Conor Cruise O'Brien, an evaluation of his career

1 An evaluation of the career of Conor Cruise O’Brien Howth Peninsula Heritage Society, Howth Angling Centre, West Pier, Howth, 8pm Tuesday 23 April 2019 Contrasting views by Frank Callanan SC and Dr. Niall Meehan, chaired by Philip O’Connor Callanan, O’Connor, contribution, The Polariser, Dublin Review of Books, https://drb.ie/articles/the-polariser/ Níall Meehan, Faculty Head, Journalism & Media, Griffith College, Dublin One of the difficulties with assessing Conor Cruise O’Brien is that there were one-two many Conor Cruise O’Briens. I hope to talk about a couple of them. Frank [Callanan] mentioned being born in 1956 and his excitement as a young teenager when Conor Cruise O’Brien was elected to the Dáil in 1969. I was born in October 1955 and also was excited by the same event. The difference between us is that I was equally enthusiastic when O’Brien lost his seat in 1977. After United Nations admission in December 1955, the Republic of Ireland opposed partition proposals from colonial powers under attack and in retreat. This was the era of the colonial revolution. In 1958, an Irish UN delegate criticised Britain’s intention to partition Cyprus. It was, he said, … a frustration of the aspirations of the majority of the Cypriot people… [I]t inflates the [TurkishCypriot] minority’s sense of what is due Sunday Independent 13 October 1968 2 to it and makes it less willing to play its proper part as a minority. The speaker, Conor Cruise O’Brien, even suggested, … that Turkish-Cypriots who did not wish to live under a government dominated by the Greek majority might migrate and be compensated. O’Brien said ‘his country would support [a] Greek resolution urging independence for the island as a whole’. He received ‘a burst of applause from the public gallery’. O’Brien’s remarks invited comparison with the partition of Ireland between the nationalist majority and a pro-British unionist minority. O’Brien also spoke in favour of Algerian independence from France and recognition of its rebel government. Unless Algeria ‘was free to choose independence then she was not free at all’, he said. The French minority, like the Turkish Cypriots, did not figure much in O’Brien’s calculations. O’Brien introduced the UN Special Political Committee’s denunciation of Apartheid in South Africa in November 1957. Australia, Belgium, Britain, France and Portugal voted against because, they said, the resolution interfered with South Africa’s ‘domestic jurisdiction’. In November 1958 O’Brien stated that Palestinian ‘refugees [from Israel] are the victims of a wrong’ and that Ireland ‘did not participate in the U.N. decisions which created the refugees’. In December of that year O’Brien referred to southern Ireland’s ‘moral authority which she deserves from her history’ and, … certain marked and enduring characteristics [that] arise from the fact that Ireland is a profoundly Christian country, is an independent nation, a republican nation, and a country that is both European and a former object of colonialisation. After civil conflict erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969-70 and after European Economic Community (EEC) entry in 1973, O’Brien’s rhetoric and that of official Ireland shifted. The Irish as white Europeans eclipsed their depiction as objects of European, in particular British, colonisation. As the late Professor Ronan Fanning put it ‘the British and Irish political establishments’ sought to gain control of ‘the presentation of history’. Nationalist emphasis became suspect because, it was argued, that was where the IRA drew support. This attempt to influence southern Irish people was combined during the 1970s with repression and censorship. Conor Cruise O’Brien was to the fore in that effort. He produced the first sustained attempt to revise the state’s raison d’être in his States of Ireland in 1972. It was astutely described by one reviewer as ‘a mess, where the mess, so to speak, is the message’. Instead of struggling for self-determination against a sectarian overlord, the Catholic Irish, specifically, were portrayed as fighting for religious supremacy. After election to the Dáil in 1969, but especially after the 1970 Arms Crisis, O’Brien obscured his earlier positions. His perfection of censorship and support of repression during the 1970s, as minister for Posts and Telegraphs in a 1973-77 Fine Gael Labour government, was at odds with often-overlooked left wing, anti-imperialist observations and activities during the 1960s. O’Brien’s ministry included responsibility for the Radió Teilefís Éireann (RTÉ), southern Ireland’s then only TV and radio station. In 1971 Fianna Fáil had politically censored RTÉ under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, a measure O’Brien had than and also later strenuously opposed. 