Conor Cruise O'Brien: diplomat, historian, politician and journalist

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s life straddled diplomacy, politics, historical scholarship, literature and journalism. He was a diplomat at the UN, a professor in the US, a government minister in Ireland, the Editor-in-Chief of The Observer in Britain and a writer whose work commanded attention throughout the English-speaking world.

He was an inveterate controversialist, the quality of whose judgment and the wisdom of whose actions were often questioned, especially in his homeland. But none could deny the force of his intellect, the skill of his exposition and the courage with which he held to his convictions.

He was born in 1917 into a family caught up in the heady political and literary life of Dublin. His mother Katherine, daughter of the Irish Party MP David Sheehy, was probably the original of Miss Ivors, a strident nationalist girl depicted in James Joyce’s short story The Dead. His father, Francis Cruise O’Brien, was a somewhat waspish journalist who disconcerted his associates by abandoning his religion and speaking with an Oxford accent. He died suddenly in Conor’s presence on Christmas Day 1927, when the boy, his only child, was 10.

O’Brien’s upbringing then became a political and religious battleground between two formidable widowed aunts, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, an agnostic radical whose pacifist husband had been executed on the orders of an insane British army officer during the 1916 Rebellion, and her sister, Mary Kettle, a pious Catholic, whose husband, the poet and former MP Tom Kettle, had been killed in action on the Somme.

Despite pressure from priests and some of her family, O’Brien’s mother conformed to her agnostic husband’s wish that their son should not be sent to a Catholic school. Friends, among them Joyce, clubbed together to find the fees to send him to Sandford Park, a non-denominational school where his cousin, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, was head boy. From there the young O’Brien went on to the predominantly Protestant Trinity College Dublin.

The result was that he was educated in a minority culture, apart from the mainstream of Catholic Ireland. His accent was different. He was to remain an outsider in Irish life, widely perceived as having the superior attitude to his compatriots associated in many of their minds with Trinity and the Protestant Ascendancy.

At Trinity O’Brien read Irish and French before turning to history, and made a clean sweep of the prizes. Contemporaries thought him somewhat arrogant, though, and denied him election to the highest office in the college debating society. He took his first steps in journalism as college correspondent of The Irish Times. He also joined the Irish Labour Party — and then embarrassed it by his outspoken opposition to Franco in Spain.

Before he left Trinity he married Christine Foster, a fellow-student who was a member of a noted liberal Protestant family in Ulster.

In 1944 he entered the Department of External Affairs, as the Irish diplomatic service was described, having served for a time in the Department of Finance, whose work he found uncongenial (he had little interest in economics). In the late 1940s and early 1950s he was employed on a virulent anti-partition campaign launched by the Foreign Minister, Sean MacBride, and universally supported by Irish political leaders. This denied the right of the majority in Northern Ireland to opt out of the Republic. O’Brien ran the Irish News Agency, which spewed out propaganda. For all his later protestations, there is no evidence that he was other than enthusiastic about the policies he helped to propound.

If O’Brien subscribed fully at this stage to the irredentist national aims of the Irish State, he remained apart from the strong Catholic ethos of its people. But he was not indifferent to his ancestral faith, the influence of which on literature and politics was a constant preoccupation. He could never forgive the hurt caused to his mother by some of the Church’s rules.

In 1952, under the pen-name Donat O’Donnell, he published a book, Maria Cross, a series of essays on Catholic writers including Albert Camus, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. At this time he was also engaged on a study of Charles Stewart Parnell, for which he was awarded a doctorate. Published in 1956, it placed him in the front rank of Irish historians.

After a stint at the Paris Embassy in the mid-1950s, O’Brien was appointed head of the UN section of the Department of External Affairs. Ireland had just been admitted to membership of the UN. The Foreign Minister, Frank Aiken, rejected suggestions that Ireland should align itself totally with the US and its Western allies. This was manifested in a decision to vote in favour of discussing the admission of Communist China to the UN. Since Aiken was a man of limited intellect, it was widely but wrongly assumed that O’Brien had led him astray.

O’Brien believed that Ireland should model its approach on that of neutral Sweden, and did not hide his conviction that imperialism was a greater evil than communist movements in the developing world.

