Conor Cruise O’Brien Has Died

by Henry Farrell on December 19, 2008

The “Irish Times”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/1219/1229523105576.html has the story, although it concentrates on his not-especially successful political career rather than his intellectual contribution. I found his later work (both books and newspaper journalism) to be very nearly unreadable, less because of its sometimes reactionary politics than because of how badly it was written. There was plenty of choler and spleen, but little real humour. But his earlier books – I’m especially fond of _States of Ireland_, which really remade the debate over Irish national identity – are still a joy and a delight to read. His best writing was liberal in the most expansive sense of that term, clearly thought through, open to its own contradictions, generous where generosity was warranted, and witheringly accurate where it wasn’t (he had a near Galbraithian facility for cutting through the bullshit with a pungent description).

{ 42 comments }

1

geo 12.19.08 at 5:23 am

O’Brien’s 1965 essay collection, Writers and Politics, is wonderful. The last paragraph of the Introduction to that book is magnificent. Orwell couldn’t have said it better.

2

krhasan 12.19.08 at 7:20 am

For a section of my generation inclined towards internationalism and a more powerful United Nations he was something of a hero in the 1960s.

3

Kevin Donoghue 12.19.08 at 10:34 am

As to the poor quality of his CCO’B’s later writing, it’s worth bearing in mind that he suffered a stroke in 1998 at the age of 81. Most of what he wrote before that is very readable, even the book about Jefferson (The Long Affair) published in 1996.

I thought this line from the Irish Times obituary was a bit defensive: “He was a tireless critic of Mr Haughey, not only about Northern Ireland, and questioned his integrity years before any evidence emerged that Mr Haughey had taken large sums from wealthy businessmen.”

He was also a tireless critic of the Irish Times for failing to acknowledge that while there might not be “any [hard] evidence” that Haughey was corrupt, there were obvious conflicts of interest in his activities.

4

EWI 12.19.08 at 10:47 am

Balls to the lionising of this character, I say (his role in Jadotville bears much closer scrutiny).

The only person this morning who has been praising him to the rafters (“man of strong convictions” isn’t really a compliment at all, if you know the Cruiser’s politics) has been Eoghan Harris. Says it all, really.

(Has the southern politician element of the Unionist Reform Movement just decreased by a third? I seem to recall Harris and Bruton being the other two involved with this astroturf operation)

5

EWI 12.19.08 at 10:52 am

(his role in Jadotville bears much closer scrutiny, for one)

6

Paul 12.19.08 at 10:53 am

Well his writing in 1994 predicting that the IRA ceasefire would lead to yugoslavian-style civil war was a bit wide of the remark.
He was a highly intelligent individual, but (and there has to be a “but” with him), his introduction of section 31 marks him out as a deep reactionary – and that was thirty years ago. As well as that I think his reaction to events like the Dublin bombings of 1974 (contrast to a hypothetical reaction if the perps had been republicans) and I suppose to Zionism, would mark him out as an individual whose thinking on violence was geared towards his political favourites rather than pacific tendencies. I think most people are like that, but it gives the lie to a lot of his anti-republican posturing (not all) which he hypocritcally fixed around anti-violence.

He was pretty spot on with Haughey though…

7

Tony 12.19.08 at 11:24 am

I found the UKUP episode quite extraordinary.

A Dubliner joins a Northern Irish party opposed to the idea of Dublin having a say in NI politics.

Then when the peace process doesn’t end in the bloodbath Cruiser had predicted, he suddenly does a volte face, blaming the Unionist people (i.e. his adopted constituents – the very people whom he had been claiming to represent, not just as a public intellectual, but in real political terms) for their failure to understand that Britain generally doesn’t give a jot about them.

Was there perhaps a just hint of arrogance there?

8

Chris Bertram 12.19.08 at 11:38 am

I recently read his little _Camus_, a Fontana Modern Master, which I picked up for 50p in a shop in west Wales. I was kind of expecting Decentism _avant la lettre_ , a sort of prefiguration of Paul Berman, but it was actually rather good, friendly to Sartre, and rather cutting about AC.

9

Mrs Tilton 12.19.08 at 11:51 am

Gone, unfortunately, but unforgotten.

Paul @5, yes, he had his flaws to be sure. Still, he is one of those people to whom we may extend a pardon on Claudelian grounds, at least for his early-to-middle works; and on other grounds for his willingness to give the chucks the kickings they deserve.