3 Instead of rescinding broadcasting censorship, O’Brien perfected it, initially covertly, eventually by way of amendment in 1976. O’Brien began by doing something no Fianna Fail minister attempted. Soon after appointment he called unannounced on RTÉ’s Director General Tom Hardiman. O’Brien insisted that television producer Eoghan Harris be dismissed. As Editor in Chief, Hardiman refused to entertain O’Brien and directed him, as protocol dictated, to the Chairperson of the government appointed RTÉ Authority. Instead, O’Brien bided his time. At the 1974 Labour Party conference O’Brien suggested that the IRA benefitted from internment without trial in the North and that, by a strange twist of logic, criticism of internment constituted IRA propaganda. RTÉ afterwards broadcast a programme critical of internment. O’Brien then entered RTÉ and directed management to watch the programme with him. Afterwards, he stated that if the IRA was not in physical occupation of RTÉ the organisation had effected a ‘spiritual occupation’. Those deemed responsible for the programme were disciplined, Eoghan Harris most severely: moved from RTÉ’s current affairs division into, he later observed, being ‘marginalised’ and making ‘ridiculous, rubbishy programmes’. It was noted that, for the first time, RTÉ management failed to stand by its broadcasters. The mould was broken and stayed that way. It is an abiding irony that Eoghan Harris emerged from his years of internal RTÉ exile as a firm supporter of O’Brien’s analysis. Other broadcasters became convinced, while operating within RTÉ’s censorship regime, of a need to portray the IRA as virtually the only aggressors in Northern Ireland, to under-report stories like the 1980-81 H-Block hunger strikes; and to promote propaganda about IRA genocide against eldest sons of Protestant-unionist farmers in border areas. Former President Mary McAleese, an RTÉ reporter in 1981, explained at length the full force of RTE ignorance of what was happening on the ground in Northern Ireland. This was, according to McAleese’s biography, The Road from Ardoyne (by Ray Mac Manais), through a studied refusal to report it. She instanced the current affairs Today Tonight programme not sending a team to cover the 1981 Fermanagh South Tyrone by-election count when hunger striker Bobby Sands won. The decision was based on confident predictions that Sands would lose badly. When Sands was on course to win, a helicopter was hired at great expense for a reporter and producer. They then borrowed the equipment and allocated time of an Irish language RTÉ crew. The same predictions affected non-coverage of Sands’ funeral, on the basis that more cameras than mourners would be present. It is estimated that over 100,000 people attended the funeral. Those responsible for such a ‘desperate professional gaffe’, as an Irish language RTÉ broadcaster at the Sands count put it, were sympathetic to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s analysis. Since O’Brien had opposed it, he had a problem with Section 31. He focussed on Fianna Fáil’s so-called ‘brutal replacement’ of a defiant RTÉ Authority in 1972. O’Brien avoided this problem by engineering eventually, no defiance. He appointed Sheila Conroy to chair the RTÉ Authority in 1976, having first appointed her to the Authority in 1973. Conroy found RTÉ Director General T.P. Hardiman’s ‘very correct’ conduct ‘frustrating’. Until retirement in 1975, Hardiman ‘spent half his time keeping the Authority off the backs of the programme makers’. Conroy noted O’Brien’s ‘desire to avoid defiance… which might lead to a repeat of the 1972 scenario’. Therefore, she said, ‘I had to be more alert to any attempt to break the [Section 31] ban’. T.P. Hardiman’s more compliant and conservative post-1975 successor, Oliver Maloney, observed sympathetically that Conroy, ‘stamped on boardroom politics 4 quite firmly’. O’Brien observed, smugly, ‘to [Conroy’s] credit there was no crisis’. This combination of O’Brien’s personal interventions, legislation, and newl y contrived internal leadership, enabled significant inroads into RTÉ’s autonomy. In 1976 the NUJ broadcasting branch reported that government policies and actions on security were broadcast without analysis or counterpoint. In 1977, RTÉ reporter Eddie Barret admitted that the news division was ‘afraid’, as he put it, to carry reports of Irish Times articles on garda brutality. O’Brien perfected Section 31 in 1976. Essentially, he dispensed with a Fianna Fail censorship order containing a degree of ambiguity, that RTE used in order to occasionally interview Sinn Féin representatives, with one admitting of none. RTÉ nevertheless expanded its scope by banning from the airwaves all Sinn Féin members, irrespective of who they might represent or what they might say on any imaginable subject, no matter how innocuous. That silence, all the more effective since RTÉ did not advertise it, was O’Brien’s lasting legacy. Though electorally and in