Table Of Content
- More From the Los Angeles Times
- Department of External Affairs
- Irish politician, writer, historian and academic (1917– / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Israel, South Africa and international affairs
- Holy War Against India
- Younger teachers in Catholic schools less likely to believe in God or attend religious services
- EDITOR
- Eleanor Coppola, matriarch of the Coppola filmmaking family, dies at 87
Ardent republicans in the family somehow took tea with supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which favored home rule but not a break with Britain. As a diplomat, he helped chart Ireland’s course as an independent, anticolonialist voice at the United Nations and played a critical role in the United Nations intervention in Congo in 1961. As vice chancellor of the University of Ghana in the early 1960s, he fell out with the dictator Kwame Nkrumah over the question of academic freedom, and while teaching at New York University later that decade, he took part in an antiwar demonstration that led to his arrest.
A Curious Queen Conor Cruise O'Brien - The New York Review of Books
A Curious Queen Conor Cruise O'Brien.
Posted: Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:57:52 GMT [source]
More From the Los Angeles Times
"His political views were not always in accordance with those of my own party over the years, but I never doubted his sincerity or his commitment to a better and more peaceful Ireland," Cowen said. Tributes poured in from Dublin's political, academic and literary establishment for a man who championed unpopular causes, relished enemies and arguments, and challenged Ireland on its twin devotions to nationalism and Roman Catholicism. Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work.
Department of External Affairs
He had charisma, or insolently flaunted his objectionability, depending principally on one's politics. Colloquial reference to 'the Cruiser' (a term popularised by John Healy (qv)), if it did not indicate affection never mind political accord, attested to a recognition of O'Brien as a familiar, formidable and distinctive figure in the dramatis personae of contemporary Irish life. He wrote for the Irish Times (1982–6), then moved to the Irish Independent, for which his father had written.
David Gilmour · Conor Cruise O'Zion - London Review of Books
David Gilmour · Conor Cruise O'Zion.
Posted: Thu, 19 Jun 1986 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Irish politician, writer, historian and academic (1917– / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
With the Ghanaian interlude, another phase of O'Brien's career had come to an abrupt end, with an ensuing hiatus. In June 1965 his appointment as regents' professor and holder of the Albert Schweitzer chair in humanities at New York University (NYU) was announced, and he took up the position in September 1965. He was an inspiring teacher, and drew to the programme he directed George Steiner, David Caute and John Arden (qv), and later Edward Thompson. O'Brien entered TCD in 1936 with a sizarship achieved through his proficiency in Irish.
Israel, South Africa and international affairs
His support of the second Gulf war, and his generally indulgent disposition towards the presidency of George W. Bush fils, were aberrant rather than characteristic. If his own world view had darkened in old age, his attitude towards the exponents of neo-conservatism was unfailingly sardonic. The new leader of the Labour party, Frank Cluskey, made himself spokesman on Northern Ireland. When he asked O'Brien to submit to him in advance any statement on Northern Ireland, O'Brien on 20 September 1977 resigned from the Labour parliamentary party. He would some years later go through the motions of resignation from the party itself in protest against the Anglo–Irish agreement, by which time his membership had already lapsed; he rejoined in 2005.
Holy War Against India
While an Irish cabinet minister, O'Brien, a fierce critic of the IRA, banned members of the terrorist group and its political arm Sinn Fein being interviewed on radio and television. His tenure as vice president of the University of Ghana proved nearly as eventful. Nkrumah, becoming increasingly dictatorial, removed the nation’s chief justice. The Ghanaian press mounted a campaign against the university, portraying it as a hotbed of subversion.
In 1961, in a sign of O'Brien's growing stature, not only in Ireland, but internationally, he was appointed U.N. However, on 1 December 1961, O'Brien resigned from the D.E.A.Footnote 41 It was during these formative years that O'Brien acquired an interest in anti-colonisation, anti-imperialism and the ‘Third World’.Footnote 42 His personal experiences in the early 1960s during his U.N. Mr. O’Brien, known to friends as the Cruiser, was born in Dublin on Nov. 3, 1917, to a family with a long political pedigree on both sides of the widening split in Irish political life.
As for Conor, he continued to display his usual sangfroid and his account of his treatment at the hands of Lonrho provides one of the more hilarious passages in his vivid volume of memoirs published in 1998. Within three months, Conor had taken up residence on the managerial floor in the slightly anonymous position of editor-in-chief. (The paper already had an editor in the shape of the young Donald Trelford, who had succeeded Astor at the age of 38 in 1975.) It says much for the forbearance and tact deployed on each side that this delicate power-sharing arrangement was made to work. When it finally came to an end in 1981, the cause was an external one - a change in the paper's ownership from the American oil company, Atlantic Richfield, to "Tiny" Rowland's African trading company Lonrho. Conor had been fiercely opposed to the paper passing into Lonrho's hands, even giving evidence against it to the Monopolies Commission. DUBLIN — Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish iconoclast who led several lives as a diplomat, government minister, author and newspaper editor, has died.
