States of Ireland

"I have more sympathy with his judgement regarding the potential for escalation than I do with the deeper analysis that he developed to uphold it. Conor Cruise O’Brien was a very—perhaps an incomparably—powerful intellectual presence in southern Ireland when I was a teenager: he exerted a considerable yet controversial influence. He was admired and reviled in equal measure. O’Brien worked for the United Nations in the early 1960s. He then occupied the position of Vice-Chancellor at the University of Ghana. By the late 1960s he held an academic post at New York University. He then returned to Ireland and entered Irish politics as a Labour party TD [Teachta Dála, member of the Irish parliament]. In due course he ended up as a minister in a Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. After he lost his seat he became editor of the Observer newspaper in London. Thereafter he largely became a campaigner, a publicist, and a freelance writer. Some would argue that, ultimately, he descended into a parody of himself – as many fêted intellectuals-turned-polemicists do. Yet he certainly was, in the 70s, peerless in terms of his powers of political analysis. Conor Cruise O’Brien built his reputation as a critic of what he chose to term ‘nationalism.’ But the truth is that he was himself a southern Irish nationalist who saw nothing but destabilising potential in the rise of rebellious, irredentist doctrine in the north. So much of his project was about securing the stability of the South against the tremendous forces of disintegration in the north. He was very much a critic of what he saw as the most potent ideology capable of connecting the fate of the north to the south — namely modern Irish republicanism. That, in the end, was his real target. Of course, it’s true, Northern Irish republicanism did have enormous potential to destabilize the South — as it succeeded in doing in the late 60s and again during the hunger strikes. O’Brien’s analysis is not exactly false. However, his account of the motivations driving republicanism, though highly influential, seems to me fanciful – abusing his antagonists in terms of their supposed reversion to a species of atavistic tribalism. I find this less than convincing, even superstitious, in its own way. I’m not at all sure that’s right, though it’s true that his constituency was down south. After Bloody Sunday, he almost swung behind the Ireland-wide nationalist option, so he wasn’t immune to the kind of sentiment he liked to denounce. I don’t see him as emotionally detached, but I do see him as having made a political calculation about the necessity for the south to detach itself. In actual fact, he informed himself about the north more than most, and spent some time there, and wrote about it sympathetically from fairly early on. I just think he believed it was essential not to get drawn in, emotionally, by the rhetoric of republicanism — which had been generated by the south in the 1912-23 period but had now found a home in the north. So while his bête noire was a southern creation, it persisted as a northern threat, and he wanted to dismantle it on the grounds of southern raison d’état . What he opposed covertly perhaps challenged his intellectual consistency, less the integrity of his political choices. That may be. I would think that needs some refinement, myself. In the south there was antagonism against northern unionist Protestantism, but I don’t think there was an energised hostility to Protestantism as a sectarian program commonly shared in the south. Of course, there’s a very small Protestant population, but I went to a mixed school in the south of County Dublin and growing up there, I don’t remember any religious hostility – ever, at all. Though perhaps my exposure was limited. I do remember, clearly, animosity to northern loyalism and unionism. In practice this meant Protestants. Southern Protestantism was altogether different, however."