10

Dave 12.19.08 at 12:26 pm

I never heard of Jadotville until it was mentioned above. According to Wiki, it sounds like a reminder of a more civilised age, when soldiers fighting in central Africa could surrender after inflicting severe casualties on their foes, and not be immediately butchered. I presume someone wants to blame CCO’B for the soldiers being there in the first place?

11

Bonapart O Cunasa 12.19.08 at 12:58 pm

“He has the finest seventeenth-century mind still alive in Ireland” was John Hume’s description, I think – and it’s yet to be bettered.

12

Andy 12.19.08 at 1:31 pm

Giving the chucks a kicking was all he was good for.

He didnt mind violence – we know that through his ardent zionism – and indeed his pathetic reaction to the Dublin 1974 bombings (as Paul says).
Oh add to that his description of the bloody sunday marchers as “sinn fein activists working on behalf of the IRA”
His censorship was pretty much a fascist act – one which he would of course utterly condemned if one of his opponents had enacted it against those he felt sympathy for.

Apart from his stuff on haughey i see little to counter the above..
He was also a self-confirmed fan of police brutality.

13

Paul 12.19.08 at 1:46 pm

R.I.P. Erin go bragh !!

14

Liam 12.19.08 at 2:29 pm

Some years ago one of my history teachers described O’Brien as the proverbial lighthouse in a bog, that is to say, brilliant, but utterly useless. In recent weeks my interest in O’Brien turned to his work on Edmund Burke (opinions on this work are welcome). For better or worse his contribution to Irish politics was great and he will be remembered.

15

mollymooly 12.19.08 at 2:47 pm

The power of the minister under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act was actually much less sweeping after the 1976 amendment than in the original 1960 act. CCOB’s change was not to give himself more powers, but to exercise his powers. The order prohibiting Sinn Féin et al was made for a year in 1976 and renewed annually till 1993, when Michael D Higgins chose not to, partly from personal conviction but mainly as part of the Peace Process. Section 31 itself was not repealed until 2001.

16

EWI 12.19.08 at 4:47 pm

I presume someone wants to blame CCO’B for the soldiers being there in the first place?

Well, not immediately. I was more in mind of the story which has been about for some time now that O’Brien’s relationship with the Irish troops was at such a low ebb that he let them rot in Jadotville without any serious attempt at relief (notably, the Irish military comms logs for the episode disappeared – make of that what you may).

This is to say nothing of the man’s attitudes on Israel. As with the two contemporary Irish polemicists with whom he is most commonly associated (Myers and Harris) his supposed abhorrence of violence and distaste for nationalism cannot be taken at all seriously when it appears to be applied solely on the basis of who is being nationalist and/or employing violence.

p.s. I’m vastly amused by this Telegraph obit, lionising him as a Unionist icon. I suppose that it’s only par for the course that the obit writer is (accidentally or otherwise) loose with the facts on Irish history:

Conor Cruise O’Brien was born in Dublin on November 3 1917 into a family with strong Roman Catholic and nationalist strains; indeed an uncle, Frank Sheehy-Skeffington, had been killed by a British officer at the time of the Easter Rising of 1916.
[…]
Moreover, while one uncle had perished in the nationalist cause in 1916, another had been killed in France in the same year, wearing British uniform.

Francis Sheehy Skeffington, as even the most casual reader of the history of the period could tell you, was instead a committed pacifist whose “involvement” amounted to being an Irishman in Dublin with British soldiers running murdeously amok.

17

Maria 12.19.08 at 5:16 pm

Gosh, that Telegraph obit is a bit of a shocker. Every Irish schoolchild can tell you Sheehy Skeffington was a committed pacifist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sad to see the Cruiser go, and especially sad that his long decline has him lionised by the likes of Telegraph writers and contrarians like Harris and Myers.

18

Jacob T. Levy 12.19.08 at 5:20 pm

Great Melody is a strange but wonderful book– as an interpretation of Burke and as a piece of writing I recommend it. (Along with the Jefferson book, it’s really my major exposure to CCO’B– I was no more than dimly aware of some of the rest of this stuff, and entirely unaware of much of it.)

19

Andy 12.19.08 at 5:28 pm

EWI – absolutely on the money.