Eleanor Coppola, matriarch of the Coppola filmmaking family, dies at 87
O'Brien, who was writing for the paper in diverse formats, proposed to contribute a regular weekly piece, and Astor agreed. His elegantly personalised, short-form essays were an acknowledged success, and the template for much of his later journalism. Corporate intrigues persisted, and on 25 January 1981 the Observer announced that O'Brien for family reasons had asked to be relieved of his duties as editor-in-chief from 31 March. When Anderson sold the paper to Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, O'Brien had testified with Astor and Goodman against the acquisition before the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Fired by Trelford, with whom his relations remained amicable, his association with the paper ceased in 1984. Asked about the section in the bill in an interview with Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post, he pulled out of his office desk a sheaf of letters to the Irish Press sympathetic to the IRA.
2 Power, ‘Revisionist nationalism's consolidation, republicanism's marginalization, and the peace process’, p. 90. Following protracted negotiations, the Sunningdale Agreement was signed on 9 December 1973.Footnote 110 Despite his own deeply-held reservations regarding the entire enterprise, as a member of the Irish cabinet and therefore with collective responsibility, O'Brien supported the Irish government's signing of the accord. The controversy over O'Brien's Galway comments was the first of many disagreements that he would have with his Labour Party colleagues. In fact, O'Brien's papers contain a file relating to his proposed resignation as the Labour Party's spokesperson on foreign affairs and Northern Ireland, dated circa October 1971. O'Brien's threatened resignation was prompted by his exclusion from an apparent meeting about Northern Ireland at the British Labour Party annual conference in Brighton in July 1971, involving Brendan Halligan, Justin Keating and the British Labour Party M.P. In correspondence with Corish, O'Brien exclaimed that his exclusion from this meeting implied that he was ‘no longer [the] credible spokesman for the Labour Party on Foreign Affairs’ and that there was a ‘lack of confidence in me as spokesman’.
He was a man of so many contradictions that to call him a blend of all these seems utterly inappropriate; rather, they appeared to pull him in many contrary directions at once. He seems posthumously fated to give rise to further controversy, since opinions on his career, his writing, his personality and his public stances vary hugely. Cruise O'Brien's Dublin North-East constituency was re-drawn and renamed as part of his Labour colleague James Tully's attempt as Minister for Local Government to design boundaries in the electoral interests of the coalition partners. In the 1977 general election, he stood in Dublin Clontarf and was one of three ministers (the others being Justin Keating and Patrick Cooney) defeated in a rout of the outgoing administration.[43] He was, however, subsequently elected to Seanad Éireann in 1977 from the Dublin University constituency.
Conor Cruise O'Brien was born on 3 November 1917, the only child of Francis Cruise O'Brien and Kathleen (née Sheehy).Footnote 25 Before his teenage years, Northern Ireland featured very little in O'Brien's world view. He had ‘no family ties with the place’ nor had he much contact, if any, with northern Protestants.Footnote 26 It was only around the age of sixteen, while attending Sandford Park, a non-denominated school in Ranelagh, Dublin, that O'Brien first gave Northern Ireland serious consideration. He was a historian, an essayist, a journalist-publicist, an academic, a politician, a career diplomat, a cabinet minister (for nearly four years), a man who held many plum jobs, yet was constantly at war with the intellectual and socio-political establishments of his time. At times he seemed consciously to stand above the battle(s), yet his attitude to many of his antagonists, intellectual or political, was often personal and he could be vituperative in his verbal attacks on enemies, real or imagined. His contempt for Charles Haughey, twice taoiseach and long-term leader of the Fianna Fail party, was notorious, and much of it seems to have been returned by Haughey, who refused to engage in public debate with him. The article examines four historical case studies to demonstrate the extent to which O'Brien found himself increasingly marginalised, in some cases ostracised, because of his attitude to Northern Ireland.
O'Brien resigned his seat in 1979 because of new commitments as editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper in London. In September 1961, a company of 155 Irish UN troops ("A" Company, 35th Battalion, Irish Army), was surrounded by a force of heavily armed Gendarmerie and mercenaries outnumbering them 20-to-one in Jadotville. The Irish soldiers, many of them still in their teens, were lightly armed, short of ammunition and supplies, and unprepared for the situation. He came to prominence in 1961, after his secondment from Ireland's UN delegation as a special representative to Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, in the Katanga region of the newly independent Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
