The Cruiser Goes Down

Conor Cruise O'Brien's death, at 91, comes as a jolt. By the end, the Cruiser was something of a reactionary (his hostility to nationalism had led him to embrace Bob Macartney's UK Unionist Party) but that shouldn't detract from his achievements as a historian (especially his books on Parnell and Burke), journalist and public intellectual.

Most of all, however, his death reminds one of how completely Ireland has changed in the past 20 years. The Cruiser's battles with Charlie Haughey (he was right about Haughey years before the full extent of the former Taoiseach's crookedness became widely apparent) and his fulminations on the national question have a certain antiquated feel now that the issue has, for the time being at least, been settled. Nonetheless, O'Brien played a leading role in dragging Irish opinion away from a cosy, soft-hearted, sentimental nationalism that tacitly endorsed the Republican movement's aims, if not necessarily its methods. In that sense, he did the Irish State great service.

In my time at TCD he still used to turn up, from time to time, to the College Historical Society but even then one had the sense that the Society's Patron (as he was) no longer quite understood how Ireland was changing. Prosperity was a tough surprise to handle and if O'Brien retained the ability to cut through some of the cant and humbug that accompanied this sudden, startling improvement in Hibernian fortune, he was, even then, a relic of earlier, grimmer times. Times when everything seemed likely to fall apart.

Even now, his war with Haughey's GUBU-era government (an acronymn coined by the Cruiser from the Taoiseach's description of how discovering a double-murderer hiding out in the Attorney-General's home was "Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented") is sparklingly good stuff. More than anyone else, O'Brien captured the extraordinary recklessness of the Haughey government, writing with savage wit, irony and anger.

Still, I guess that it's his work on Parnell and Burke that will last the longest. He was a very Irish intellectual: riddled by contradiction; often wilfully extreme (and inconsistent) in his views but, until his later years at least, always interesting and often surprising.

The best obituary I've seen is Brian Fallon's notice in the Guardian. Telegraph and Irish Times obits here and here.

UPDATE: Sean Coleman has a very good post on O'Brien over at Norm's place.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to Jim for reminding me that O'Brien was also a Contributing Editor to the Atlantic. Here's one of his autobiographical essays, published by the magazine in 1994.

Comments

[Jim]

O'Brien's Atlantic articles on Ireland and the middle east persuaded me to subscribe to the magazine back in the 80s (and I still do). He did a very lucid job of explaining just why the conflicts were so intractable - at a time when the average mush-headed American journalist believed that peace was just around the corner (and that the IRA were the good guys). And, yes, his biography of Burke is excellent.

[Observer]

He did a very lucid job of explaining just why the conflicts were so intractable

And in regard to Ireland, he did his best in the early 90s - by his attacks on those people like John Hume who did take the initiative in trying to resolve the conflict, by his apocalyptic predictions in the international press after the IRA went on ceasefire, by his support of the rejectionist wing of Unionism in the form of the UKUP - to ensure that the conflict would remain intractable and to sabotage any attempts at a solution.

Fortunately, he failed.

Good riddance to the malevolent old sod.

[ndm]

Who's to know what to think.

Sean Coleman at Normblog:

His rancorous rejection of the Northern peace process, for example, and his dubious claims on other conflicts (Israel, South Africa) served to create an image - unfair perhaps - of a mind soured on the liberal ideas that had made his name.

Martin Peretz on The Spine:

He wrote one book the New York Times did not refer to in its Friday obituary. It is a gargantuan book (nearly 800 pages) called The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, one of the three or four most authoritative and certainly the most literate in the field. Maybe it is understandable, this coarse omission by the newspaper of record. Zionism was O'Brien's last great passion, and I recall an evening at my house with Amos Oz when he tried to rekindle what he thought was the Hebrew writer's unaccountable pessimism about the dream. But, as O'Brien himself wrote at the end of his grand opus, "what is not in sight is the end to the siege."

[Bongo]

Nationalists hated The Cruiser because he berated both the blood and soil fascism of the Provos and the cowardice of the "constitutional" nationalists who apologised for their murder gangs and sustained them intellectually and politically by refusing to accept that the vast majority of Protestants choose not to be Irish and that short of force or fear there was no changing their minds.

[coach outlet]

Your point of view a lot of benefit to me, thank you