20

Peter Hart 12.19.08 at 5:32 pm

I don’t think anyone here has yet mentioned his work as a historian. His book, Parnell and His Party is still a standard work and is a most elegant and well-judged study. His essay on Yeats and Fascism, while controversial, is also powerful and important. As for his later thoughts on Israel, NI and South Africa, his arguments are sometimes all the more interesting for being so comprehensively wrong. No offense to Harris and Myers, but they’re nowhere near in the same league as thinkers.

21

Liam 12.19.08 at 6:15 pm

Re. Jacob (18). I may check it out again, I was interested in finding works that had something to say about Burke & American Independence.

22

Mordaunt 12.19.08 at 6:32 pm

His biography of Burke is rather good although he completely ignores his hero’s opposition to the emancipation of protestant dissenters (as opposed to the Catholic sort). I enjoyed his book on Jefferson but suspect that it is unreliable.

Personally I didn’t much like his little book on Camus, but then in the Camus vs. Sartre shindig my sympathies are broadly with Camus.

23

Kevin Donoghue 12.19.08 at 7:05 pm

His biography of Burke is rather good although he completely ignores his hero’s opposition to the emancipation of protestant dissenters (as opposed to the Catholic sort).

Actually there is quite a bit on that topic in The Great Melody (see Chapter VI especially). Maybe it got cut out of the shorter paperback published a few years later?

As to Jefferson, much of CCO’B’s evidence aginst him consists of lengthy quotations from Jefferson’s own writings. But I would like to see a good critique of that book, which doesn’t simply take it as given that Jefferson was above reproach.

24

Tom Hurka 12.19.08 at 7:59 pm

He gave a public lecture at my old university in western Canada, oh, 25 years ago, and was properly devastating about the university president, who’d told him he’d take his shoes off if O’B spoke for more than 50 minutes. He also absolutely lived up to his Private Eye nickname of Conor Cruise O’Booze.

25

mollymooly 12.19.08 at 8:45 pm

“Every Irish schoolchild can tell you Sheehy Skeffington was a committed pacifist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I won’t dispute the subordinate clause, but Irish education achievement was lower in the parallel universe where I went to school.

26

P O'Neill 12.20.08 at 2:49 am

The inevitable C. Hitchens tribute to the Cruiser is worth waiting for.

27

EWI 12.20.08 at 7:43 pm

I won’t dispute the subordinate clause, but Irish education achievement was lower in the parallel universe where I went to school.

Which, the non-Irish readers here may be interested to note, brings us back to Cruise O’Brien and in particular the neutering and sterilisation of Irish history in the school system, a logical extension of the work that both he and Harris engaged in (in their seperate ways) to try to kill sympathy for northern Irish nationalism in the Republic.

28

Dave Weeden 12.20.08 at 9:39 pm

“neutering and sterilisation ” are interesting terms. Could you say what Irish history should be taught that isn’t? In my experience, the Irish take their history very seriously – as a shopping list of grievances. Could “neutering and sterilisation” mean “accepting there are two sides”? Who cares about Northern Irish Nationalism? The only real issue is the Euro. (NB my personal position is this: it wasn’t Jonathan Powell and Tony Blair who sorted the Peace Process, it was the EU. The choice was: join the Euro with Eire or join the Euro with the UK. Who would die for that? No one. War over. We’re all ruled from Brussels and better for it.) Hitler was a nationalist, need I say more?

29

EWI 12.20.08 at 11:10 pm

“neutering and sterilisation ” are interesting terms. Could you say what Irish history should be taught that isn’t? In my experience, the Irish take their history very seriously – as a shopping list of grievances. Could “neutering and sterilisation” mean “accepting there are two sides”?

I see that you lack familiarity with the Irish educational system (“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you). The outcome of this policy is that little or no history is taught (in comparison to the situation which obtained before), so as not to inflame any possible nationalist opinion. The wrongness of this policy should need no pointing out on a forum filled with educators.

I’m very sorry to hear that you subscribe to the view that Irish history is a “shopiing list of grievances”. I suggest that you perhaps to reflect on why it is that, outside of the UK educational system, Ireland’s past is considered to reflect rather badly on England. Perhaps inspiration might strike you.

Hitler was a nationalist, need I say more?

A sentiment CCO’B would echo. So long as we’re not talking about what we might term ‘Ulster-Scot’ nationalism, or other UK-centric varieties, of course.

30

Mrs Tilton 12.21.08 at 1:30 am

EWI @29,

“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you

That burden falls properly on you, I think.

the view that Irish history is a “shopiing list of grievances”

… is bollocks, of course. The view that Irish historiography at certain periods has been just that, by contrast, is not.

