IN SOME respects, Conor Cruise O'Brien was more typical of the 18th century of his hero Edmund Burke than of our own times. He harked back to a period when a "public man" could be expected to have things to say about a wide range of human endeavours, and to combine learning with practical politics.
His prose style - muscular classical rhetoric, leavened with sharp wit and lightly-worn erudition - had echoes of the same era. Yet what made O'Brien unique was that he combined this almost anachronistic tradition with a passionate engagement with the issues of the day, both in Ireland and in the wider world.
As a writer, O'Brien's breadth of forms - books, essays, newspaper columns, plays - was more than matched by the range of subjects on which he wrote with the lucidity, high intelligence and argumentative power that made him so formidable. From Parnell to Thomas Jefferson, from Ireland to Israel, from the United Nations to William Butler Yeats, he enlivened every subject he dwelt on in a way that was easy to disagree with but impossible to ignore. His characteristic ability to swoop down from the heights of erudition to skewer an enemy with rapier wit made him perhaps the finest polemicist of his day.
In politics, he arguably suffered from the tendency of intellectuals to be impatient with equivocation and subtleties. His hostility to positions he despised expressed itself in an unmistakably authoritarian streak. His tendency to draw absolute lines of division - pro or anti-Haughey; pro or anti-Israel; and especially pro or anti-IRA - sometimes took on an obsessive cast. His fondness for predicting an apocalyptic civil war meant that, in his later years, he missed the nature and significance of the peace process.
Yet, paradoxically, he contributed immensely to the achievement of peace in Ireland. A mark of his achievement is that his courage, when it mattered most, as an internal critic of Irish Catholic nationalism is easily forgotten. He was ultimately so successful in challenging fixed mindsets that many of his basic messages are no longer especially controversial. His dismantling of the myths of violent Irish nationalism helped to combat the IRA's claim to legitimacy. His recognition of the rights of unionists prepared the way for the Belfast Agreement. He would argue passionately and brilliantly against such conclusions, but we have reason to be grateful that, in this case at least, he would be wrong.