‘I was altogether out of tune with my colleagues’: Conor Cruise O'Brien and Northern Ireland, 1969–77

This article critically re-assesses Conor Cruise O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1977. It argues that O'Brien's most significant contribution to public life was the ability to deconstruct many aspects of Irish nationalism, specifically his rejection of the Irish state's irredentist claim over Northern Ireland. In doing so, it contends that O'Brien was one of the most important, and outspoken, champions of so-called ‘revisionist nationalism’ of his generation. The article examines three themes in relation to O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland: his attack on the Irish state's anti-partitionism; his rejection of Irish republican terrorism; and his support for the ‘principle of consent’ argument. The article illustrates that O'Brien was criticised in nationalist circles and accused of committing political heresy. Indeed, his willingness to challenge the attitude of most mainstream Irish politicians on Northern Ireland invariably left him an isolated figure, even among his own Labour Party comrades. Writing in his Memoir, O'Brien neatly summed up the difficult position in which he found himself: ‘I was altogether out of tune with my colleagues over Northern Ireland’.

Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland

This chapter traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict, from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Tom Paulin to the remarkable number Antigone plays which have appeared post-ceasefire but allude to the conflict and its legacy. The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney (2004) was inspired by the funeral of hunger-striker Francis Hughes in 1981. Ismene by Stacey Gregg (2006) responds to the sisters of Robert McCartney, who was brutally murdered by paramilitaries in 2005. Antigone (2008) by Owen McCafferty alludes to power-sharing and casts Creon as a soldier-turned-politician in ways that have contemporary political resonances. Norah by Gerard Humphreys (2018) portrays the sister of a fictional hunger-striker as an Antigone figure. The proliferation of dead bodies and the contested ownership of those bodies in all these plays show that Ireland is still dealing with the trauma of the conflict.

Responsibilities

Rooted in the poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and drawing heavily on unpublished material, this final chapter, Chapter 5, finds Seamus Heaney in another university setting, this time in Oxford. Taking its cue from Heaney’s own interest, in The Redress of Poetry, in the question of responsibility, it examines the complex intersections of the imagination with the challenges of contemporary society and the burden of history. It brings Heaney into dialogue with figures as diverse as Coleridge, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Raymond Williams, and it charts the development of two key poems, ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Markings’, in order to illuminate his various expressions of the fraught but necessary interactions between the private artist and their social world.

‘I ran away’? The I.R.A. and 1969: the evolution of a myth

Between 13 and 15 August 1969 communal violence in Belfast saw seven people killed and over 400 treated for injuries. Nearly 2,000 families were forced from their homes. British troops were deployed on the streets to prevent further violence, events usually seen as the starting point of the modern Irish Troubles. In 1972 the Sunday Times Insight Team's Ulster set the tone for commentary on the role of the I.R.A. during this period. It claimed that the organisation had been ‘largely an irrelevance’ in Belfast during August 1969 and as a result ‘I.R.A. – I Ran Away was scrawled derisively over the walls of the Catholic Ghettos’. Conor Cruise O'Brien soon asserted in States of Ireland that when violence erupted ‘the I.R.A. had very few weapons and very few people trained and ready to use them. Their prestige in the Ghettos went sharply down. People wrote on walls I.R.A. I Ran Away.’ Echoing these statements twentythree years later Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Troubles stated that ‘the I.R.A. posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the I.R.A. in the traditional role of “the defenders” wrote up the letters I.R.A. on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.' Similar assertions are found in a wide variety of the literature, both popular and academic, dealing with the outbreak of the Troubles.

The “O'Brien Ethic” as an Interpretative Problem

The necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.