There were better uses for Rose Dugdale’s great intellect

UNTIL her death last week, I mistook Rose Dugdale as the quintessential bored rich girl who, tapping into the zeitgeist of student radicalism and the terrorist chic surrounding the Baader-Meinhof Group in 1970s Germany, found her purpose in life by becoming a violent revolutionary.

I didn’t realise that the daughter of a British army lieutenant-colonel had a scorching intellect and a top-notch education. She studied PPE – Politics, Philosophy and Economics – the Oxford degree that so many UK politicians like David Cameron and Ed Miliband take that it is often credited with running Britain.

She had a Master’s from a US university for her research into Wittgenstein, and a doctorate in economics from the University of London.

When Dugdale was in Limerick prison after the Beit art robbery, Iris Murdoch, who was her tutor in Oxford, wrote to the Irish ambassador in Britain pleading that she be allowed better reading material than the usual prison diet of paperbacks.

‘I am worried because I fear she is not being allowed to receive serious and learned matter (on economics and history) which various people are wanting to send her. She wishes to study but cannot, a terrible punishment for an intellectual person,’ wrote Murdoch.

Dugdale’s commitment to ruthlessly progressing the IRA’s armed struggle as a gun-runner and bomb-maker exposes the limits of intelligence, and indeed of an elite education in producing insights, understanding or prescience. Peace was won in the North not by bloodshed or paramilitary violence but by political leadership and the hard slog of diplomatic negotiation.

It’s the final irony of Dugdale’s life that although she had no regrets about the path she took, she would have achieved more for the North in breaking the stranglehold of British imperialism as a sympathetic politician in Westminster than as an IRA woman in exile.