The acclaimed war historian speaks forthrightly to John Manley about reporting the outbreak of the Troubles, Britain’s decline, and his lifetime loathing the Orange Order.
When Max Hastings became editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph in 1986 he made an immediate effort to move the paper to a more centrist position by changing its approach on three key issues.
“We no longer supported apartheid in South Africa, we no longer supported capital punishment, and we no longer supported the unionists in Northern Ireland,” he tells The Irish News.
“And I made that stick for ten years but as soon as I was gone, they went back,” he adds, tailing off into a guffaw.
While ostensibly he can be described as a conventionally posh, upper middle-class Englishman, the 80-year-old Times columnist is much more nuanced than the characterisation immediately suggests.
He’s said to have voted for Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems in the past, while his advocacy of Irish unity and criticism of the Israeli government certainly don’t reflect that of the British establishment.
Hastings first visited Belfast in the summer of 1969.
He was a “naive” 24-year-old and working for the Evening Standard, which he recalls acerbically “was then a quite a serious newspaper”.
A descendant of the Catholic Hastings family who’d fled to England from near Brookeborough in Co Fermanagh in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, on arrival in Ireland he’d already devoured “truckloads” of Irish history.
His initial first-hand experiences of the north, later recounted in the book Ulster 1969, were nonetheless a “revelation”.
“One met Stormont ministers, the sort of people who wouldn’t have been allowed to run a whelk stall in England, but they all called themselves captain and took themselves very seriously,” he remembers of the unionist-dominated Stormont regime in its final throes.
“They all lied through their teeth.”
Amid widespread unrest, he was reporting from Divis Flats in west Belfast on the night of August 14.
“I’ve never forgotten that terrible night,” the veteran journalist says, recalling how the episode “played a significant part in shaping my personal view of the entire Northern Ireland tragedy”.
As he walked under the flats, an RUC armoured car drove up and parked nearby.
He remembers vividly how “its turret traversed and its gun began to fire on the flats, the barrel sweeping to and fro, hosing the building”.
“Idiotic as it may seem, at first I thought it was firing blanks, because I could not believe that in a city of the UK, a machine-gun was being employed against a block of flats and its occupants, who were displaying no aggressive intent whatsoever.”
The mounted Browning machine gun fired for around 20 seconds before the vehicle drove off.
Hastings then heard a voice above say a child had been hit.
“I ran up the stairs until through the open door of a flat I saw a child lying on a bed, its head cradled in the arms of a man whom I later discovered was his father.
“The child was bleeding copiously from a terrible head wound, inflicted by a bullet that had passed through several flimsy partition walls before hitting him.”
The victim was nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, the eldest of six children, who’d been shot in front of his family as they sought cover in a bedroom. He is remembered as the first child victim of the Troubles.
A 2021 Police Ombudsman’s report into the killing concluded that the use of vehicle-mounted machine guns to deal with rioting was “disproportionate and dangerous”.
No former police officers were prosecuted due to a lack of evidence.
An apology for the actions of the RUC was issued by the PSNI 56 years later.
The morning after the incident, Hastings attended a Stormont press conference led by the region’s then prime minister Brian Faulkner.
“He told us that the police had been facing an armed Catholic uprising,” he says.
“We were simply stunned. Though I think some of the politicians may even have wanted to believe it. I’m not even sure that Brian Faulkner that morning was lying, as it was what the RUC senior officers had told him, and I think he may have believed some of it. It was a revelation.”
Since then, the author says he has always made a point of highlighting how “a lot of the very bad stuff one saw done by the unionists, the RUC, and so on, happened before the Provos”.
“But once the Provos got going, it then suited everybody, including the Tory government in Britain and even a lot of British people, just to regard it as a security problem and to sort of walk away from the whole political thing,” he says.
“The unionists became, by default, our sort of allies in a way that I always found very depressing.”
The “young and impressionable” journalist, who would later become an acclaimed author and war historian, says he quickly became a “passionate united Irelander”.
“I haven’t changed my view,” he insists. In 2021 he predicted that Ireland would be unified “within a generation”.
However, he says something he didn’t consider all those years ago was “what it would do to the whole island to incorporate 800,000 deeply embittered Protestants against their wishes”.
“And one realises that an awful lot of people in the south, whatever they may say publicly, realise that they’re better off without it,” he adds.
His experiences in the north left him “curiously ambivalent”.
“On the one hand, I was appalled by what one saw and heard, yet on the other, I did form a real affection for the north. I did have some good times there, and I met an awful lot of very interesting people,” he says.
“I would say at the end of it all, one got no closer to knowing what one thought, except for feeling a passionate hatred for the so-called loyalists.”
Hastings is blunt in his disdain and criticism of Orangeism.
“I’ve always loathed the Orange Order,” he says. “I went to so many effing parades I could virtually become an Orangeman myself. I can even remember all the songs.
