expression of something deep within the soul of his own people. We can choose to describe this as the self-hating neurosis arising from the colonial experience, or as the voice of our collective conscience, awakening to the new responsibilities of a post-victimhood Ireland. Perhaps it does not matter how we describe these feelings, so long as we recognize their existence. For this clarity about ourselves, we owe Conor Cruise O’Brien a significant debt.
But there is another side. Few objective observers could have disagreed with the Cruiser’s description of the Provos as ‘haters’. But he seemed to forget that there was hatred also on the other side, that hatred begets hatred and that, in the end, it can be difficult to tell the angels from the devils for all the hate clogging up the system. Perhaps his point was that it was not our responsibility to critique the other side. But from the nationalist viewpoint, it sometimes looked as though he’d simply changed tribes.
Perhaps his greatest flaw was that he was unable to see other than the dark side of his own people, and this, tragically, caused him to become an undeservedly marginalized figure. His pessimism affected his judgement and led him eventually to a profound error about the chances of reconciliation. In an address delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in 1978, he said that the reason many people could not see that Irish nationalism and unionism were incapable of reconciliation was because this idea was ‘so desolatingly devoid of all comfort’. We all, he said, ‘find it hard to accept bad news even when it is true’. For many years he predicted an outright descent into civil war, and, even after the settlement of 1998, continued to preach gloomily about the prospects of a lasting peace. His apocalyptic predictions have been shown to be largely mistaken. The truth may, however, be more complex: perhaps even his overstatements contributed to the eventual outcome.
But perhaps, too, he had become so certain that collective ambivalence was the problem with Irish history that he refused to adjust his opinions in a changing landscape. Having convinced himself and others that the problem in the North was a particular interpretation of the nationalist narrative, he became focussed on pursuing and permanently imposing this argument, rather than looking squarely at the prevailing conditions. The ultimate tragedy, for him and Ireland, was that his pessimism resonated too harmoniously with the despair of his times, opening up the appalling possibility that, in spite of the moral integrity of his leadership, his main influence was to delay the peace for a generation.
20 Frank McDonald
T here is a possibly apocryphal story about a stranger who goes into a West of Ireland bar and, spying a man in the corner in a state of some melancholia, clearly determined upon drinking himself to death, asks of the barman what the matter is with this troubled soul. The barman explains that the man is a carpenter by trade and, once upon a time, was the area’s foremost expert in the construction of stairs. No matter how awkward the job, how confined the quarters, how complicated the configuration, he was called in to advise and implement. He was The Man Who Could Figure Out Stairs. ‘What happened to him at all?’ the stranger enquires. ‘Some bastard,’ replies the barman, ‘invented bungalows.’
One could be forgiven for thinking that many of those who commentate upon the nature of housing and planning in today’s Ireland are secretly related to this unfortunate individual, such is the zeal with which they have taken to condemning the bungalow and all who reside in it. For twenty-five years, until the very recent past, the public conversation seemed to take it for granted that the most significant planning problem facing Irish society was something called ‘bungalow blight’ or ‘one-off housing’, a phenomenon not entirely unique to Ireland but somehow seeming to
But there is another side. Few objective observers could have disagreed with the Cruiser’s description of the Provos as ‘haters’. But he seemed to forget that there was hatred also on the other side, that hatred begets hatred and that, in the end, it can be difficult to tell the angels from the devils for all the hate clogging up the system. Perhaps his point was that it was not our responsibility to critique the other side. But from the nationalist viewpoint, it sometimes looked as though he’d simply changed tribes.
Perhaps his greatest flaw was that he was unable to see other than the dark side of his own people, and this, tragically, caused him to become an undeservedly marginalized figure. His pessimism affected his judgement and led him eventually to a profound error about the chances of reconciliation. In an address delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in 1978, he said that the reason many people could not see that Irish nationalism and unionism were incapable of reconciliation was because this idea was ‘so desolatingly devoid of all comfort’. We all, he said, ‘find it hard to accept bad news even when it is true’. For many years he predicted an outright descent into civil war, and, even after the settlement of 1998, continued to preach gloomily about the prospects of a lasting peace. His apocalyptic predictions have been shown to be largely mistaken. The truth may, however, be more complex: perhaps even his overstatements contributed to the eventual outcome.
But perhaps, too, he had become so certain that collective ambivalence was the problem with Irish history that he refused to adjust his opinions in a changing landscape. Having convinced himself and others that the problem in the North was a particular interpretation of the nationalist narrative, he became focussed on pursuing and permanently imposing this argument, rather than looking squarely at the prevailing conditions. The ultimate tragedy, for him and Ireland, was that his pessimism resonated too harmoniously with the despair of his times, opening up the appalling possibility that, in spite of the moral integrity of his leadership, his main influence was to delay the peace for a generation.
20 Frank McDonald
T here is a possibly apocryphal story about a stranger who goes into a West of Ireland bar and, spying a man in the corner in a state of some melancholia, clearly determined upon drinking himself to death, asks of the barman what the matter is with this troubled soul. The barman explains that the man is a carpenter by trade and, once upon a time, was the area’s foremost expert in the construction of stairs. No matter how awkward the job, how confined the quarters, how complicated the configuration, he was called in to advise and implement. He was The Man Who Could Figure Out Stairs. ‘What happened to him at all?’ the stranger enquires. ‘Some bastard,’ replies the barman, ‘invented bungalows.’
One could be forgiven for thinking that many of those who commentate upon the nature of housing and planning in today’s Ireland are secretly related to this unfortunate individual, such is the zeal with which they have taken to condemning the bungalow and all who reside in it. For twenty-five years, until the very recent past, the public conversation seemed to take it for granted that the most significant planning problem facing Irish society was something called ‘bungalow blight’ or ‘one-off housing’, a phenomenon not entirely unique to Ireland but somehow seeming to
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