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2 Power, ‘Revisionist nationalism's consolidation, republicanism's marginalization, and the peace process’, p. 90. Following protracted negotiations, the Sunningdale Agreement was signed on 9 December 1973.Footnote 110 Despite his own deeply-held reservations regarding the entire enterprise, as a member of the Irish cabinet and therefore with collective responsibility, O'Brien supported the Irish government's signing of the accord. The controversy over O'Brien's Galway comments was the first of many disagreements that he would have with his Labour Party colleagues. In fact, O'Brien's papers contain a file relating to his proposed resignation as the Labour Party's spokesperson on foreign affairs and Northern Ireland, dated circa October 1971. O'Brien's threatened resignation was prompted by his exclusion from an apparent meeting about Northern Ireland at the British Labour Party annual conference in Brighton in July 1971, involving Brendan Halligan, Justin Keating and the British Labour Party M.P. In correspondence with Corish, O'Brien exclaimed that his exclusion from this meeting implied that he was ‘no longer [the] credible spokesman for the Labour Party on Foreign Affairs’ and that there was a ‘lack of confidence in me as spokesman’.
Israel, South Africa and international affairs
Ardent republicans in the family somehow took tea with supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which favored home rule but not a break with Britain. As a diplomat, he helped chart Ireland’s course as an independent, anticolonialist voice at the United Nations and played a critical role in the United Nations intervention in Congo in 1961. As vice chancellor of the University of Ghana in the early 1960s, he fell out with the dictator Kwame Nkrumah over the question of academic freedom, and while teaching at New York University later that decade, he took part in an antiwar demonstration that led to his arrest.
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But while the Belgians cut their official ties, they didn't stray far, bent on extracting further great profits from the region's abundant natural resources. Given strong Belgian encouragement, one of the richest provinces, Katanga, decided that it would fare better on its own, outside the newly-founded Democratic Republic of Congo. After the newly-independent Congo Republic elected a pro-Soviet leader, the Western powers piled in on the side of breakaway Katanga as the Congo became the latest theatre of hate in the Cold War. He resurfaced as a writer and playwright, an outspoken Irish Independent columnist, and as Minister for Posts & Telegraphs in the 1970s he reinforced Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act banning supporters of militant republicanism from the airwaves. He also bequeathed the English language a new word, Gubu, describing foe CJ Haughey's car crash 1982 administration as "Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented". During the interview, Kreisler asked if, as a politician and a writer, O'Brien were ever torn between rationality and emotions about specific issues.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, 91, Irish diplomat and writer; Paul Weyrich, conservative strategist
He had charisma, or insolently flaunted his objectionability, depending principally on one's politics. Colloquial reference to 'the Cruiser' (a term popularised by John Healy (qv)), if it did not indicate affection never mind political accord, attested to a recognition of O'Brien as a familiar, formidable and distinctive figure in the dramatis personae of contemporary Irish life. He wrote for the Irish Times (1982–6), then moved to the Irish Independent, for which his father had written.
Conor Cruise O'Brien was born on 3 November 1917, the only child of Francis Cruise O'Brien and Kathleen (née Sheehy).Footnote 25 Before his teenage years, Northern Ireland featured very little in O'Brien's world view. He had ‘no family ties with the place’ nor had he much contact, if any, with northern Protestants.Footnote 26 It was only around the age of sixteen, while attending Sandford Park, a non-denominated school in Ranelagh, Dublin, that O'Brien first gave Northern Ireland serious consideration. He was a historian, an essayist, a journalist-publicist, an academic, a politician, a career diplomat, a cabinet minister (for nearly four years), a man who held many plum jobs, yet was constantly at war with the intellectual and socio-political establishments of his time. At times he seemed consciously to stand above the battle(s), yet his attitude to many of his antagonists, intellectual or political, was often personal and he could be vituperative in his verbal attacks on enemies, real or imagined. His contempt for Charles Haughey, twice taoiseach and long-term leader of the Fianna Fail party, was notorious, and much of it seems to have been returned by Haughey, who refused to engage in public debate with him. The article examines four historical case studies to demonstrate the extent to which O'Brien found himself increasingly marginalised, in some cases ostracised, because of his attitude to Northern Ireland.
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In 1961, in a sign of O'Brien's growing stature, not only in Ireland, but internationally, he was appointed U.N. However, on 1 December 1961, O'Brien resigned from the D.E.A.Footnote 41 It was during these formative years that O'Brien acquired an interest in anti-colonisation, anti-imperialism and the ‘Third World’.Footnote 42 His personal experiences in the early 1960s during his U.N. Mr. O’Brien, known to friends as the Cruiser, was born in Dublin on Nov. 3, 1917, to a family with a long political pedigree on both sides of the widening split in Irish political life.
Opposition to the Vietnam War
Perhaps his nearest equivalent were French intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. O'Brien, as with many Irishmen of his generation, was deeply influenced by French culture. His early essays on contemporary French writers, especially the neo-Catholic novelists of the 1940s such as François Mauriac, first brought him into the public eye, though they were written under the pseudonym Donat O'Donnell. Later he used the title of a Mauriac novel for his book Maria Cross, which dealt largely with those writers and the intellectual and moral dilemmas with which they wrestled.
Katanga, 1961
While an Irish cabinet minister, O'Brien, a fierce critic of the IRA, banned members of the terrorist group and its political arm Sinn Fein being interviewed on radio and television. His tenure as vice president of the University of Ghana proved nearly as eventful. Nkrumah, becoming increasingly dictatorial, removed the nation’s chief justice. The Ghanaian press mounted a campaign against the university, portraying it as a hotbed of subversion.
