23

Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (1972)

States of Ireland was published just three years after the commencement of the Ulster Troubles, and during the year in which killings by the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries reached a peak of frightfulness never matched before or since. The killings were to go on for another quarter-century before political initiatives began, slowly and painfully, to put together a series of agreements and institutional reforms that, in an untidy way, went some way to satisfying the various sets of participants. In 1972, even ‘Sunningdale’, an early failed settlement, was a year away, and an apocalyptic conclusion to the conflict, climaxing in an all-Ireland civil war, did not look impossible. As O’Brien says in his foreword to the book, he saw himself as an Irish patriot and loved Ireland and his people, but when the ancient opposition between Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant began to become active:

… one has to take leave of almost everything that is lovable about Ireland: the affection, the peace, the mutual concern, the courtesy which exist in abundance – if they cannot always be said to prevail – inside each community. Instead we must discuss the conditions of a multiple frontier: not just the territorial border, but a very old psychological frontier area, full of suspicion, reserve, fear, boasting, resentment, Messianic illusions, bad history, rancorous commemorations and – today more than ever – murderous violence. This is not Ireland, and it is not peculiar to Ireland: such frontiers, of tribe, colour, religion, language, culture, scar a great part of the surface of the globe. And have cost millions of lives even in this decade… Our frontier is exceptionally old – over three-and-a-half centuries – and now so disturbed that many of us fear we may be approaching the brink of full-scale civil war.1

The book is a long and sustained personal meditation on the crisis. O’Brien uses literary evidence for psychological states and social conflict and rarely has much use for the apparatus of the social sciences, despite the avalanche of academic studies that had already begun to descend all over the ‘Irish Problem’ from universities in Ireland, Britain and the United States. In many ways this absence is a strength. As he tells you in this remarkable book, O’Brien was very much an insider in Ireland. He had been a member of the Irish diplomatic corps for a decade, and at the time of writing States of Ireland he was a member of Dáil Éireann in the Labour Party interest.

More importantly, perhaps, he came of a well-known net of Dublin Catholic political families; his uncle, for example, had been a gun-runner in preparation for the 1916 rising and many other close family connections had been conspicuously active in the independence movement. A remote ancestor was a Father Nicholas Sheehy, framed and hanged for Whiteboyism (agrarian agitation) in the late eighteenth century in what amounted to an exercise in judicial murder. Sheehy was seen afterwards as a national and religious martyr in the Irish popular imagination. A great-uncle, Father Eugene Sheehy, taught Eamon de Valera Irish in County Clare, and Dev reminisced fondly about him in Irish, ‘It is he who taught me patriotism’ (Eisean a mhúin an tír-ghrá dhom). His aunt on the Sheehy side of the family, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, was a noted feminist. The family was, like many Irish families, divided ideologically and emotionally between different strands of Irish nationalism. Three of his uncles, for example, fought loyally in British uniform for the allies against Germany in the First World War, while other relatives tacitly supported Germany. Both sets expected Irish independence in return for their support of one or other great power. Two famous relatives, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Tom Kettle, died in 1916; the first at British hands in Dublin and the other at German hands at the Somme. O’Brien himself was born a year after the Rising, in 1917.

In his youth, he was consequently introduced to various varieties of Irish nationalism and idealist socialism. His father died suddenly when O’Brien was a boy in what were shocking circumstances for a devoted lad; he remarked many years later that this was the only time in his entire life when he feared that he might lose his reason because of his grief. He was reared by his mother and other female relatives. He grew up in the aftermath of the Irish revolution and had, in a sense, a ringside seat to watch the progress of its emotional and cultural aftermath in his childhood and young manhood. As the Irish saying has it, he was reared to it. He says himself that his earliest memory was of a crucial event in the Irish conflict: the beginning of the Irish Civil War of 1922–23, which was to be the forming event of so much of Irish politics for two generations after:

The first sound I can remember is a series of booming noises which woke me up on Wednesday, June 28, 1922. I was then four-and-a-half years old. That bombardment is generally considered to be the beginning of the Irish Civil War, which lasted throughout the remainder of my fifth year and into my sixth.2

A second feature of his family was its intellectualism. His cousin, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, son of the man who was murdered in Dublin, was an accomplished lecturer in French at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and was the young O’Brien’s almost fatherly mentor. O’Brien, like many another, admired ‘Skeff’s’ political courage in Irish public affairs. Sheehy-Skeffington correctly predicted the Second World War after a brief visit to Berlin in January 1933 in a long letter to his mother on the emergent Nazi Germany. The young Germans thought they had been cheated out of victory in 1918 by the communists and the Jews. The Germans would start a war in 1938 or 1939 and would be defeated again, the Irish student predicted. In the 1950s and 1960s this extraordinary man was an outspoken member of the Irish Senate, where he attacked many aspects of Irish public policy, particularly the practice of unrestrained physical punishment of small children in schools.3 He was instrumental in encouraging the writing of Peter Tyrrell, Founded on Fear, a personal account of the writer’s own experience of Letterfrack industrial school and his tragic subsequent life.

O’Brien did a BA degree in French and Irish, going on afterwards to a Ph.D. on Charles Stewart Parnell, published later in 1956 as Parnell and His Party. O’Brien later observed in a revealing phrase that there had been ‘something crippled’ about Irish politics ever since the fall of Parnell in 1891. The book is brilliant, but contains some odd opinions, in particular the proposition that, in a Home Rule of independent Ireland Parnell might have become some kind of dictator. O’Brien was to have many more odd opinions later on.