Dag Hammerskjöld, the Swede who was Secretary-General of the UN, had observed O’Brien closely and read Maria Cross. As a result, the Irish Government was requested to second O’Brien to serve with the UN in the Congo, where civil war broke out after the country became independent of Belgium. Although a UN resolution had stated that force was to be used in the last resort to remove from Katanga the foreign mercenaries who were assisting the secessionist regime of Moise Tshombe, O’Brien was reviled as unnecessarily pugnacious when he authorised such force.

Belgium and Britain had an interest in maintaining a compliant regime in mineral-rich Katanga. Under pressure from the Western powers, Hammarskjöld sought a compromise and was on the way to negotiate with Tshombe when he was killed in a plane crash. After his death it was impossible for O’Brien to establish definitively that he had acted within his remit, and he was recalled to New York and relieved of his post.

At this stage O’Brien could have returned quietly to the Irish diplomatic service, but his colleagues there had helped to undermine him and he feared that he would be relegated to obscurity and become known as “poor O’Brien”. At any rate he ached to tell his side of the story. So he resigned. In interviews and in the columns of The Observer he accused Harold Macmillan and his Government of duplicity in supporting a UN resolution to end the secession of Katanga while working secretly to prevent its implementation. He was not even accorded the satisfaction of a reply.

He then wrote a superb but rather sharp book, To Katanga and Back, in which he blamed Hammarskjöld for allowing him to be made a scapegoat. His account has been essentially vindicated by historians, but its tone and content were such as to leave him with few friends in high places.

By this time O’Brien’s marriage had broken down, his wife complaining that it was impossible to go on living with a man who thought he was God. O’Brien had formed an attachment to a colleague in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Máire MacEntee, whose father was Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister). The affair was made public by the British press when MacEntee appeared in the Congo at the height of the crisis. This was used as a stick to beat O’Brien in the UN, and it embarrassed the Irish Government. MacEntee resigned from the diplomatic service, and after O’Brien’s divorce in Mexico, they were married in a Catholic church in New York. This was possible because O’Brien had been baptised a Catholic, and his first marriage in a register office was, therefore, invalid in the eyes of the Church.

Leaders of the emerging African nations admired O’Brien’s stand against the colonial nations in the Congo. In 1962 Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, invited him to become Vice-Chancellor of the newly created University of Ghana. Relations went sour, however, little over a year after O’Brien took up the appointment, when he protested publicly against the dismissal of the Chief Justice who had acquitted some of the President’s political opponents.

There were disputes about academic freedom, one of which culminated in several lecturers being deported. Courageous as ever, O’Brien stood his ground and Nkrumah knew that he would lose face in Africa if he dismissed O’Brien. They parted by mutual consent at the end of the three-year term. The O’Briens maintained their connection with Ghana by later adopting a boy of mixed Irish-Ghanaian parentage. They also adopted a half-African daughter.

From 1965 to 1969 O’Brien was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, where he shocked the academic world by branding William Butler Yeats a fascist. Although he generally maintained a lower public profile, he took part in the agitation against the war in Vietnam and was arrested and manhandled, together with other demonstrators, during Stop the Draft Week in 1966. He was also involved in a bitter confrontation with Encounter magazine when it was exposed as the recipient of money from the CIA.

In these years he was still a figure of the Left. But he had become interested in Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France he edited for Penguin and who was to influence him profoundly for the rest of his life.

The death in 1970 of his cousin, the Trinity lecturer and socialist senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, removed a major left-wing influence in his life.

O’Brien had returned to Ireland in 1969, when he was invited by the Labour Party to contest a seat in the Dáil. He was successful and became the party’s spokesman on Northern Ireland.

At first he identified with the movement for civil rights among the Catholic population, which was then directed against discrimination in housing and employment. On one visit to the North he was assaulted by loyalists. However, when the IRA began its campaign of violence, he came to see that the root of the problem lay in the Republic’s claim of right to Northern Ireland irrespective of the wishes of its inhabitants.

In his book States of Ireland (1972) he challenged the nationalist dogma that Ireland was one nation. Ultimately this reshaped Irish attitudes, but at the time it raised doubts about O’Brien’s nationalist credentials.

As a minister in Liam Cosgrave’s coalition Government formed in 1973, O’Brien urged his colleagues to settle for power-sharing in Northern Ireland and not to press for a Council of Ireland that would be anathema to Unionists. His wise advice was not heeded, and provision was made for a potentially powerful council in the Sunningdale agreement. This undermined support among the Protestant community for the Unionists who had joined moderate nationalists in a power-sharing executive set up under the agreement. These Unionists suffered heavy losses in the British general election of 1974. The executive collapsed later that year when Harold Wilson’s newly elected Government backed off from a confrontation in the face of a loyalist general strike.

