Cruise O'Brien and the Northern question: A key Labour Party strategist and former diplomat, Conor Cruise O'Brien, was wary of involving a UN peacekeeping force in Northern Ireland, claiming it would let Britain "off the hook", writes John Bowman.
Conor Cruise O'Brien and Garret FitzGerald have often been linked together as like-minded commentators on Northern Ireland. From their speeches, books and journalism over many decades, they could be regarded as the most influential Southern voices in debunking the naive analysis which for so long had underpinned the South's anti-partitionism.
But there were also differences between them. I think readers familiar with their thinking would have no difficulty in saying which of them tended toward optimism and which toward pessimism about possible outcomes in Northern Ireland. In 1975 they were cabinet colleagues: FitzGerald, as foreign minister, the main originator of cabinet memoranda on the policy options; O'Brien, as a key Labour Party strategist, determined to have his voice heard.
That voice, when expressed publicly, could cause FitzGerald problems. There was the RTÉ interview just after the convention election when O'Brien, in an apparent contradiction of government policy, rubbished the prospects for power-sharing. This was being listened to in Derry by John Hume and by FitzGerald's key adviser, Seán Donlon. The consternation which followed was a reminder of an earlier row when O'Brien, on a visit to the United States, had publicly rebuked the New York lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer, for his support for Noraid.
O'Brien returned to Dublin with a copy of a memorandum by the Irish consul-general in New York, Michael Lillis. This noted that the Irish-American community exemplified many of the attitudes and problems of an émigré community in the US: they felt "socially and culturally insecure" and they clung closely "to a totem of historic myths of British repression and Irish failure which provides them with a history, an identity and a cause". Northern Ireland provided "a heady focus for all of this".
Lillis advised that the Irish-Americans were "not disposed to accept a didactic and prescriptive message from Dublin as to whom they should endorse or support". He recommended that the message to them should, "as far as possible, harness their assumptions and appeal to their concerns". Emphasis should be placed on Dublin's apprehension concerning the exposed Catholic minority and on the need for reconciliation.
On his return from the US, O'Brien wrote privately and confidentially to FitzGerald stating that he was "considerably concerned" - not with Lillis himself, "a very good officer" - but rather with the prevailing attitude of Irish officials which was reflected in the Lillis memorandum.
In summary this was "the less said about the IRA the better because they are making no impact outside the Irish-American community"; and within that community, "the attacks do not damage them but perhaps increase support for them". O'Brien admitted there was "certainly a minority of Irish-American irreconcilables", but he believed the Irish government should actively explain their condemnation of the IRA to a much larger group, "which is neither fanatical nor altogether indifferent - these are the people who contribute the dollars out of vague sentiment and lack of knowledge of the realities of the situation".
O'Brien then confided to FitzGerald that in his opinion it was "very much more convenient from the point of view of the personal comfort and peace of mind of the people concerned to shut up about the IRA, within the hearing of Irish-Americans. The alternative course involves threats, pickets, disagreeable telephone calls affecting one's family and the possibility of more serious unpleasantness. I do not say that a mere threat of such things would deflect any of the people concerned from their clear duty, but human nature being what it is it is quite likely to affect them. . ."
O'Brien had many invitations to universities abroad to lecture on politics and history; and invariably took the opportunity to meet political leaders or to speak publicly on Northern Ireland. In London in May he had a meeting with the Northern Ireland secretary, Merlyn Rees. The Irish ambassador, Donal O'Sullivan, accompanied O'Brien and records him as reassuring Rees that the Irish government had in mind "further steps to arrest the flow of what he described as silly money from the USA".
The ambassador's rather anodyne note of the meeting is followed in the file by a more acerbic addendum from O'Brien. He believed that Rees would soon be transferred and, perhaps, replaced by Roy Hattersley. "In the circumstances it would be understandable if Rees at the moment is thinking along the lines of Louis XV: 'After me the deluge'." And O'Brien believed that "on the whole the sooner Rees is relieved of his present duties the better".
He had found him "to a dangerous degree" manifestly preoccupied with his own political future.
"Several times when I asked him what the effects of such and such a development would be, he replied in terms of effects in Westminster, on the Labour Party, on public opinion in Britain and even directly on his own future. Whereas, of course, what I was asking about was the likely effect in Northern Ireland."
O'Brien concluded that whereas Rees's remarks "about the actual present situation - statistics of violence, policing and so on - were apparently reassuring, I would not feel that the implications of his remarks as regards the future gave much grounds for optimism".
Running through O'Brien's advice to his colleagues throughout the year is a warning against optimism. In January he wrote to FitzGerald with a detailed analysis querying some of the thinking in FitzGerald's contingency planning. In particular he drew attention to scenarios under the heading: "Developments leading to a peaceful solution outside the UK." O'Brien told FitzGerald: "I gather from some obiter dicta of yours recently that you are leaning rather strongly towards this possibility."
O'Brien wrote as a former diplomat, a veteran of the futile anti-partition campaign of the 1950s and an expert on the United Nations. He clearly thought that any prospect of an agreed UN force to keep the peace in Northern Ireland remote. And he saw dangers in even tentative exploration of such a policy.
"Is there not a serious danger that our toying with the idea of an international force, which may well prove entirely chimerical, might let Britain off the hook, providing her with an honourable path of retreat from Northern Ireland in circumstances offering only illusory guarantees for the minority?"
O'Brien allowed that he might be "given to over-simplification" but it appeared to him that "the only likely outcomes - I will not call them solutions - in Northern Ireland are either (a) continuance of British rule or (b) Protestant rule".
Since the latter "would be nastier" from the Irish point of view, it followed that it was an Irish interest "to keep the British on the hook rather than let them off the hook, through internationalising schemes of dubious validity"; especially when such schemes "might well have the effect of ensuring that the shift from British to Protestant rule occurs in the most hysterical and destructive forms possible".
Five months later, O'Brien returned to the same arguments when he detected what he clearly saw as a recurring Iveagh House fault on the partition question: optimistic assumptions influencing policy. Such assumptions did not have "a happy fate" in Northern Ireland.
O'Brien believed that a British withdrawal - whatever the circumstances - would inevitably lead to a loyalist-led government which would come under renewed assault from the IRA. This would invariably be met by a "very much more drastic, ruthless and efficient" response from the loyalist security forces than Catholics had suffered in Belfast in August 1969.
In such a situation, O'Brien foresaw the Irish government being called on "to go to help theminority and it would be called on with all the more insistence, and indeed justice, because it had itself helped to set up, and had guaranteed, the entity which. . . would have proved to be a trap".
O'Brien believed that the Dublin government was not in a position "to extend effective protection to the minority", and that an ineffective attempt "would precipitate even greater disasters than would have preceded the intervention. A full-scale massacre of Catholics under these conditions is a possibility by no means to be ruled out."
He concluded that the British "may go anyway". If they did "indicate an intent to go - and not before - we should then have to look for fall-back positions". What he was lobbying to avoid was what he termed "a broken-down fall-back" which the Irish government had helped to construct. In that case, "we ourselves would be regarded as among the chief architects of the disaster".