The request was declined, but renewed at the end of May without referring to the Congo. O'Brien left Dublin for New York on 27 May, and left New York for the Congo, via Brussels and Paris on 8 June, reaching Élisabethville on 14 June to take up his responsibilities as the representative of the UN secretary general in Katanga as part of ONUC (Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo). "Conor was a leading figure in Irish life in many spheres since the 1960s. It is a reflection on his wide array of talents that he was able to make a sizeable impact in the public service, in politics, in academia and journalism," Cowen said. With the defeat of the coalition, Mr. O’Brien became editor in chief of The Observer, the London Sunday newspaper. For the two years he occupied the post, it gave him a platform from which to write polemical articles on politics and to indulge his passion for literature and history. Conor Cruise O’Brien (born November 3, 1917, Dublin, Ireland—died December 18, 2008, Howth, near Dublin) Irish diplomat, politician, educator, and journalist who was one of Ireland’s most provocative political and intellectual figures.
His essays and occasional pieces also contain some excellent literary criticism, without the contemporary polemics that intrude into so much of what he wrote and said. But then, polemics and O'Brien could seldom be kept apart for long, and public controversy and debate seemed to answer a fundamental demand of his nature. In 1987 he was embroiled in controversy again, this time as a result of a visit to South Africa, where his lectures at the University of Cape Town angered black students. However, as his writings show, O'Brien was no friend to racial (or racist) policies, and his 1986 book on Israel, The Siege, was characteristically independent in its viewpoint. He was then appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, a position he held until 1969. He supported the right of the Vietnamese people to use violence against US armed forces.
As for Conor, he continued to display his usual sangfroid and his account of his treatment at the hands of Lonrho provides one of the more hilarious passages in his vivid volume of memoirs published in 1998. Within three months, Conor had taken up residence on the managerial floor in the slightly anonymous position of editor-in-chief. (The paper already had an editor in the shape of the young Donald Trelford, who had succeeded Astor at the age of 38 in 1975.) It says much for the forbearance and tact deployed on each side that this delicate power-sharing arrangement was made to work. When it finally came to an end in 1981, the cause was an external one - a change in the paper's ownership from the American oil company, Atlantic Richfield, to "Tiny" Rowland's African trading company Lonrho. Conor had been fiercely opposed to the paper passing into Lonrho's hands, even giving evidence against it to the Monopolies Commission. DUBLIN — Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish iconoclast who led several lives as a diplomat, government minister, author and newspaper editor, has died.
With the Ghanaian interlude, another phase of O'Brien's career had come to an abrupt end, with an ensuing hiatus. In June 1965 his appointment as regents' professor and holder of the Albert Schweitzer chair in humanities at New York University (NYU) was announced, and he took up the position in September 1965. He was an inspiring teacher, and drew to the programme he directed George Steiner, David Caute and John Arden (qv), and later Edward Thompson. O'Brien entered TCD in 1936 with a sizarship achieved through his proficiency in Irish.
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O'Brien, who was writing for the paper in diverse formats, proposed to contribute a regular weekly piece, and Astor agreed. His elegantly personalised, short-form essays were an acknowledged success, and the template for much of his later journalism. Corporate intrigues persisted, and on 25 January 1981 the Observer announced that O'Brien for family reasons had asked to be relieved of his duties as editor-in-chief from 31 March. When Anderson sold the paper to Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, O'Brien had testified with Astor and Goodman against the acquisition before the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Fired by Trelford, with whom his relations remained amicable, his association with the paper ceased in 1984. Asked about the section in the bill in an interview with Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post, he pulled out of his office desk a sheaf of letters to the Irish Press sympathetic to the IRA.
He was a man of so many contradictions that to call him a blend of all these seems utterly inappropriate; rather, they appeared to pull him in many contrary directions at once. He seems posthumously fated to give rise to further controversy, since opinions on his career, his writing, his personality and his public stances vary hugely. Cruise O'Brien's Dublin North-East constituency was re-drawn and renamed as part of his Labour colleague James Tully's attempt as Minister for Local Government to design boundaries in the electoral interests of the coalition partners. In the 1977 general election, he stood in Dublin Clontarf and was one of three ministers (the others being Justin Keating and Patrick Cooney) defeated in a rout of the outgoing administration.[43] He was, however, subsequently elected to Seanad Éireann in 1977 from the Dublin University constituency.
O'Brien resigned his seat in 1979 because of new commitments as editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper in London. In September 1961, a company of 155 Irish UN troops ("A" Company, 35th Battalion, Irish Army), was surrounded by a force of heavily armed Gendarmerie and mercenaries outnumbering them 20-to-one in Jadotville. The Irish soldiers, many of them still in their teens, were lightly armed, short of ammunition and supplies, and unprepared for the situation. He came to prominence in 1961, after his secondment from Ireland's UN delegation as a special representative to Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, in the Katanga region of the newly independent Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Her father, Alec Foster, was a liberal Derry presbyterian, her mother a Lynd who was a sister of the essayist Robert Lynd (qv). O'Brien and Christine began a relationship, and were married in the registry office in Dublin on 20 September 1939, before they commenced their fourth year at Trinity. He was very fond of Alec Foster, and it was under his auspices that O'Brien had his first experience of Northern Ireland, where he taught for a couple of months in the spring of 1939 at the Belfast Royal Academy, of which Foster was head. Mr. O’Brien, determined to take decisive action, ordered in United Nations troops, but the operation ended in disarray.
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