But like many prophets of doom, O’Brien was not held in any esteem for his prescience among those to whom his warnings were directed. He irritated nationalists by concentrating all his criticism on the IRA and overlooking the misdeeds of the security forces. Even worse was his challenge to the glorification of the 1916 Rebellion that was central to the Irish nationalist culture. He fell foul of the media when, as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, he forbade interviews with supporters of Sinn Feín, the political wing of the IRA. It was a form of censorship that had no parallel in Northern Ireland or the rest of the UK.

His manner, which was sometimes supercilious and pugnacious, did not help. Rather than search for common ground, he preferred to focus on points of disagreement. It was always an imperative to spell out his views to the full, however impolitic that might be. His uproarious wit, which could be cutting, his compulsive irreverence and his tendency to indiscretion made some wary of him. He was also prone to fail in the simple politenesses of life, such as honouring appointments.

In the 1977 general election the Government of which O’Brien was a member was heavily defeated, and he lost his Dublin seat. Although he managed to win election to the Senate, representing Trinity College (of which he was Pro-Chancellor), it was a humiliating rejection. “I was sore in my head for about six months,” he wrote later, “and then I was very glad.”

But he would not be silenced. He railed against the IRA and its fellow-travellers in Fianna Fáil, especially Charles Haughey, who was shortly to become Taoiseach. He continued to expose the ambivalence even among constitutional nationalists about giving Northern Ireland a right to self-determination. The honeyed words and what he saw as the essential intransigence of the persuasive Ulster nationalist leader John Hume, advocating “an agreed Ireland”, was a favourite target. O’Brien warned that a withdrawal of British troops would lead to mass slaughter. Direct rule, he concluded, was the least bad solution and the defeat of terrorism was the most important objective.

He summarised his views in a series of lectures in 1978 and 1979 that won the Ewart-Biggs award, named after the British Ambassador assassinated in Dublin in 1976. He too was a likely target for the IRA, and was often threatened. He was fortunate that its leadership reckoned that his pronouncements did it little harm with Irish public opinion.

In truth, Ireland, for all the largely unrequited love he bore it, was too restricted a stage for the man the Irish nicknamed “the Cruiser”. He was fortunate when he was recommended to the new American owners of The Observer as an Editor-in-Chief by David Astor and also by his old adversary, Harold Macmillan, who said the paper needed another J. L. Garvin. At his best O’Brien was a brilliant columnist, concise, witty and always easy to read. In 1980 he was named Columnist of the Year in the Granada press awards. But the proprietors were not best pleased when he was persuaded to support Labour in the 1979 general election. He also blotted his copybook by giving evidence at the Monopolies Commission against Tiny Rowland’s subsequent takeover of the paper. He was retired as Editor-in-Chief in 1981 but wrote a weekly column until 1984.

O’Brien continued his work unabated from his home in Howth near Dublin, apart from occasional terms as a visiting lecturer at US universities. He managed a punishing schedule of journalism and more profound scholarship. Although he rarely finished a day fully sober, he would be at his desk by 6am the next day with his sharp mind fuelling an even sharper pen.

He had a lifelong affection for Jews and had Jewish friends at school and in Trinity. He had shared their horror of fascism. His sympathy found expression in The Siege (1986), a book about Israel and Zionism, which was faulted for not presenting the Arab case fairly. He had declined an offer to talk to Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. His indifference to the Palestinians was symptomatic of a declining sympathy for the Third World and its grievances. In international politics as in Ireland he came to be perceived as a figure of the Right, and he focused more on the evils of terrorism than on the political conditions that had nurtured it. Even on apartheid, of which he had once been a relentless critic, he broke ranks with friends when he took a post at the University of Cape Town in 1986, only to be forced to quit after a student demonstration against him. Economic exploitation of poorer countries did not engage his attention in the way that had once made him such a determined opponent of political imperialism and racial discrimination.

He continued to be a scourge of republicans and their fellow-travellers at home, whether in his weekly column in the Irish Independent or in The Times, to which he became a regular contributor. His favourite target was Charles Haughey, who was Taoiseach in 1979-81, for part of 1982, and in 1987-92. His unexplained wealth, his arrogance and association with the illegal importation of arms in 1970 made him a good target. But O’Brien did not know when to stop and, in the absence of proof, the campaign deteriorated into a vendetta; Haughey, who did not deign to reply, sailed on regardless to be exposed only after he had retired.