other ways unpopular by 1977, O’Brien’s intellectual and ministerial legacy remained both politically and institutionally significant. After appointment in 1979 as Editor in Chief of the London Observer newspaper, O’Brien continued as he had left off. He censored and then sacked Ireland correspondent, Mary Holland. In 1978 he disapproved of an Observer magazine article Holland wrote on Mary Nellis from Derry, two of whose sons served sentences for IRA activity. O’Brien explained that ‘the killing strain of [Irish republicanism] has a very high propensity to run in families, and … the mother is most often the carrier’. He said of Holland, who pioneered reporting on sectarianism in Northern Ireland, ‘It is a serious weakness in your coverage of Irish affairs that you are a very poor judge of Irish Catholics. That gifted and talkative community includes some of the most expert conmen and conwomen in the world’. O’Brien went on, also in 1979, to assert that some ‘fellow travellers of the IRA … are in the media and some are in the SDLP’. The SDLP was then Northern Ireland’s leading nationalist party. John Hume, its best known leader, remarked that O’Brien was ‘a deeply prejudiced man’. O’Brien saw republicanism as a pathological subculture and remarked, ‘one should not under-estimate the capacity of those infected to transmit the infection to the next generation’. It was a view that was close to, but obviously does not quite match, fascist concepts of Judaism as a bacillus within western civic culture. His censorship of Mary Holland indicated that O’Brien viewed republicanism, like the Jewish faith, as carried on by matrilineal descent. It possibly indicated also a problem with independent minded women, a point to which I shall return (if I have time). O’Brien’s interventions in RTÉ and in the Observer are key to understanding the methods he employed to defeat his opponents. His intolerant ire was directed at those who did not accept his new view of Irish republicanism. The SDLP was alarmed. The SDLP’s Ivan Cooper (a Protestant) and Paddy Devlin (formerly of the Northern Ireland Labour Party) pleaded with the Labour Party in 1972 to disown O’Brien and his analysis. So also did fellow Labour TDs who failed to dislodge him as Northern Ireland spokesperson. It is important to understand how O’Brien flip-flopped. His initially cogent, often objective, understanding in 1969 of southern Irish conservatism and northern Irish unionism was transformed into asserting, incoherently, that opposing unionist sectarianism was a form of Catholic imperialism. It is often assumed that O’Brien suppressed support for republicanism by force of intellectual argument. O’Brien’s 5 authoritarian use of force after 1973 was decisive, as was the fact that his methods were in tune with the perceived needs of the southern Irish state. To illustrate O’Brien’s sharp change of direction, we should start in 1961. Seconded from the Irish diplomatic service, O’Brien was appointed UN High Commissioner of Katanga, a province in the newly independent, formerly Belgian, Congo, where Irish troops were on their first tour of UN duty. O’Brien’s appointment fell smack in the middle of western and white-ruled Rhodesian attempts to subvert Congolese independence, partly by partitioning off Katanga. Prior to O’Brien’s arrival, left wing Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was beaten to death by western backed secessionists, under the gaze of UN forces. Time magazine depicted O’Brien as a ‘stripe shirted Castro’. The British Foreign Office said he was a ‘wild anticolonial boy’. As far as they were concerned, he had gone off script. O’Brien had launched a military strike in Katanga against western mercenaries and indigenous forces. A UN compound, including O’Brien, came under attack. After a semblance of order was restored, O’Brien was recalled to Dublin. His claim to be acting on UN orders was weakened in September 1961, by UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in strange circumstances. Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in northern Rhodesia, near Katanga. O’Brien became convinced he was destined for bureaucratic exile. He therefore resigned his position so as to restore his freedom of speech. Breaking a diplomatic taboo, he wrote a two-part article in the Observer and New York Times. Part-one began, ‘My resignation from the United Nations and from the Irish Foreign Service is a result of British Government policy’. This analysis is absent from D.H. Akenson’s 1994 anthology of O’Brien’s writings. After publication of To Katanga and Back in 1962, O’Brien was launched on an 8-year career as a ‘new-left’ academic activist. He was in tune with the 1960s revolt against racism in the US, apartheid in South Africa and US involvement in Vietnam. From 1962-65 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana. He fell out with the university’s