movement, would have liked him to at least hint that his motivation was pragmatism rather than principle.
There are those who say that the Cruiser, by his promotion of censorship measures that for years kept the ‘men of violence’ off the airwaves, did much to prolong the ‘Troubles’ by contributing to the isolationism of the republican movement and precluding an open public discussion that might have served to end the conflict sooner. This is an unknowable quantity now, although the degree of progress achieved after the dismantling of censorship in the 1990s suggests that the gagging of the gunmen might have been a mistake.
There are those, too, who hold the diametrically opposite view: that only because of the Cruiser’s insistent repudiation of armed republicanism, and the logic of censorship that emanated from it, did southern society become ‘honest’ enough to edge towards an accommodation with the other tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to say that, without Dr Cruise O’Brien’s moral leadership, we would never have achieved the resolution of the Good Friday Agreement.
Wars are not fought solely by men bearing guns. Behind the troops in the trench or the sniper in the undergrowth is the moral authority supplied by the unwritten mandate of the many who tacitly support the cause being pursued through violence. Wars cannot last long without such energy behind them. It follows, therefore, that settlements do not come about merely by negotiation between the active combatants, but also through a process in the hearts and minds of those who supply the active combatants with the moral authority to carry on the war. This suggests a cultural problem, which can be dealt with only by a delicate snipping of the atavistic wires that carry the signals and impulses that, down the line, lead to bombs going off in the street.
In this process there was a need for a special kind of leadership, from people with a special capacity for collective empathy with their own tribe. There has always been a great deal of pious nodding towards the Cruiser’s intellectual capacities, and undoubtedly he was one smart cookie. But really he was a type of tribal shaman, who depended as much on instinct as on reason of the conventional kind. During the years of conflict, he turned his own name into a byword for something that really did not emanate from him at all, but was rather an element of the culture he belonged to. Because of his enormous gifts of understanding, he has tuned into a strain of our collective emotional life and gave it words.
As a writer, he engaged deeply with the issues he wrote about. His 1972 book, States of Ireland , remains one of the most compelling and elegant chronicles of the roots of Irish tribal conflict. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it is impossible to be unaffected by the quality of the writing.
States of Ireland had been written, he stressed, from the Catholic, ‘specifically Southern Catholic’, side of the fence. He had tried to understand some of the feelings shared by most Ulster Protestants and to communicate some notion of these feelings to Catholics in the Republic. As a result, he had been ‘accused of being hyper-sensitive about the Protestants, and caring little about the Catholics’. In fact, he insisted, the reverse accusation would be more true. ‘It is to the Catholic community that I belong. This is my ‘‘little platoon”, to love which, according to Edmund Burke (whose family were in that same platoon), ‘‘is the first, the germ, as it were, of publick affections’’. I am motivated by affection for that platoon, identification with it, and fear that it may destroy itself, including me, through infatuation with its own mythology.’
It is interesting to note how this passage is dominated by the concepts of ‘feeling’ and ‘affection’, rather than by intellectual or conceptual thought. With this book, Dr Cruise O’Brien was attempting the
There are those who say that the Cruiser, by his promotion of censorship measures that for years kept the ‘men of violence’ off the airwaves, did much to prolong the ‘Troubles’ by contributing to the isolationism of the republican movement and precluding an open public discussion that might have served to end the conflict sooner. This is an unknowable quantity now, although the degree of progress achieved after the dismantling of censorship in the 1990s suggests that the gagging of the gunmen might have been a mistake.
There are those, too, who hold the diametrically opposite view: that only because of the Cruiser’s insistent repudiation of armed republicanism, and the logic of censorship that emanated from it, did southern society become ‘honest’ enough to edge towards an accommodation with the other tradition. It may not be an exaggeration to say that, without Dr Cruise O’Brien’s moral leadership, we would never have achieved the resolution of the Good Friday Agreement.
Wars are not fought solely by men bearing guns. Behind the troops in the trench or the sniper in the undergrowth is the moral authority supplied by the unwritten mandate of the many who tacitly support the cause being pursued through violence. Wars cannot last long without such energy behind them. It follows, therefore, that settlements do not come about merely by negotiation between the active combatants, but also through a process in the hearts and minds of those who supply the active combatants with the moral authority to carry on the war. This suggests a cultural problem, which can be dealt with only by a delicate snipping of the atavistic wires that carry the signals and impulses that, down the line, lead to bombs going off in the street.
In this process there was a need for a special kind of leadership, from people with a special capacity for collective empathy with their own tribe. There has always been a great deal of pious nodding towards the Cruiser’s intellectual capacities, and undoubtedly he was one smart cookie. But really he was a type of tribal shaman, who depended as much on instinct as on reason of the conventional kind. During the years of conflict, he turned his own name into a byword for something that really did not emanate from him at all, but was rather an element of the culture he belonged to. Because of his enormous gifts of understanding, he has tuned into a strain of our collective emotional life and gave it words.
As a writer, he engaged deeply with the issues he wrote about. His 1972 book, States of Ireland , remains one of the most compelling and elegant chronicles of the roots of Irish tribal conflict. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it is impossible to be unaffected by the quality of the writing.
States of Ireland had been written, he stressed, from the Catholic, ‘specifically Southern Catholic’, side of the fence. He had tried to understand some of the feelings shared by most Ulster Protestants and to communicate some notion of these feelings to Catholics in the Republic. As a result, he had been ‘accused of being hyper-sensitive about the Protestants, and caring little about the Catholics’. In fact, he insisted, the reverse accusation would be more true. ‘It is to the Catholic community that I belong. This is my ‘‘little platoon”, to love which, according to Edmund Burke (whose family were in that same platoon), ‘‘is the first, the germ, as it were, of publick affections’’. I am motivated by affection for that platoon, identification with it, and fear that it may destroy itself, including me, through infatuation with its own mythology.’
It is interesting to note how this passage is dominated by the concepts of ‘feeling’ and ‘affection’, rather than by intellectual or conceptual thought. With this book, Dr Cruise O’Brien was attempting the
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