31

Henry 12.21.08 at 3:29 am

I see that you lack familiarity with the Irish educational system (“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you). The outcome of this policy is that little or no history is taught (in comparison to the situation which obtained before), so as not to inflame any possible nationalist opinion.

Umm, not so much

32

P O'Neill 12.21.08 at 3:46 am

Although one might quibble here and there, the Times (UK) obit is quite good.

33

Hektor Bim 12.21.08 at 4:32 am

I fear I must request a translation.

What’s a “chuck”, and why do they need kicking? I know Mrs Tilton hates republicans with a deep and abiding passion, so I assume a chuck would be a republican, but it would be nice to get the confirmation.

Why is “Eire” a giveaway?

34

Mrs Tilton 12.21.08 at 2:38 pm

Hektor @33,

the movement around the IRA and Sinn Féin use the slogan “tiocfaidh ár lá” (“our day will come”), which is pronounced roughly like “chuckie are law”. Hence “the chuckies” or “the chucks”. As to why that movement needed kickings back when Cruise O’Brien was in a position to kick, let’s go to the numbers.

As for what “Eire” gives away, it gives away two things, actually. The first thing it gives away is that the writer is unfamiliar with the terminology preferred by the Irish themselves, who would normally use the Irish-language name of the place only when speaking Irish, “Ireland” being deemed perfectly suitable for use by those Irish people able to speak the tongue of the Saxon oppressor. The second thing it gives away is that the writer doesn’t actually know the name of the place in Irish, which is not Eire but Éire. A small thing, that fada, but its absence weighs heavily.

When the Free State changed its name (in Irish) to just-plain Éire, lots of people on the island over to the right started using that name in English. In some, this was possibly contentious (and possibly that contentiouness is what EWI perceives in, and thinks given away by, what Dave wrote). In most, though, I think it reflects nothing more than confusion (and possibly even a friendly desire to use what one mistakenly believes the correct name). Confusion is understandable. The nomenclature of the various geographic and political bits of the British Isles IONA these islands those things from which the continent is sometimes cut off by fog can be complex.

I’m told, though, that linguists are all about description rather than prescription these days. Words are what people use them as. It might be strictly speaking wrong by current standards, but if enough British people used “Éire” (or even “Eire”) to refer to the bits of Ireland that are no longer in the UK, and kept doing so for a long enough time, well then, that would eventually become a correct name for Ireland; but it would be a name in English. I am happy, however, to join with EWI in encouraging Dave and all his countrymen to refer to the country as “Ireland” any time there is no reason to distinguish specifically between the Republic and Northern Ireland (or, as I should possibly call it as long as we are trying to be correct about these things, the Corrupt 6-County Orange Statelet), and to use “Éire” only when speaking Irish.

Slippage and change in meaning happen to lots of words, though, and haven’t spared “republican”. You write that I hate republicans (though it would be more accurate to say that I hate republicanism). It might surprise you, then, to learn that I think “republican” one of the noblest names in the history of Ireland, and in the history of political philosophy generally. And I gladly claim that name for myself, to the extent it still denotes what Butler described in, for example, Wolfe Tone and the Common Name of Irishman (sorry, doesn’t seem to be online, but you can find it in at least one easily available anthology).

Sadly, the meaning of that lovely old word has changed (not, to be sure, in an Irish context alone) such that it now usually refers to people with whom I would not willingly associate. In the Irish context, as I am sure you know, most people now use the word to refer to the movement that so resoundingly beat all other players to the top of that league table I linked to in the first paragraph above. And that sort of movement does need a kicking, whenever a kicking can be administered to it lawfully.

35

Mrs Tilton 12.21.08 at 2:40 pm

The nomenclature of the various geographic and political bits of the British Isles IONA these islands those things from which the continent is sometimes cut off by fog can be complex.

Sorry about that; the strikethrough tag worked well enough in the preview.

36

DC 12.21.08 at 10:03 pm

States of Ireland is indeed a wonderful book. God Land is an interesting collection of lectures on nationalism and religion (focused more on early US than on Irish history). Agreed that he became completely unreadable and basically batty – wild and improbable speculations presented as confident declarations of reality. But the Irish Times reprinted the original 1982 GUBU piece and it really is a terrific piece of writing.