chancellor, Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, on the issue of academic freedom. O’Brien asserted, [A] liberal, incurably, was what I was. Whatever I might argue, I was ... profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom - freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges. He was then appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. In 1967, O’Brien spoke at a US seminar on the Viet Nam war, entitled ‘the legitimacy of violence as a political act’. Speakers included philosopher and German Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt plus Noam Chomsky. In opposition to Arendt who had remarked, ‘As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it’, O’Brien said, I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make. In addition, O’Brien publicly opposed US police oppression and killing of members of the radical Black Panther Party, which asserted a constitutional right to carry arms for self-defence. Panthers in jail were ‘victims of persecution’, he said. He also claimed that use of an anti-riot statute against protesters outside the Democratic Party Convention in August 1968 potentially created ‘the foundation for a police state’. 6 O’Brien was front-page news in the Irish Times in December 1967, after his arrest at a New York Vietnam War protest, alongside noted child-development expert, Dr. Benjamin Spock (not the Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy, for those of you puzzled by the Irish Times headline). O’Brien’s wife Máire observed that the police ‘kicked Conor around quite a bit’. In 1974, a short few years after voicing opposition to police state methods and after being himself kicked by a policemen, O’Brien became a secret champion of ‘kick[ing] the shit’ out of republican suspects in Ireland. When the Irish Times reported on these methods in 1976-77 the then minister of justice denied their existence. Like RTÉ news. O’Brien remained silent. He revealed his support for police beatings in a memoir published in 1998. During the 1960s O’Brien did not forget Ireland. In 1966 the New Left Review published O’Brien’s 50th anniversary essay on 1916, ‘The Embers of Easter’. It reproduced, sympathetically, V.I. Lenin’s observation that the Irish rose a year early, before European wide imperialist contradictions occasioned by World War One had ripened sufficiently. In the article, O’Brien critiqued how Ireland’s ‘three quarters representatives’ (as he then put it) eroded a initially anti-imperialist stance at the UN. After accession, Ireland had defied the US by calling for UN discussion on China’s admission, then represented by Taiwan’s pro-western regime. Later, during the 1960s, Ireland sided with western interests in all important respects, said O’Brien. The article also observed that the Irish Labour Party, which he was to join two years later, was all too often represented by ‘dismal poltroons’. During this period, from 1963-67, O’Brien helped, spectacularly, to expose a seemingly independent and highly reputable magazine, Encounter, as a CIA-front publication. O’Brien’s later 1970s claim of political continuity with his 1960s self was undermined by non other than Encounter Editor Melvin J. Lasky. O’Brien had outed him as, effectively, a CIA functionary. Laskey wrote without contradiction from O’Brien in the Irish Times in 1974, I have been following Dr. O’Brien’s new and substantially revised ideology with the greatest of satisfaction… it does seem to me that he now stands with us. In 1966 and 1967 O’Brien also exposed the US historian and Kennedy administration aide, Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as having lied to the New York Times about how Encounter was funded. 20 years later O’Brien tempered this with, ‘at that time I had not myself engaged in active democratic electoral politics in my own country’. It was implied that, had he been so engaged, Schlesinger’s lies would have been excusable. O’Brien’s return to Ireland in 1968-69 was to a society undergoing a radicalisation similar to what was occurring in other parts of the world. The women’s movement was emerging. Irish youth were in revolt. A long strike-wave played out during the 1960s. The conservative Roman Catholic stamp on Irish identity was put under a critical spotlight. In October 1968 the North began its long simmering eruption. Very quickly, due to media coverage, southerners learned about the mechanisms by which northern nationalist political and socio-economic rights had been systematically suppressed. More importantly, they learned and were impressed with how the same northern 7 nationalists, like 1960s African-Americans with whom they were compared, seemed unlikely to be going back, any time soon, to their assigned role of sullen passivity. O’Brien initially welcomed these movements north and south. He then became alarmed, alongside the southern establishment, when northern