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O'Brien was born in 1917 in Rathmines, a Dublin suburb, the only child of Francis Cruise O'Brien, a journalist who worked for the Freeman's Journal and later the Irish Independent, and Kathleen Sheehy, a teacher, feminist, pacifist and author of a book on Irish grammar. His father died when his son was 10, so the dominant influence on O'Brien was his strong-minded mother. Conor Cruise O'Brien, who has died aged 91, was a natural controversialist, probably the most pugnacious Irish intellectual since George Bernard Shaw.
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Christianity Today, April 29, 1996, Bruce Barron, review of On the Eve of the Millennium, p. 34. Niall Meehan teases out some of the contradictions of a man who wrote, made and was the product of history. He developed a successful academic career later before returning to Ireland, where he became a leading player in the Labour Party in the late 1960s alongside counterparts such as David Thornley and Justin Keating.
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After his stint as editor-in-chief of the Observer, O'Brien earned his living by his journalistic writing, by contributions to international reviews and by his books, and had a series of visiting lectureships in American academic institutions. Though immersed in its public life in a period of bracing political and artistic vibrancy, the O'Briens were never quite settled in New York. With the adoption of Patrick, Whitewater, the house which O'Brien had purchased in 1950 on the summit of Howth, overlooking the Baily lighthouse, with the glittering sweep of Dublin bay to the right, once more beckoned.
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Although he was a fierce advocate of his homeland, O’Brien was a strong critic of Irish Republican Army violence and of what he considered the romanticized desire for reunification with Northern Ireland. Many still believe that O'Brien was at his best as an academic historian, and that the book Parnell and his Party, which grew out of a student thesis, is his most valuable work. A Concise History of Ireland, published in 1972 under the joint names of himself and his second wife, is a useful "potted" survey and has gone through several editions.
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O'Brien recognised that in the post-Morthor furore he should leave his assignment in Élisabethville so as not to jeopardise the prospects of reconciliation, but wanted to be assigned to Léopoldville as the senior political adviser to the ONUC chief of civilian operations rather than be reassigned to a role in New York. He left for New York on 16 November, leaving Máire MacEntee in Élisabethville, where she had joined him a couple of weeks previously. At the security council, the Belgian foreign minister Paul Henri Spaak denounced O'Brien for having pursued 'a personal policy', and 'grossly exceeded instructions'. Paradoxically, this fortified O'Brien's position; however, it was almost immediately destabilised by what transpired in Élisabethville on 28 November. Katangese paracommandos apprehended a party en route to a reception in honour of US Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, a backer of Tshombe.
In a sequence of events which originated in the proclamation of Ireland as a republic in 1949, an all-party campaign against partition was launched in the Mansion House in which O'Brien was to play a central role within the department. Promoted in 1951 to the rank of counsellor, he edited the bulletin Éire, and arranged the publication of pamphlets. At MacBride's behest, he wrote an anti-partitionist history of Ireland, never published and not extant, which his biographer dubbed 'the Lost Book of O'Brien' (Akenson, 134). Most remarkably in the context of his later career, he became managing director of MacBride's surreal Irish News Agency, established by statute to engender a flow of propaganda in favour of Irish reunification in the international press. In 1966, O'Brien accepted an invitation from Owen Dudley Edwards to contribute to a special supplement of the Irish Times to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916.
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Incomprehensibly, he failed the Irish civil service entrance examination, but passed on his second attempt in 1942 and joined the department of finance where he spent two years before moving to the department of external affairs (now foreign affairs). In view of O'Brien's later stances towards Northern Ireland and Republicanism, it is rather ironic to note that in the late 1940s he worked energetically in the Irish government's campaign against partition. Meanwhile, he tried his hand at writing poetry, which was tactfully rejected by Sean O'Faolain, editor of Bell magazine, but he soon made his mark as a critic and commentator. With the election of the first inter-party government in 1948, Seán MacBride (qv) was appointed minister for External Affairs.
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You know how I feel, I think, and you and I are both a bit dumb about expressing such feelings. It's true that you are both exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally imaginative, so that you must have suffered even more acutely than most people would under the initial impact of this thing. But you also have unusually deep inner resources, moral, emotional, and intellectual, great powers of recuperation, reflection and enjoyment, and also the mysterious, indestructible and versatile capacity we vaguely call humour (Migrant, 208).
