Conor Cruise O'Brien - his legacy

Lavish tributes have been paid to Conor Cruise O’Brien following his death last week. O’Brien was a man who succeeded in setting aside the assumptions of his tribe. An achievement which should not be underestimated.

Not only was O’Brien steadfast and unambivalent in his opposition to terror, but his realisation that unionism formed a rational and defensible political doctrine was a hugely valuable contribution to a more tolerant discourse in Ireland.

Maurice Hayes does not offered unqualified praise for O’Brien, but in his Irish Independent piece he does produce three paragraphs which neatly sum up his political legacy.

“CCOB's great contribution to modern Irish political debate -- apart from his implacable hounding of those who would in any way condone the use of violence -- was to force the recognition of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland as Unionists as well as Protestants.

He cut through the comfortable myths which had sustained the relatively passive anti-partitionist rhetoric of successive governments in which Unionists were dismissed either as a group of deluded patriots who would soon come to their senses or a hard-headed lot who would jump to the side their bread was best buttered on.

Almost single-handedly (in public at least) over several decades, he explained the realities of a complex and confusing set of allegiances and relationships, and forced the Irish public mind to come to terms with the existence of a Unionist community in the North."

Comments

Anonymous said…
The Cruiser was chairman at an inter-schools debating contest at Trinity College, in which I took part for Omagh CBS back in 1991. Didn’t actually meet him though. Seems like a lifetime ago now. A few years later whilst at Queen’s I quoted him in an essay on Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ (whom he was a noted scholar of)”L’Étranger” (The Outsider).

I was no great fan of the man, but he was certainly a highly intelligent and erudite individual who had the courage of his convictions to go against popular opinion. I don’t think his obsession with media censorship while in the quaintly named position of Minister for Posts & Telegraphs acheived anything practical - and was probably counter-productive if anything,

I also feel he lost much credibility by joining the rather pointless UK Unionist Party, which was little more than an extension of Bob McCartney’s ego.

Still, he led a varied and prolific life and should be remembered for it.
22 December 2008 at 19:44
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more