The Cruiser - important figure, but was he good?
21 December 2008 By Tom McGurkThe legacy of Conor Cruise O’Brien will find little consensus, other than a universal recognition of his importance.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise; the Cruiser always seemed to enjoy his notoriety and to have an eye on his final resting place in history. This post-mortem debate is one he would have enjoyed.
To some, he was the intellectual guru and founding father of the post-Arms Trial 26-county state. He provided the historical comfort blanket under which the post-partition Irish state hid, in the face of the historical and emotional turmoil spilling across the border. The Cruiser’s subtext was stark, and as propagandist as the next: the Northern crisis was as much a creation of the founding myths of this state as it was of unionism, therefore both sides were equally to blame.
On one level, it opened up the most significant historical debate we had had since the Treaty but, on another, it authorised the Irish intelligentsia not to confront their post-colonial legacy - a crippling intellectual failure. To some, the Cruiser’s dissection of the national myths to see whether they were still the sum of their parts made him a hero, while to others he was an egomaniacal intellectual corner-boy whistling at history passing by.
There can be only immense regard for the Cruiser’s achievements as a diplomat and historian.
However, it is his contribution as a central protagonist in the battle of ideas which the North after 1969 provoked, at home and abroad, that will dominate his obituaries. His immense intellectual skills cannot be questioned, but that does not mean that he couldn’t be clearly and dangerously wrong. And he frequently was.
Even his most devoted followers gasped at the sight of Robert McCartney and Conor Cruise O’Brien campaigning for the UK Unionist Party against the Good Friday Agreement on the miserable streets of East Belfast.
As the saying, adapted by Mao, goes, ‘‘truly when you lie down with political dogs you will get up with fleas’’.
As the Cruiser drove around on a lorry that afternoon, festooned with Ulster and Union Jack flags, he was attacking an historic agreement that was in many ways the outcome of his contribution to the great debate.
Surely, even his bitterest enemies must have looked away in embarrassment.
His campaign against the Good Friday Agreement confounded many. After all, here was nationalist Ireland reaching across the deepest of historical gorges to make a new accommodation with unionist Ireland. There were times when the success of the process was actually threatened by the Cruiser’s opposition. Sadly, in the end, his words became just more mud for Ian Paisley to throw at the Agreement.
It was within the context of RTE’s operation of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act that I came most in contact with the consequences of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ministerial dictates.
Section 31 was actually introduced in 1971 by posts and telegraphs minister Gerry Collins under Jack Lynch, and banned interviews with members of proscribed organisations. Largely it was brought in to defuse Ted Heath’s government’s claim that Dublin was soft on the IRA.
When O’Brien became minister for posts and telegraphs in 1973, he extensively extended the ban to include Sinn Féin. Section 31 provoked an enormous crisis of self-censorship in RTE. In response to it, the organization was intellectually and journalistically undermined; paranoia reached into every corner and, understandably, few were prepared to take risks. The national broadcaster was forced, for the next 30 years, to cover the greatest national story with one hand tied behind its back.
There were extraordinary and wide-ranging consequences within the organisation. Can you imagine an executive being sent to the music library to attach stickers to recordings of songs that required special permission to be played? The result was a ghettoisation of militant Irish republicanism and a subtextual context which disguised loyalist paramilitary killings and British state-sponsored violence. ‘‘Provo sympathiser’’ became a deadly accusation that was capable of killing off careers and any significant journalistic inquiry. know because I tried, and ended up making the first investigative programme on that miscarriage of justice with ITV in Yorkshire.
But most important of all, I believe that the ghettoisation of militant republicanism for almost 30 years as a result of Section 31 prolonged the Northern crisis by a generation and may well have cost lives. Isolated from normal journalistic inquiry and increasingly having to answer only to its own followers, the militant republican campaign moved on into another generation.
It has recently emerged that, after the 1981 hunger strike, republicanism was seeking away out of militarism, but the Section 31 climate, which was to be followed by similar legislation in the BBC, stymied that possibility. After a generation of hiding behind London’s attempt to ‘‘defeat terrorism’’, it is significant that Dublin was only able to bring the Provos into the mainstream when Section 31 was lifted. I suspect, though, that the Cruiser didn’t appreciate the long-term implications of his addiction to political censorship.
His unrelenting hostility to Sinn Féin was to continue long after even the middle ground accepted that they, too, must be part of the solution.
In the important post-colonial debate, O’Brien often found himself in bizarre places. Some suspected that his huge reputation in London was understandable because he told the English what they wanted to hear about Ireland, while at home O’Brien had become something of a national apologist. ‘‘If the fault was in ourselves’’ in the old colonial relationship, then that was what the good doctor had diagnosed. The consequences were sometimes extraordinary. The Official IRA ended up as neo-unionists, and revisionism, particularly in historical writing, took on Vichy-like characteristics.
In the end, it was swept away as much by the self-confidence of the new Celtic Tiger generation as by the peace process itself. The years of national apologising were at an end. The Cruiser had been a grim historical reaper in the grimmest of times, politically and economically and, while he served an important part in repositioning our understanding of the 20th-century crisis of Irish unionism, in the end, intellectually, he became a victim of his own demons.
Irascible, pugnacious and arrogant, Conor Cruise O’Brien repositioned some part of the national imagination but, given the great tide that has followed on from the peace process, did it all add up to much more in the end than a furious little finger in the dyke?
The Section 31 climate made it impossible for RTE to investigate, for example, the infamous trial of the Guildford Four in Britain. I