A third feature of his family was a sense of being ousted from anticipated power by the events of 1916–23. The old parliamentary nationalists were destroyed by the unionist rebellion against Home Rule in 1912 and the subsequent nationalist revolution and the partition of the island in 1920–22. They were also bypassed in a classic example of Pareto’s circulation of elites, by people of (on average) more humble origins, or, to put it more accurately, more recent humble origins; people like Michael Collins or Eamon de Valera, both from small-farm backgrounds and typified many of the new leaders who often distrusted or despised the older tradition. There was an element of generational conflict as well, old men of settled opinions and habits being replaced by young, more radical and fiery men. O’Brien’s family was not rich however, and he was obliged to go for scholarships to finance his education.

A fourth characteristic of his immediate family was a certain religious marginality. His people were Catholic by faith and tradition, but he was sent as a boy to Sandford Park School in Ranelagh on Dublin’s south side, a non-denominational school set up in 1922 in anticipation of a Catholic clerical clampdown on non-denominational education which indeed occurred after independence. Catholics were forbidden by the clergy to send their children to such schools on the grounds that their Catholic faith would be destroyed, and Mrs Cruise O’Brien was seen as being unusually independent-minded in so doing. She did so because her dead husband had wished the boy to have a secular and liberal education. This he certainly got; Sandford Park’s religious balance was apparently about one-third each Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. This meant that young Conor got a very different educational experience from the vast majority of young people at that time, herded as they were into single-creed, mainly Catholic schools. It was in this school that he was stunned to be informed by a teacher that Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom at the express wish of the vast majority of its inhabitants, an observation that would have been anathema to his family. Furthermore, being handed this seminal and undeniable proposition by an Irish teacher in those times would have been a very unusual experience. On top of all this, he went to the mainly Protestant Trinity College Dublin (TCD) rather than the mainly Catholic University College Dublin (UCD), a choice which was again seen, as not quite engaging in religious apostasy, but not far off it.

States of Ireland was full of quasi-anecdotal personal information of this kind, which gradually built up into a picture of a society, or set of societies, in the island of Ireland which did not talk to each other and which increasingly perceived each other inaccurately and sometimes grotesquely. In a time of political instability, these stereotypes were liable to become active and could even operate in such a way as to generate violence. O’Brien felt that the period of the early 1970s was easily the most dangerous such time in modern Irish history.

The book unleashed a storm of protest, much of it apparently driven by a perhaps subconscious anger that O’Brien, at least nominally a Catholic, should be arguing that nationalists and unionists in Ireland were really like two peas in a pod, one as bad or as good as the other, especially in Northern Ireland. However, much of its thinking eventually seeped into the official mind and even the popular mind, and arguably was an important progenitor (among many others) of the settlements of thirty years later.

In a strange and disguised follow-up to States of Ireland, O’Brien published in The Siege in 1986, a history of the State of Israel and its long fight for survival in the Arab–Muslim world around it; an account that has been seen as very sympathetic to the Israeli case. That sympathy has surprised many people outside Ireland who had seen O’Brien as an anti-colonialist because of Ireland’s anti-colonial fight for independence and O’Brien’s role in the Congolese crisis as a UN officer opposing Katangese secession; an event schemed for by Belgium and Britain. There is, however, a logic and a sociologic about his stance on Israel. First, his ‘Protestant side’ permitted him to see the other chap’s point of view. Certainly, when reading the book soon after publication while living in the United States, I was struck by the way the narrative was actually haunted by Ireland, with the Israelis standing in for the Ulster unionist (‘orange’) community, and the Arabs for the overwhelmingly large Catholic nationalist (‘green’) community encircling it on the island. The horrific history of the Jews in Europe made the tragic history of the Irish look trivial; to write about the greater tragedy in terms derived from the lesser one perhaps gave O’Brien some capacity to distance himself from his Irish obsessions. I had some difficulty explaining this to an Iranian colleague (Professor Hormuz Shadadi) in the US. As I fell silent, he looked at me puzzledly and asked finally:

‘What is the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant?’

‘Something like that between a Shia and a Sunni Muslim.’

‘You really have problems in Ireland!’

Ernest Gellner, in one of the few non-Irish commentaries on O’Brien and coming from someone unconnected with Irish affairs, noticed many things. He noticed in particular O’Brien’s almost complete disregard for the huge corpus of modern academic writing on nationalism as an ideological and sociological phenomenon in the disciplines of history, sociology and political science. He also noted O’Brien’s implicit assumption that the nation state was the logical and appropriate vehicle for political action.4 As suggested earlier, in a way, O’Brien’s use of literary reference rather than sociology was a strength because of his peculiar personal circumstances; he could, as he said himself, use literary criticism as a social science.

During a long and illustrious literary career, O’Brien published many literary and autobiographical studies, as well as many essays on political life. In later life O’Brien also published distinguished studies of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, but it is for States of Ireland he will be remembered longest in Ireland: a book that certainly shook the island.

TG

Notes

1Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1972; revised version, St Albans: Panther, 1974), p. 13.

2Conor Cruise O’Brien, Memoir: My Life and Themes (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1998), p.5.

3Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington, Skeff: the Life of Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, 1909–1970 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1991). See also National Library of Ireland, Sheehy-Skeffington Papers, NLI MS 40, 480/3–11.

4Ernest Gellner, ‘The Sacred and the National’, in Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp.59–73.