nationalists no longer acted as grateful recipients of Dublin’s unsuccessful policies and initiatives. O’Brien had promoted official anti-partition propaganda during the early 1950s. With others, he grew tired of meeting ignored Nationalist Party representatives; and, in turn, of being ignored by other states when partition was raised. O’Brien knew also that unionist resistance to reform would be unrelenting. As he reportedly put it in late October 1968, Orangemen had never been beaten and therefore their resistance to change would be all the stronger. Nor was it likely that all of them would restrict themselves to non-violence…. [T]he Orangemen resembled the Afrikaners of South Africa in their qualities and their limitations, both of which were considerable. Despite this, civil rights leaders refused to go backwards, no matter how much state violence or state-sponsored violence and repression came their way. They gave a lead that threatened to spread throughout 32 Counties. These leaders, including later SDLP representatives, also sought southern arms for self-defence. Some members of Jack Lynch’s Fianna Fáil government attempted to take control of the movement. Lynch followed the latest episode of the northern revolt, and Stormont’s usually violent reaction, with verbal support. A crisis of leadership developed inside Fianna Fáil in May 1970 with the sacking and then failed prosecution of Ministers Haughey and Blaney, for alleged illegal arms importation. That debacle and the election of an essentially pro-unionist Conservative government in Britain in June 1970 ended the first phase of the northern revolt. O’Brien portrayed the May 1970 arms crisis as a crisis of democracy. As pointed out by historians Niamh Puirséil and Angela Clifford, he had been aware of attempts to procure and to supply arms, at least since October of the previous year. As the arms crisis unfolded he began to argue hysterically that Fianna Fáil, under Lynch, might attempt to establish an authoritarian regime like that of Greek colonels. And with that, he began to turn. Previously, during 1969, while publicly indifferent to attempts to procure arms, O’Brien’s support for nationalist violence was far from ambivalent. In December 1969 in New York, he said Catholics were ‘the blacks in Northern Ireland’: The Civil Rights Movement began as a strictly non-violent one, civil rights workers were pelted with rocks, thrown in jail, beaten by the police, without resistance or retaliation… A year earlier, in October 1968 in Queen’s University, O’Brien had counselled non-violent civil disobedience tactics. Not now. As he put it, “No bombs, no rights” read a local headline. There is no doubt that the young people of the civil rights movement with backing from older people achieved first through non-violent symbolic protest, and then through the use of a degree of violence, far more than their elders had achieved in two generations of argument and minority voting… [T]he cost was high and not yet paid in full… In this case violence did indeed assure a hearing for moderation, which in the absence of violence had gone unheard for nearly fifty years. 8 O’Brien also reported, Civil rights people and the people in [Derry’s] Catholic ghetto … used force to break-up the traditional [Apprentice Boys] procession of their oppressors …. and successfully defended their ghetto against the police by use of petrol bombs. In Belfast armed defenders of Protestant supremacy started shooting Catholics and burning their homes. O’Brien was referring to what happened in August 1969, after which British troops were introduced. He had argued previously that it was necessary to ‘keep up the pressure’ on Northern Ireland’s then rhetorically reformist Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, in order to ‘to keep up his intentions’. In January 1969 he termed O’Neill’s Unionist Party the ‘political arm’ of the Orange Order, in which ‘the denial of rights to Catholics is an essential – indeed the essential – part of its character’. Pressure was required also, so as to counteract ‘hate merchants’ like Protestant fundamentalist preacher [Ian] Paisley. O’Brien was largely indifferent to O’Neill’s fate, even if ‘replaced by a more right-wing unionist’, because ‘it often turned out that a strong man with a reputation for toughness was more able to make concessions than a reputed liberal’. O’Brien criticised the London Observer’s editorial policy of support for O’Neill and a policy of ‘gradualism’. O’Neill’s call-up of the ‘armed Orangemen’ of the paramilitary B-Special RUC reserve was, noted O’Brien, ‘more instructive… than… the studied moderation of [O’Neill’s] language’. To ‘proceed slowly’, … implies a corollary, the greater the resistance, the slower the pace. This is an encouragement to the Paisleyites in and out of uniform to increase their provocations. Those who are repressed will respond and are