“He was a scholar, diplomat, educator, politician, author, memoirist and general agent of change. He may also have been just slightly off his rocker.”—“Black 47” frontman Larry Kirwan, “Cruiser Sank More Than Spoken Words,” The Irish Echo, January 14, 2009
Conor Cruise O’Brien—inevitably nicknamed “The Cruiser”—enjoyed a long and varied career before his death last month at the age of 91. The comment by historian Paul Johnson regarding O’Brien’s biography of Edmund Burke--"a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived"—is the kind of blurb that authors would kill for. Unfortunately, the first part of the quote is, I’m sorry to say, not only exaggerated but foolish.
Somewhere along the way, O’Brien segued from an admirable historians’ tendency to look past patriotic myth about Ireland’s revolutionary origins to something closer to revisionism for its own sake. By the end of his career, he had not only become a Unionist Party member but had denounced the Good Friday agreement, the pact that enabled Ulster, at long last, to move out of the shadow of the gunman.
None of us can be right all the time. Particularly when it comes to Northern Ireland, quite a few bright people were wrong over the years. But at least some early critics of Bill Clinton’s decision to advance the peace process there by admitting Gerry Adams later owned up to their mistake, notably the late columnist Michael Kelly, one of the President’s fiercest critics.
What made O’Brien unique was not just that he was wrong nor even that he was consistently wrong, but that he was loudly, unrepentantly wrong.
O’Brien was concerned about the minority rights of Ulster Protestants in a united Ireland—an irony, given that that same group trampled on the rights of Catholics in the province for a half century after the Anglo-Irish Treaty that brought into being the Irish Free State as well as the fateful partition between North and south.
O’Brien himself infringed on the rights of citizens in the Irish Republic when he became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, pushing to curtail open debate on Irish history and the fate of the North by more aggressively applying the ban on IRA appearances on the airwaves called for in Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.
Kirwan’s column from the current issue of The Irish Echo rightly takes The Cruiser to task for this enforcement, which not only affected what citizens of the republic could see or hear from the Nationalist side in The Troubles but also limited exposure even to old folk songs that were heavily oriented for the republican cause and against British rule early in Ireland’s history.
Once he got a whiff of the urge to censor, O’Brien even thought of extending it outside the realm of the airwaves to print. The minister told a journalist friend of Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan that he was contemplating prosecuting the editor for printing pro-Nationalist letters in his paper.
It should also be mentioned that in 1994, O’Brien called for “more stringent security measures” for dealing with the rebels—ignoring a quarter-century of past experience in which that very approach had been tried by the British government, only to produce excesses that led to more sympathy for the IRA than might have existed otherwise.
A sympathetic obit of O’Brien in the British newspaper The Telegraph refers to the “many ways” in which he remained “profoundly Irish,” including “sometimes excessive conviviality.” Sounds like a euphemism for overindulgence in alcohol, does it not?
Well, if you ask me, O’Brien did far more damage to intellectual debate and the Irish constitution when he was sober than when he was under the influence.
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