“It exists only to sustain a legacy of hatred and violence but then again, what else have these people got? The south has become part of the modern world, which it wasn’t for a long time, and it’s wonderful but the north is not part of the modern world. These unionists, they’re stuck in this mad time warp, and they know that nobody loves them yet they keep it going.”
He’s shocked to learn that Edward Carson’s statue still stands at Stormont.
“Jesus Christ… A terrible man,” he exclaims. “The creation of Northern Ireland and the destruction of Oscar Wilde - what a thing to take to your grave?”
Republicans don’t attract quite the same ire though doesn’t appear especially fond of Gerry Adams.
“He was perhaps an inevitable product of his background,” he says of the former Sinn Féin president. “One can’t deny he’s a man of quite extraordinary strength of character, as all fanatics are.”
Given his stature as a military historian, Hastings assessment of the IRA’s armed campaign is notable, and potentially controversial.
“What’s very hard to say, and I’m still not sure, is whether the Provos’ campaign served the best interests of Ireland or not?” he says
“At the time, I felt it was a ghastly mistake from the point of view of republicans and from the point of view of the cause. It enabled British governments, and especially Tory governments, to just say ‘Well, this is now a security problem. It’s just a matter of suppressing terrorism’.”
He argues that “the basic problem” with the British when dealing with Ireland is that “nobody ever gives a sh*t - and that was true during the Troubles”.
“Their one idea was to try and get it off the agenda, to try and get it off their plate,” he says.
“There was a sort of - I won’t call it racist contempt - but it was a sort of ‘why can’t all these silly buggers just go away?’ That’s not a good way to go about problem solving.”
Quoting his “dear friend” Michael Howard – “the acclaimed historian, not the wicked politician” - he argues that the Tories determinedly opposed Irish independence “because they sincerely felt that if we lost Ireland next door, that the whole empire would unravel”.
“Ireland is a wonderfully joyous country, but there’s also this deep strand of melancholy, you can see it in the literature too,” he says.
“One feels that Ireland deserves some happiness after a 20th century of unhappiness, and to a remarkable degree, the south - and I’m well aware of the problems - but nonetheless, to a considerable degree, the Republic has achieved happiness that even when I was a young reporter in the Troubles, we never thought they would because we didn’t think they’d ever have the economic breakthrough.”
While he believes Ireland is destined to be united, Hastings is less inclined to advocate or predict Scottish independence.
“Scotland has never suffered the same kind of unspeakable persecution that Ireland suffered at the hands of the English,” he says.
“There’s nothing in the Scottish experience remotely comparable to the scale of English misconduct in Ireland, apart from perhaps the Highland clearances, which were mostly carried out by Scots.”
He also argues that almost 20 years of Scottish Nationalist Party rule in the devolved parliament, coupled with “economics”, mean the Scots are less eager for independence.
“One should never say never but while the relationship with England has gone sour, I’d be surprised if they broke away in my lifetime,” he says.
Hastings isn’t especially complimentary of today’s Britain and its political class.
“I can’t believe sometimes the Tory and Reform slogan-mongering about British sovereignty,” he says.
“Nowadays we’re a middle-ranking country, a very nice middle-ranking country and a very nice place to live but we’re not important anymore. An awful lot of Britain’s trouble comes from the whole rump of people encouraged by Nigel Farage and the Tories who’ve got this peculiar, wildly exaggerated idea of how important we are.
“I think we’re still a significant country, and we’re still a very interesting country, but we’re not important. And every time I get a platform, I try to persuade audiences that we are not an important country anymore but it’s probably hard to get that message across.”
He believes Farage is dangerous “because he’s completely irresponsible”.
“The politicians I was close to in my life, who were really close friends: Roy Jenkins, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, Ken Clarke… these are all very serious people with serious ideas,” he says.
“Nigel Farage isn’t fit to kiss their feet. He’s a slogan monger; he’s got no serious ideas about anything except keeping out immigrants. Trump is no better.
“It’s depressing when you see more and more of the world being taken over by people who in times gone by would’ve been living in secure accommodation”.
On Israel, Hastings has moved over the years from a position of avid admiration of the Zionist state’s military power to one of unapologetic criticism.
He notes that “feeling in Ireland is much stronger than in England” in relation to the conflict in the Middle East.
“I think what the Israelis have done in Gaza and the West Bank is inexcusable,” he says. “I think Israel has brought shame on itself, and it’s not surprising it’s becoming a pariah internationally, though I doubt whether it’s going to change course, as the Americans are still broadly with it.”
He points out that in the years prior to October 7, the Israeli army killed more Palestinian civilians than were killed in the 2023 Hamas attack.
“How could any Palestinian ever forgive or forget what the Israelis have done?
“I mean, my wife is Jewish, and she is as horrified as anybody by what the Israelis have done.”
Article first published in The Irish News on 31st October 2026