responding - in kind, and the more gradual the process the more long-drawn out and bloody it will be. It turned out as O’Brien then predicted. Into this failure of reform in the North and crisis in the South stepped the IRA. Its analysis that the North was irredeemably sectarian and not reformable seemed at that time in line with reality. After 1970 O’Brien abandoned this type of commentary. He would criticise its use by others as ‘verbal violence’ leading to ‘civil war’. O’Brien feared that southern rhetoric generally might provoke cross-border northern unionist violence. A policy of Irish unity would foster, he asserted, ‘a massive and perhaps uncontrollable escalation’. Fear of death was used to discourage discussion accused of provoking violence. Paddy Devlin said this approach was ‘an invitation to extreme loyalists to hold an open season on Catholics’, to crush nationalist aspirations since nationalists could not generate as much violence as a unionist community presented as more uninhibited in that regard. Devlin suggested that this southern commentary was part of a ‘deliberate effort […] to reduce interest in issues affecting the North’. Professor Denis Donoghue argued perceptively that O’Brien’s ‘prophecy is yet another way of making discourse afraid of itself’. Elements of British counterinsurgency may have contributed to this climate by being instrumental in exploding bombs in Dublin in 1972 and 1974. On 1 December 1972 bombs that killed two CIE workers collapsed Fine Gael opposition to emergency legislation being proposed by Fianna Fáil. Labour and O’Brien still voted against but O’Brien regretted having done so a few years later. The bombs went off after two English bank robbers in the pay of MI6 were apprehended. The Littlejohn brothers’ task was to engage in acts of violence, so as to provoke Fianna Fail justice minister Desmond O’Malley into composing the emergency measures. Three weeks 9 after the explosions, Garda Special Branch arrested John Wyman, the Littlejohn’s MI6 handler, and, as a bonus, Wyman’s garda mole, Patrick Crinnion. Gardaí were alerted to Wyman by another Dublin MI6 operative, Alex Fursey, whose role was kept secret. It was revealed in History Ireland, May-June 2018 (at https://www.academia.edu/36964845/). While fixated on IRA violence, O’Brien was not particularly concerned with the loyalist or British state-sponsored variety. His 1998 Memoir mentioned the 1972 emergency legislation he regretted not supporting, but not the explosions that guaranteed its passage. He reminisced on the 1974 collapse of the Sunningdale power sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland, but not the related 17 May 1974 DublinMonaghan bombings that killed 34 people. They caused more deaths than any other single incident in ‘the Troubles’. After the bombings, a widely reported comment from an Ulster Defence Association press officer asserted, ‘I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State [Republic of Ireland] and now we are laughing at them’. While O’Brian ensured that republicans remained off television screens, two weeks later he appeared on Britain’s Thames Television with two paramilitary UDA representatives, Andy Tyrie and Glen Barr. They told him that only those who ‘served Ulster and the Queen’ could govern Northern Ireland. When he named organisations to be censored under Section 31 in 1977, O’Brien omitted the UDA. He asserted that, ‘access by the UDA did not present the threat that broadcasting by the Provisionals represented’ O’Brien’s move rightwards contained an international as well as a national dimension. In 1958 he supported the struggle of the Black majority victims of Apartheid in South Africa. As mentioned earlier, he also expressed sympathy for Palestinian refugees, driven out when Israel was formed in 1948. During the 1980s he expressed sympathy for the alleged ‘predicament’ of the white Afrikaner architects of apartheid and ignored Palestinians when expressing newfound support for Israeli Zionism. Formerly a supporter and founder member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, in 1986 he broke the movement’s academic boycott of South Africa, an initiative that ended in farce and failure. O’Brien gradually lost his grip on political reality. Prior to the 1994 IRA ceasefire, O’Brien wrote regularly in the Sunday Independent that John Hume and Gerry Adams’ dialogue would initiate the civil war he had anticipated since the 1970s This controversial cartoon of Hume appeared a number of times in the paper. Critics argued that it implied that Hume had blood on his hands, defenders that it was merely shadow on one of Hume’s hands. It featured a number of times in the paper. I leave it to the audience to make your own evaluation. Here is another cartoon image of SDLP and Sinn Fein sledgehammers I will come back to, that appeared on the 3rd of October 1993. In many ways the Sunday Independent was a perfect vehicle for O’Brien’s views. 