Are people aware that he claimed to have inspired the name of Orwell’s O’Brien from 1984? How true that is I have no idea…

37

toby 12.22.08 at 1:50 pm

I can remember Conor Cruise O’Brien as the first one to say (loudly and repeatedly) “You can’t bomb one million Protestants into a United Ireland”.

That is now a truism, but it was revolutionary in the 1970s. Four years after the 1966 celebrations of the 1916 Rising and after 50 years of glorifying violent Republicanism from soft armchairs, there was an unspoken expectation that the Provos might “win back the North” for the rest of us. O’ Brien was the first and most forceful of those who pointed out how disastrous this course would be. Even in the 1980s, I can remember Captain James Kelly (he of the Arms Crisis, and then just re-elected at that time to Fianna Fail’s National Executive) demanding the withdrawal of the Irish Gardai and Army from the border counties to “let the Provos at them”. Many agreed with this on the grounds of the expense to the Irish state of the security measures needed to prop up the British in the North. Other believed that Ireland would never “fulfil its national destiny” until we “took back” Northern Ireland.

The resemblance to Milosovic is obvious, thankfully none emerged. But O’Brien was one of the most important of those who made sure he never did, or never could. He showed the intellectual case for supporting the Provos was a crock of shit, and for that we are in his debt.

38

Mrs Tilton 12.22.08 at 2:56 pm

toby @37,

the first one to say (loudly and repeatedly) “You can’t bomb one million Protestants into a United Ireland”

I recall Cruise O’Brien writing — was it in States of Ireland? — that he had said just that, during his days at Foreign Affairs working on the antipartition campaign, to some rural nationalist elder from the North; who, with unusual honesty, replied, “Who wants to bomb them into it?”

39

Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 12.22.08 at 5:45 pm

“the movement around the IRA and Sinn Féin use the slogan “tiocfaidh ár lá” (“our day will come”),”

I always thought it was something about floors. I just thought they really loved interior decorating. I guess you need floors to stash the armalites underneath.

Seriously, though, Ms Tilton, your post was a thing of beauty.

40

Hektor Bim 12.22.08 at 7:26 pm

Thanks for the long post, Ms Tilton. I apologize for the late response.

I did notice the lack of a fada, but I have to say that the tone of the discussion between EWI and other posters had an amazingly strong whiff of inside baseball. I just wanted a translation for the bystanders like me so that we could follow the game.

I’m going to have to quibble with something you said, unfortunately. You didn’t say give “chuckianism” a kicking, you said giving the “chucks a kicking”, which does betray a certain hostility to the people who belong to the movement and not just the movement itself.

As for republicanism, it seems like Australia is the next great hope.

41

Mrs Tilton 12.22.08 at 11:51 pm

Hektor @40,

you’ll have to forgive my no doubt clumsy attempt at subtlety, but whilst I plainly am hostile to republicans, I do try not to reduce people to their political positions. Republicans are human beings, not cartoon villains. It is their republicanism to which I am hostile, nothing more.

And whilst there were many ways in which republicanism should have been given a kicking — e.g., working hard, if one had influence on British state policy, to remove factors that could make republicanism an attractive ideology to anybody other than a small hard core of psychopaths and fascists — one of those ways inevitably had to be kicking republicanism’s vectors, i.e., republicans.

In doing so, however, it would have been important not to descend to their level; the final word in my post upthread @34 is not the least important in that post. Though I think it will be obvious that there is much I liked about Cruise O’Brien, there were also some things I disliked, and one that I dislike most intensely was his willingness to connive in having a few big old guards beat holy fuck out of IRA men. Never mind that IRA men might arguably, in some cosmic moral sense, deserve having holy fuck beaten out of them; CCOB (and the policemen in question) were acting under colour of state authority. In no state worth defending can that sort of thing be lawful; and agents of the law acting unlawfully is something I despise.

Anyway, all that is in the past now, isn’t it, and republicans (and their equally repugnant opposite numbers) no longer terrorise or murder, do they, except for members of their own community. So that’s all right then. Or at least, people in Northern Ireland have decided it’s an acceptable price to pay for something like peace. And fair play to them; but I still don’t think medals should be handed out for refraining from murder, and I will be glad if Sinn Féin’s electoral success remains limited to British elections.

42

memoryfoam 12.24.08 at 6:14 am

If he could cut through bullshit with a pungent description, he deserves the hagiography.

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