to awful violence by the onset of the Troubles and what it saw as a war against it, and all its values, by the PIRA.

Brian Nelson was a deeply flawed and nasty bit of work. I’ve never thought otherwise, and he might well have been a dangerous misfit in a normal society. The Black Watch called for his dismissal from the army after just one year with them, not five, perhaps a decision to that regiment’s credit. Neither have I believed in the defence in court offered for him in 1992 by the Force Research Unit’s commanding officer.

Some of Mr Handley’s claims tie in with points made by Margaret Urwin in her critique of my article published in this issue (HI 31.4, July/August 2023, pp 48–51). It’s strange, though, to state that victims (he must mean their families and survivors) of Loyalist terror in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 don’t ‘give a fig’ about alleged British state collusion. Surely the Justice for the Forgotten campaign’s Margaret Urwin and others who speak for it are very much concerned with this.

Margaret Urwin is a major player in the ongoing debate about collusion, but she is wrong to imply that I see it as ‘a figment of Irish republican imagination’. I have never said that, but I have argued, and still do, that it was not a major factor in the outcome of Northern Ireland’s war. She asks, ‘Why do we need a lot of dead Provos to prove collusion?’, but it was always Provos that the security forces wanted killed, or preferably arrested and convicted, rather than innocent Catholics. Yes, there were victims of state violence among them, as in Ballymurphy in 1971 and on Bloody Sunday in 1972, which the British state has belatedly admitted. For all their rhetoric about defending Catholics, the PIRA had little ability to protect them from Loyalist attacks. Indeed, these victims were viewed as collateral damage by the PIRA in their futile war. It was moreover a war in which the PIRA leadership became an increasingly well-protected species by state forces.

As to Brian Nelson, Margaret Urwin dismisses my reading of what his arrest in 1990 by the RUC signified. She says, correctly, that he was arrested because the Stevens inquiry demanded it. Back then, however, most of the RUC, apart from an element within the Special Branch, knew no more about Nelson’s role than did most of the army. I can recall at the time RUC officers voicing to me their surprise and satisfaction at his arrest when they learned of it. After all, tensions between the RUC and Special Branch and the CID were no secret. Conscientious detectives such as Jonston Brown, who brought Johnny Adair to face a court, had for a long time been uneasy over how the Special Branch used its agents and informers.

Margaret Urwin may possibly have missed the passage in Sir John Stevens’s memoirs where he pays tribute to ‘the excellent people from the CID’ whose help was essential to his work. It was men and women like them in the RUC, and indeed in army units other than the Force Research Unit, who made possible the high success rate of the security forces in arresting and charging Loyalist paramilitaries. Indeed, for much of the period of Nelson’s double game the arrest and conviction rate of Loyalists was much higher than it was for Republican paramilitaries. At the time of the Good Friday Agreement many hundreds of them were serving lengthy sentences and I cannot recall any of them thinking that they had been the beneficiaries of collusion.

During the conflict in Northern Ireland, Loyalist paramilitaries liked nothing more than to see themselves as the fourth arm of the security forces, backing up the army, the RUC and the UDR. It was never as simple as that, but this may be one reason why Margaret Urwin’s book A state in denial and Anne Cadwallader’s Lethal allies have been seen on display and available for purchase in Loyalist bookshops in Belfast. Good luck to them with sales from these outlets.—Yours etc.,

IAN S. WOOD