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Your email address will be used in order to notify you when your comment has been reviewed by the moderator and in case the author(s) of the article or the moderator need to contact you directly. See also Ivory, ‘Revisions in nationalist discourse among Irish political parties’, pp 89–90. 61 O'Brien, ‘Report of party delegation to Six Counties and the British Labour Party – 16/19 August 1969’. Elements within the Belfast Citizens’ Defence Committees would later form part of the Central Defence Committees, which would go on to form the nucleus of the P.I.R.A. See Kelly, ‘A failed political entity’, p. 65. His dramatic writings include King Herod explains (1968), in which Hilton Edwards (qv) played Herod at the Gate theatre in 1971; Murderous angels (1968), on the prelude to Katanga; and unpublished screenplays on Parnell and Michael Collins (qv). He was pro-chancellor of the University of Dublin (1972–94), a member of the RIA, and was awarded numerous honorary doctorates, including from QUB in 1984.
Later he went to Sandford Park, nominally secular but in effect imbued with the Protestant ethos. His mother's influence had made him fluent in Gaelic, and he won a sizarship to study Irish and French at Trinity College, Dublin. O'Brien was a brilliant student and won a scholarship at the end of his first year, which brought an allowance of £30 a year and rooms in college – a coveted privilege – at half price. His roommate was Vivian Mercier, later a professor of English literature and author of books about Beckett and the Irish comic tradition. Not even O'Brien's denigrators, however, could deny that he was an intellectually formidable figure and a man who commanded attention in many countries.
Born in Dublin in 1917, Mr Cruise O'Brien was one of the leading intellectual lights of the Labour Party during the 1960s, following a career as a civil servant in the Department of Finance and later the Department of External Affairs. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, both of whom figured largely in O’Brien’s career and propelled him to diplomatic roles after Ireland’s admission to the United Nations in 1955. It was a shabby episode in the history of the Observer and no one surviving from that time can afford to look back without a twinge of guilt.
O'Brien's article, ‘The embers of Easter’, attacked anti-partitionism, which he argued had merely fostered bigotry and promoted suspicion between Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists.Footnote 45 Two years after the publication of ‘The embers of Easter’, O'Brien was approached with a proposition that would transform his life. In the autumn of 1968 Brendan Halligan, political director of the Labour Party, invited O'Brien to re-join the party (O'Brien had been a member as a T.C.D. undergraduate). His father, a journalist, moderate nationalist and agnostic, insisted that Conor, his only child, attend a Protestant school, although his mother — the model for Miss Ivors in James Joyce’s story “The Dead” — managed to keep him in a Catholic school until he received his first communion. He later studied history at Trinity College, Dublin, which was also Protestant. On graduating, he found a job in the civil service, initially in the finance department but soon with the department for external affairs (now called the foreign office).
(When you heard that distinctive Irish voice squeakily address you as "party comrade", it was usually time to go home.) Few things afforded me greater pleasure than helping to get Conor named Commentator of the Year in the 1983 What The Papers Say awards. This coincided, though I did not realise it at the time, with the final push by Lonrho to get the paper's most illustrious contributor removed from any connection with the Observer - a demand which I shall always believe that the entire staff, from the editor downwards, should have combined to resist. Conor's enforced departure was dressed up as having something to do with his acceptance of a visiting professorship at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire - and face, if not pride, was thereby preserved. A government announcement Thursday did not give the cause of death, although Cruise O'Brien had faded from public life since suffering a stroke in 1998 and several broken bones from a fall in 2007. 94 Power, ‘Revisionist nationalism's consolidation, republicanism's marginalization, and the peace process’, p. 90.
Meanwhile, he divorced his wife and married MacEntee, and they adopted two Congolese children. After the 1973 general election, Cruise O'Brien was appointed Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the 1973–77 Labour-Fine Gael coalition under Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave.
Among them was Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana, who talked O’Brien into becoming vice chancellor of the University of Ghana. But the former Irish diplomat famously left Ghana in disgust after three years. He had clashed over academic freedoms with the economically and politically embattled Nkrumah, who was also the university’s chancellor. Characters in the works of Irish writer James Joyce were based on several of his family members, including his mother.
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