Speech by Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Micheál Martin

The Department of Foreign Affairs has always, right up to the present, recruited its fair share of our most able young people.  But Conor Cruise O’Brien was perhaps its most remarkable recruit ever – even if not perhaps always its most diplomatic.

When he died last December, I stated that:

“Conor Cruise O’Brien made a remarkable contribution to Irish life over many decades.  He was a scholar and writer of international distinction, an outstanding diplomat in the service both of Ireland and of the United Nations, and a robust and highly influential participant in the politics of our island.  He was a man of undoubted courage and brilliance. “

I went on to express my deepest condolences to his wife Máire Mac an tSaoí, another former officer of my Department, to his sons and daughters and other family members – including two nephews, John and Maurice Biggar, who also work in Foreign Affairs.

Dr Whelan’s book might be described as an intellectual biography.  It recognizes that O’Brien’s ideas, as expressed and advocated in his dazzling prose, are what mattered most about him.  But it also makes very clear the interplay between his personal history and his public and intellectual lives. 

O’Brien’s personal roots extended into the Irish parliamentary party; into socialism, pacifism and feminism; into UCD but also into Trinity.  His first wife was an Ulster Protestant, his second the daughter of a Belfast Catholic who played a major part in the foundation and development of our state.
At times -and this was already clear in States of Ireland – O’Brien approached history as a form of autobiography, and perhaps vice versa.  It also meant that his later political views continued to be heavily shaped by the lush and at times criss-crossing branches of his family tree, crammed full of strong personalities and political activists such as his father Frank, his uncle Tom Kettle, his aunt Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and her son Owen.  I think Dr Whelan does a brilliant job in summarizing how they and their life-stories helped to mould him.  He was the product of an Irish élite but always – not least because of his varied family history, and his education outside the Catholic mainstream – felt at an angle to it.

Moreover, Dr Whelan is right to say that O’Brien, for all that he liked to be seen as the ultimate cool rationalist, the debunker of others’ myths, was in fact himself capable of great passion and, at times, of evident irrationality. The appeal of much of his argument, conveyed as it is through prose of such lucidity and dazzle, is emotional as well as intellectual.

It is always good to be reminded, as this book does so well, of O’Brien’s amazing range – as an intellectual and as a performer.  He had fascinating things to say about Irish history and recent events; about French Catholic writers; about decolonization; about Camus; about Thomas Jefferson; about Zionism; and above all, in the later decades of his life, about Edmund Burke.  He wrote full-length scholarly monographs, scintillating short studies, articles and editorials; he wrote brilliant speeches for delivery by his Ministers at the UN and by himself in the Dáil, at conferences and at debating societies; he extemporized superbly on television and in person.  He was a scholar; a diplomat; a university professor; an editor; a member of Dáil Éireann; and a Minister.

Dr Whelan also underscores O’Brien’s continued and firmly held belief, throughout his life, that ideas, and the words which expressed them, mattered deeply in politics.  He would surely endorse Keynes’s dictum that all practical men are the slaves of some defunct philosopher – though O’Brien might add “or patriot.”

O’Brien’s distinctive style of analysis and argumentation is also very well analysed in this book.  Across many decades, and across many subjects, he consistently would identify a key theme, or organizing principle, and would then use it to clarify and explain.  Thus – to take a couple of examples  - the key to Camus for O’Brien was his upbringing in a colonial society in Algeria; while for Burke it was his strong but usually latent sympathy with his catholic heritage.  At its best, this method could work brilliantly in delivering focus and clarity.  At its worst, the arguments could become circular, self-referential, and blind to change or to nuance.  A valid but partial insight would be pushed to extremes.

Nobody ever accused O’Brien of an inability to make up his mind – or of a passive even-handedness.  When he wrote his book on Zionism, “The Siege”, he sent a copy to an old Foreign Affairs colleague, Bob McDonagh, whom he thanked in the acknowledgements for the hospitality Bob and his wife Róisín had offered him in New York.  Bob wrote back thanking him for the book, but commenting that so far as he could see he was the closest thing to a Palestinian Conor had met in the course of his researches.

This brings me on to Northern Ireland.  Conor Cruise O’Brien’s last years were something of a travesty of his own earlier record:  his endless prophecies of doom, his flirtation with Bob McCartney and the unionist rejectionists, his contempt for John Hume and other architects of the peace process.

Likewise, one can ask whether his willingness in the 1970s to set aside some of his own liberal principles on civil liberties and the freedom of speech might in fact have been morally questionable and counter-productive in its zeal, even at a time of such peril for Ireland.

But there is no doubt that in the 1970s in particular O’Brien’s impact on nationalism and on nationalists was profound, however much many of us might have contested this at the time.  He forced us to look at the tradition of violence in Irish political life, and to realize that the distinctions between past and present were certainly not black and white.  We were all obliged to ponder the relationship between history, speech and song, and the brutal acts of terrorism which disfigured our country.  He also played a pivotal role in forcing nationalism to face up to the realities of the unionist identity and of the unionist aspiration.

In this he was not alone.  Others – men such as Jack Lynch, Garret FitzGerald, TK Whitaker, and John Hume – in their own very different ways tried to confront these issues.  None did so as aggressively as O’Brien, and none went so far in repudiating all that nationalism includes, the good and noble as well as the misguided and bad.  The very force of his debating style, and his refusal to admit the complexity of “the crooked timber of humanity”, created enemies out of potential allies.  He was insufficiently understanding of the need, at times, for politicians to move not directly but by zigzags.  He did not respect ordinary people’s pride in their history as they had learned it.

But his sheer brilliance, and persistence, forced us to keep holding the mirror to our face, warts and all.  He exposed much of the hypocrisy and cant of militant republicanism, even if constitutional nationalists could be collateral damage.
In a sense – even though the idea would have appalled him – the strength of the basic principles underpinning the Good Friday Agreement:  respect for difference, consent, reconciliation through co-operation for mutual advantage, non-violence – owed not a little to his own role as the pitiless interrogator of unreflecting nationalism.

In conclusion, I believe that the Irish state has produced no more brilliant and accomplished a citizen than Conor Cruise O’Brien.  He was often wrong, but when he was right he was devastatingly so.  I think that this fine book amply makes Diarmuid Whelan’s concluding point that “he..shaped twentieth century Ireland like few others have.  Paradoxically he is similar to other architects of our national intellect, Pearse and de Valera.  Like them, his epitaph is the aftermath.”

ENDS

“Conor Cruise O’Brien: Violent Notions” by Dr Diarmuid Whelan is published by Irish Academic Press and is available at all bookshops.

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