O’Brien also broke with his old colleagues in the Labour Party when they helped to negotiate the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, on which the Ulster Unionists were not consulted and which gave the Irish Government an institutionalised consultative role in the government of Northern Ireland. He advocated the reintroduction of internment without trial. As he continued to challenge the sacred cows of Catholic nationalist Ireland, it seemed that in his defiant way he relished being a kind of itching powder of his own people.

All the time he was working away at the life of his hero Edmund Burke, from whose speeeches and other writings he could quote long passages from memory. What was termed a “thematic biography” was published in 1992, as The Great Melody, a title taken from Yeats’s tribute to Burke. Going well beyond biography, it was a brilliant polemical vindication of his subject against all those, from Thomas Paine to Sir Lewis Namier, who had written him off as a time-serving toady of mighty aristocrats.

O’Brien put Burke back into the context of his background among the Irish Catholic gentry of the 18th century who were deprived of civil and political rights by the Penal Laws. Burke, he maintained, was conditioned by that background to resent the abuse of power, whether by tyrannical governments or by revolutionaries. O’Brien empathised with Burke as a fellow Trinity man and as an intellectual involved in politics, dominating party leaders by sheer intellectual and verbal power — and he even unearthed a possible family connection. Some critics thought parts of the argument relating to Burke’s background attenuated and that the identification between author and subject was so great that O’Brien had recreated Burke in his own image.

His interest in Burke led O’Brien on to Thomas Jefferson, of whom he wrote a rather debunking biography published in 1996. Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution was depicted as politically opportunistic, and his support for liberty and equality was condemned as hypocritical, in that he accepted slavery and did not envisage blacks ever being equal citizens.

Much though O’Brien admired the religious convictions of Burke, who he believed may have desired to die as a Catholic, neither this nor his own wife’s strong religious faith led him back to the Church into which he had been born. His book On the Eve of the Millennium (1996) was highly critical of Pope John Paul II’s Church, which he grouped with Muslim fundamentalists as forces leading the world away from the values of his beloved Enlightenment.

That pessimism extended to his own country. With what he may have thought was Burkean prescience, he foresaw that the IRA ceasefire of 1994 would not hold and insisted that communal warfare would be the inevitable outcome of any effort under the Downing Street declaration of the previous year to foist all-Ireland institutions on Ulster Unionists. This led him to join Bob McCartney’s UK Unionist Party, which was free from the sectarian overtones of other Unionist parties and favoured closer integration with mainland Britain. As such he served in 1996 on the Northern Ireland Forum, which was to lay the groundwork for the Good Friday agreement of 1998.

O’Brien felt that agreement, which brought Sinn Feín into government, was disastrous, and in a curious twist he suggested that Northern Unionists would be better off moving of their own accord to negotiate a deal to join the Republic on terms that protected them, rather than soldiering on in a state where more and more concessions were being made to republicans under threat of force. This accorded with his dream of an Ireland dominated by moderate Unionists and moderate nationalists working in harmony to repress extremists on both sides. But it was too clever for the Unionist rank and file, and he was forced to take leave of the UK Unionist Party while continuing to support its leader and his policy of non-participation in the new power-sharing government.

Although there was some special pleading and much repetition of his old themes in his Memoirs, the book afforded an insight into the roots of the personal insecurity and vulnerability behind the self-assurance that so often came over as arrogance. It also showed him to be a man of quite narrow focus, without any interests outside politics and literature.

O’Brien continued to contribute a regular column to the Irish Independent until early 2007. To the end, he predicted that Ian Paisley and his party would never enter a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland with the former terrorists of the IRA whose conversion to constitutional politics O’Brien did not credit. His abhorrence of terrorism led him to take understanding view of the international adventures of the Bush presidency.

On his 90th birthday O’Brien announced that he would die with a pen in his hand and that his biography of George Washington would appear in 2008.

He is survived by his wife Máire, a poet of note in the Irish language, their two adopted children and also a son and daughter of his first marriage. Kate Cruise O’Brien, a writer who was a daughter of his first marriage, died in 1998.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, politician and writer, was born on November 4, 1917. He died on December 18, 2008, aged 91