10 If Hume had been, since 1972, O’Brien’s selfdeclared deadly enemy, he warmed to a new friend, 1968’s ‘hate merchant’, Ian Paisley. When Paisley wielded a sledgehammer, as in the picture here, in order to ‘Smash Sinn Féin’ it reminded nationalists that it was the implement of choice for loyalist paramilitaries, when smashing their way into nationalist homes in order, usually, to kill a Catholic. Paisley probably knew what he was doing, while I assume the Sunday Independent cartoonist did not. Such imagery did not appear to bother Conor Cruise O’Brien. Joint opposition to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement initiated the O’Brien-Paisley alliance. It was further cemented when O’Brien joined the UK Unionist Party in 1996. The political bromance ended when, in 2007, Ian Paisley became O’Brien’s ‘strong man… able to make concessions’ by agreeing to share power with O’Brien’s bête noir, Sinn Féin. O’Brien had observed, unwisely, a short time earlier: I have known Paisley now for about 50 years, during the first phase of which I was opposed to him and he to me. But for the past 20 years, we have been good friends and still are. I am quite sure he is not going to do a deal with the British and Irish Governments, despite their copious hints to the contrary... When Paisley finally announces his decision against them, the two governments will have to shut up about the North. O’Brien’s anti-republicanism and diminished political acuity developed in tandem. I don’t have time to go into O’Brien’s view in 1974 that former President Mary Robinson was ‘dancing to the IRA’s tune’ and that her opposition at that time to internment in Northern Ireland entailed support for shooting judges. She accused him of abusing his position and of 11 attempting to censor her. Essentially, O’Brien thought that those who did not toe the O’Brien line were IRA dupes. Hence, in 1974 also, he referred to newspaper political correspondents as ‘IRA stooges’. The same year he wondered whether history teachers were sending pupils into the IRA. In 1976 he revealed to a very surprised Washington Post reporter, Bud Nossiter, his intention to prosecute Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan, for publishing pro-republican letters. Mary Robinson remarked in 1976 that ‘simple condemnation of the IRA does not require particular courage today’, but it was more difficult to combine that with ‘deep concern for the protection of civil liberties and for the curtailment of government power’. The question remains, why did O’Brien lose his bearings in 1970? The answer may be partly political, partly psychological. In 1939, he privately described his aunt, the well-known feminist, republican, and socialist, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, as ‘a howling bitch’. Hannah’s pacifist husband Francis was murdered by a British officer, Capt. J.C. Bowen-Colthurst from Cork, in 1916. Another O’Brien uncle, Tom Kettle, was soon afterwards killed by the Germans, while serving with the British Army in France. O’Brien’s father died when Connor was 10, in 1927, his mother in 1939, after which he declared that there was no one left who could hurt him. He wrote, also privately, that he disliked ‘most of my family most of the time’. O’Brien appeared increasingly to view the 1916 rebellion and the succeeding war of independence as a usurping of the position of the reformist Irish Parliamentary Party, with which his mother’s family was associated. These upheavals negatively affected the position of ‘my family’ in the community, said O’Brien. It occasioned, he thought, the lower middle class near penury he experienced while growing up. Perhaps, when confronted later with the views of the three Mary’s - Holland, Nellis and Robinson - his mind linked back to unpleasant memories of his Aunt Hanna. With the North blowing up in 1970, the catharsis appeared to be happening all over again. The radical part O’Brien’s family retreated in independent Ireland and he was beaten in Katanga. Perhaps he decided to side with the winners, the Orangemen who had never been beaten, who physically assaulted him at the conclusion of an Orange parade in 1971, and the strong men who served the southern Irish state. When he was elected for the first time in 1969 he was 52 years old. Maybe he was tired of the prospect of fighting the same battles all over again and possibly envisaged insurmountable obstacles to victory by the nationalist or republican side. Perhaps, defeated, he sought solace by changing sides while claiming to be on the same side. For more on O’Brien’s analysis and the emergence of revisionist historiography, see: • ‘The Embers of Revisionism’ (2017), Niall Meehan, at https://www.academia.edu/34075119/; • ‘The “O'Brien Ethic” as an Interpretative Problem’ (2013), John M Regan, at https://www.academia.edu/5110300/.