"This has to be a joke", began the one-paragraph Sunday Tribune review of Ideas Matter - Essays in honour of Conor Cruise O'Brien. After reciting a few of the titles, it went on: "The blurb on the back says this project was born to celebrate the man through a wide range of subjects about which Conor is an acknowledged expert: Irish history and politics, the United Nations, the Middle East, African affairs, American studies, the interplay of literature and politics, Edmund Burke, Tocqueville, Camus, W.B. Yeats. No more needs to be said."
I puzzled over those few lines, showed them to an Englishman who was equally baffled and then talked them over with an Irish friend who is unusual in being pleased that Conor wasn't drowned at birth. Our conclusion was dispiriting. It isn't just that Conor is hated for being nasty about the excesses of Irish nationalism, it's that he's hated for being open to new ideas and for being hostile to ideologies. For all our cosmopolitan pretensions, the Irish are by instinct ideologists - partly because of centuries of adherence to an autocratic church that discouraged thought and stifled dissent.
One of "the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea", wrote that great Victorian, Walter Bagehot. In Ireland, we deal with this by condemning as a heretic anyone who tries to inflict such pain on us. When we overthrow one dogma, we replace it with another.
When I left Ireland 30 years ago you couldn't safely criticise the Irish Catholic Church. I haven't forgotten the fear I felt when my then chap and I took the decision to stay sitting down one midday in the library of UCD - an allegedly non-denominational university - as everyone else rose to say the Angelus. I don't know what I thought would happen, but somehow I thought they'd get us or our 30 first cousins.
When I come back to Ireland these days I find myself, an atheist, defending the church against the blanket condemnation of the intelligentsia. Attempts to remind people how hard were the lives of many nuns, priests and brothers trapped in lives they hated has once or twice ended in near-uproar: I was once accused by a friend of condoning child abuse.
When I first emigrated, James Joyce was a dirty anti-Catholic writer who wasn't a proper Irishman at all. These days, he's compulsory, if rarely read. Padraig Flynn is for me the perfect physical manifestation of the Irish Catholic mind. It's less than a decade ago that he symbolised misogyny: these days he is a standard-bearer for equal-opportunity fanatics.
Conor's very intellectual cosmopolitanism offends Ireland as surely as it would have offended the old Soviet Union, for his insatiable curiosity about the world threatens our orthodoxy of the moment. The first time I met him was at a banquet seven years ago.
At the time I was writing the history of the Economist and was in love with the mind of Walter Bagehot, its greatest editor, of whom most people knew little or nothing. I was not surprised that Conor was a shining exception, but I was almost disconcerted when we touched on my other preoccupation of the time - the crime novel I was writing lampooning political correctness in academia. He was not only highly informative about what was going on American campuses, but was utterly clued-up on the clashes between feminists and blacks and development in lesbian studies.
"Damn it, he's 73," I remember thinking almost resentfully. "How can he be more up-to-date than I am?" Perhaps part of the problem Ireland has with Conor is that he makes envious people feel small.
I look at the line-up of essayists honouring him and I feel great pride that our little island could have produced such a world-class intellectual and man of moral and physical courage. Here is Alexander Kwapong, a distinguished classicist and Conor's successor as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, writing of Conor's "genius" as an author and of how his leadership in championing academic freedom against an oppressive dictator helped the institution "mature into the great African university first envisioned by its founders".
An emeritus professor of the University of Capetown writes of the impact in South Africa of "one of the great minds of the western world." A Los Angeles Asian-American met him at Harvard and fell in love with his "cross-cultural approach and global mind". Other admiring friends and ex-colleagues include a Harvard professor of Afro-American Studies, an Israeli diplomat of great distinction and a prize-winning Mexican intellectual.
But of course it is his relentless analytical scrutiny of Irish nationalism that has given Irish society the excuse to hate Conor. Gerry Adams has explained in what he has palmed off as his autobiography that "O'Brien's hostility to the democratic demands of nationalists in the North was intimately connected with his denial of the colonial nature of Britain's presence in Ireland".
IT would be slightly more accurate to say that his hostility to the armed fascists who killed in the name of Ireland was intimately connected with his passion for democratic liberalism. His first principles are summed up by the editors of Ideas Matter as a "life-long commitment to constitutional democracy, pluralism - in politics and thought; the preservation of individual liberty; the defence of human rights; undiluted academic freedom; religious tolerance; an implacable opposition to racism, especially in its most virulent strain in Europe, anti-Semitism; resistance to imperialism in all of its forms; and the rejection of illegitimate political violence".
Unfortunately for his popularity at home, Conor's application of these principles to Irish nationalist orthodoxies have caused him to expose the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, intolerance and atavism that provide its underpinning. Violent or constitutional, Irish nationalism is still intellectually threadbare, and some of its main proponents loathe Conor.
Walter Bagehot got it right. "Dogma," he wrote, "is a hard husk; poetry has the soft down of the real fruit. Ideas seize on the fanatic mind just as they do on the poetical; they have the same imperious ruling power. The difference is, that in the one the impelling force is immutable, iron, tyrannical; in the other the rule is expansive, growing, free, taking up from all around it moment by moment whatever is fit." Ireland produced a great poetical man of ideas. She has treated him with scorn and derision. Fortunately, the rest of the world is full of people who admire and love him.