Madam, – In an otherwise generous tribute to Conor Cruise O’Brien, Stephen Collins writes: “Of course, he also made political mistakes. His determination to defeat the objectives of Sinn Féin/IRA led him to ignore the faults on the unionist side, and his venture into Northern politics in the 1990s as a member of Robert McCartney’s fringe unionist party devalued his real achievements” (Opinion, December 20th).
Many other commentators have made much the same point, or simply avoided mention of that UK Unionist Party (UKUP) episode, one I observed at close hand.
I believe it was not a mistake or fault, rather the logical conclusion of a position Dr O’Brien had long espoused as a 26-county patriot. He was never an instinctive unionist and, more’s the pity, no integrationist, which was the initial position of the UKUP. Nonetheless he was determined to go wherever necessary, risking his reputation, to ensure that the South was not destroyed by its tendency to at least sympathise with the IRA, and, at worst, to let it infect the body politic.
One only has to see how willing Fianna Fáil (and for that matter London) was to ignore the IRA’s criminal activities in the run-up to the St Andrew’s deal – a position from which it took Michael McDowell, single-handedly, to rescue the two governments.
O’Brien was ready to go to the utmost extreme to protect the southern State from the corrosive and destructive force of the Provisionals and their deceptive “Republican” ideology. If that required him to join a unionist party, then so be it. And he never apologised for it.
Back in April 1972, I observed Dr O’Brien’s foresight (if not his sympathy for two-nationism) as he went bail for a group of nine Northerners from the Workers Association for the Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland. They had chained themselves to the radiators in Iveagh House under the banner “Recognise Northern Ireland”. A deed unfortunately not done for 25 years, and at a cost. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Brendan Lynch’s assertion that Conor Cruise O’Brien was “our Bertrand Russell” (December 23rd) does a great disservice to the eminent British philosopher.
If Dr O’Brien’s life and political opinions could be said to mirror those of anyone, a better match could not be found than another Irishman and his intellectual hero, Edmund Burke.
Like Burke, who supported both the American Revolution and greater reform in Ireland, Dr O’Brien initially made his reputation by espousing such liberal causes as the separation of Church and State and the anti-apartheid movement. The outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland led Dr O’Brien to draw many of the same conclusions regarding political change that Edmund Burke had arrived at following the French Revolution. Unlike Burke, Dr O’Brien had the opportunity to effect enormous change when he was appointed to ministerial office, but his tenure proved Gustave Flaubert’s comment that “inside every revolutionary there is a policeman”.
The most galling scene in Dr O’Brien’s life was undoubtedly the sight of him, having spent decades writing and arguing in favour of the Enlightenment and against the power of the clergy, throwing in his lot with another doctor – a reverend whose tribalism and rabble-rousing went against everything the Enlightenment held dear.
Dr O’Brien should be remembered and congratulated for his pioneering work on such literary figures as Yeats and Camus, but he was no Bertrand Russell. – Yours, etc,