19 Conor Cruise O’Brien

It is not necessary to have agreed with Conor Cruise O’Brien about everything – or even about anything – to be able to recognize his importance in Irish life and culture. In our time his name has become a byword for a certain deeply unyielding mindset in relation to the so-called Irish Question. Perhaps because his view of Irish history was inordinately skewed by a desire to effect changes in the present, the Cruiser seemed to believe that the past could be re-entered and altered almost in the manner of a Harry Potter storyline. From the 1970s, he became the High Priest of revisionists who set out to deconstruct the alleged myths of Irish nationalism so as to pursue a reconciliation with unionism. Many Irish people, though agreeing that the Provos were an abomination, never came to accept that in order to isolate armed republicanism, it was necessary for southern Irish society to distance itself from all sense of moral grievance concerning its own history. When the revisionist blueprint extended to excoriations of the 1916 leadership and calls to downplay the gravity of the Great Famine, many found themselves having to excuse themselves from the anti-Provo express.

While many nationalists in the Republic agreed that the Provos had been able to take advantage of a legitimate historical grievance to justify acts of the most appalling barbarism, they had difficulty with the idea of dismantling their entire sense of history. Many supporters-in-principle of Cruise O’Brien’s position, while recognizing that there was a paradoxical validity to the idea that a change of heart among nationalists offered the best, perhaps the only, possibility of forward movement, would have liked him to at least hint that his motivation was pragmatism rather than principle.

There are those who say that the Cruiser, by his promotion of censorship measures that for years kept the ‘men of violence’ off the airwaves, did much to prolong the ‘Troubles’ by contributing to the isolationism of the republican movement and precluding an open public discussion that might have served to end the conflict sooner. This is an unknowable quantity now, although the degree of progress achieved after the dismantling of censorship in the 1990s suggests that the gagging of the gunmen might have been a mistake.

There are those, too, who hold the diametrically opposite view: that only because of the Cruiser’s insistent repudiation of armed republicanism, and the logic of censorship that emanated from it, did southern society become ‘honest’ enough to edge towards an accommodation with the other tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to say that, without Dr Cruise O’Brien’s moral leadership, we would never have achieved the resolution of the Good Friday Agreement.

Wars are not fought solely by men bearing guns. Behind the troops in the trench or the sniper in the undergrowth is the moral authority supplied by the unwritten mandate of the many who tacitly support the cause being pursued through violence. Wars cannot last long without such energy behind them. It follows, therefore, that settlements do not come about merely by negotiation between the active combatants, but also through a process in the hearts and minds of those who supply the active combatants with the moral authority to carry on the war. This suggests a cultural problem, which can be dealt with only by a delicate snipping of the atavistic wires that carry the signals and impulses that, down the line, lead to bombs going off in the street.

In this process there was a need for a special kind of leadership, from people with a special capacity for collective empathy with their own tribe. There has always been a great deal of pious nodding towards the Cruiser’s intellectual capacities, and undoubtedly he was one smart cookie. But really he was a type of tribal shaman, who depended as much on instinct as on reason of the conventional kind. During the years of conflict, he turned his own name into a byword for something that really did not emanate from him at all, but was rather an element of the culture he belonged to. Because of his enormous gifts of understanding, he has tuned into a strain of our collective emotional life and gave it words.

As a writer, he engaged deeply with the issues he wrote about. His 1972 book, States of Ireland, remains one of the most compelling and elegant chronicles of the roots of Irish tribal conflict. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it is impossible to be unaffected by the quality of the writing.

States of Ireland had been written, he stressed, from the Catholic, ‘specifically Southern Catholic’, side of the fence. He had tried to understand some of the feelings shared by most Ulster Protestants and to communicate some notion of these feelings to Catholics in the Republic. As a result, he had been ‘accused of being hyper-sensitive about the Protestants, and caring little about the Catholics’. In fact, he insisted, the reverse accusation would be more true. ‘It is to the Catholic community that I belong. This is my ‘‘little platoon”, to love which, according to Edmund Burke (whose family were in that same platoon), ‘‘is the first, the germ, as it were, of publick affections’’. I am motivated by affection for that platoon, identification with it, and fear that it may destroy itself, including me, through infatuation with its own mythology.’

It is interesting to note how this passage is dominated by the concepts of ‘feeling’ and ‘affection’, rather than by intellectual or conceptual thought. With this book, Dr Cruise O’Brien was attempting the expression of something deep within the soul of his own people. We can choose to describe this as the self-hating neurosis arising from the colonial experience, or as the voice of our collective conscience, awakening to the new responsibilities of a post-victimhood Ireland. Perhaps it does not matter how we describe these feelings, so long as we recognize their existence. For this clarity about ourselves, we owe Conor Cruise O’Brien a significant debt.

But there is another side. Few objective observers could have disagreed with the Cruiser’s description of the Provos as ‘haters’. But he seemed to forget that there was hatred also on the other side, that hatred begets hatred and that, in the end, it can be difficult to tell the angels from the devils for all the hate clogging up the system. Perhaps his point was that it was not our responsibility to critique the other side. But from the nationalist viewpoint, it sometimes looked as though he’d simply changed tribes.

Perhaps his greatest flaw was that he was unable to see other than the dark side of his own people, and this, tragically, caused him to become an undeservedly marginalized figure. His pessimism affected his judgement and led him eventually to a profound error about the chances of reconciliation. In an address delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in 1978, he said that the reason many people could not see that Irish nationalism and unionism were incapable of reconciliation was because this idea was ‘so desolatingly devoid of all comfort’. We all, he said, ‘find it hard to accept bad news even when it is true’. For many years he predicted an outright descent into civil war, and, even after the settlement of 1998, continued to preach gloomily about the prospects of a lasting peace. His apocalyptic predictions have been shown to be largely mistaken. The truth may, however, be more complex: perhaps even his overstatements contributed to the eventual outcome.

But perhaps, too, he had become so certain that collective ambivalence was the problem with Irish history that he refused to adjust his opinions in a changing landscape. Having convinced himself and others that the problem in the North was a particular interpretation of the nationalist narrative, he became focussed on pursuing and permanently imposing this argument, rather than looking squarely at the prevailing conditions. The ultimate tragedy, for him and Ireland, was that his pessimism resonated too harmoniously with the despair of his times, opening up the appalling possibility that, in spite of the moral integrity of his leadership, his main influence was to delay the peace for a generation.