OPINION:Conor Cruise O'Brien understood that Northern Protestants didn't have to choose between being Ulster and Irish - he knew we could be both, writes Michael McDowell.
THIRTY-SIX years ago, in TCD's Berkeley Library, this Northern Ireland Prod had an epiphany. I was thrillingly immersed in a new book, States of Ireland, by Conor Cruise O'Brien.
At last, I thought, here was a Southerner who understands the North and the people I come from, who treats their political beliefs with respect and empathy.
I had gone to Trinity because I saw myself as a "trifecta" - Irish, British and above all Northern Irish. I loved all of Ireland but Belfast was home, not Dublin. We Northerners at TCD, Catholic and Protestant, had more in common with one another than with our Southern fellow students, who, overwhelmingly, had never visited our part of Ireland but had multiple opinions about it, mostly ill-informed and heavily prejudiced against "unionists", whom they saw as oppressors and irredeemable bigots.
The Cruiser, like me, was a member of the Irish Labour Party then and States of Irelandposited a radical thought - that Ireland was populated by two nations, or two communities, or two tribes, or two traditions; take your pick.
The Irish Timeschose John Hume to write a furious review of the book. He just didn't get it. The book was condemned as "unionist" which it was not. Cruise O'Brien was seeking a logical explanation for why this Northern majority was so irreconcilably opposed to a united Ireland and why that community was so different from those with whom they shared the island.
He grounded his argument in history and, coming from a "mixed" religious background, understood the complexities of the different identities. The book was an intellectual refutation of the simplistic Irish nationalist, republican and unionist myths of the time, and still.
Decades later, in Washington, when I challenged Hume at a think-tank, he remarked to a colleague: "Michael McDowell will always be an Ulsterman and never an Irishman."
The Cruiser taught me that I didn't have to choose to be one or the other. I could proudly be both.
How could a Prod like me be just simply "Irish"? My family came to the North in the 17th to 19th centuries, were Scottish Calvinists and English non-conformists. Our identity was a hybrid and no harm in that.
The Cruiser knew we didn't have to choose one identity, or to allow people like Hume to define us. Likewise, I and my family didn't accept the unionist label either. We were Northern Ireland Labour Party voters, social democrats or democratic socialists, who supported a party which had both Protestant and Catholic voters who eschewed the tribal choices which so many others felt they had to make or made comfortably.
This is what Cruise O'Brien understood. States of Irelandis a classic and will remain so, long after the decent Garret FitzGerald's Towards a New Irelandhas been forgotten.
I might have differed with the Cruiser in his last years, but not a lot. He fought to keep the gun out of Irish politics, North and South; he created the intellectual space in what was a stifling cesspool of lazy sectarian understandings. He changed the political playing field decades ago but we are still far from the pluralism he sought.
I supported the Good Friday Agreement and played a small part in its working out. Sadly, its spirit was damaged hugely by sectarian bargains struck by London and Dublin, of which the Cruiser deeply disapproved. I originated the Independent Monitoring Commission concept which got us to "yes".
True, and happily, we are not killing one another for our beliefs any more but the Executive is a largely cynical compact which allows the DUP and Sinn Féin to carve up political power and not truly share power. It is not the vision which Conor had in mind.
I enjoyed a close friendship with Conor from my early 20s. My 13-year-old son Conor is named in his honour; indeed, the Cruiser dedicated his book on Thomas Jefferson to Conor. His loving and equally distinguished wife, Maire MacEntee, is an equal friend to myself and my Irish-American wife, Susan Flanigan. Conor broke the mould of Irish prejudice like no one else.
• Michael McDowell is a foreign affairs consultant and former journalist in Washington DC