Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Northern Ireland conflict: formulating a revisionist position

ABSTRACT

This article focuses narrowly on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s shaping of Irish government policy towards Northern Ireland in light of his revised assessment of the dangers he saw implicit in what he called ‘the cult of 1916’. Casting aside his former position during his career as a diplomat in the Department of External Affairs, where he had a complex role in the Anti-Partition campaign of Seán MacBride, and building at a tangent on his peculiar critique of the Rising in the essay ‘The Embers at Easter’ (1966), he formulated an analysis of Irish militant nationalism and republicanism as a contagion that could destroy the achieved state of the Irish nation. The most important articulator of a revisionist position through his essays and through States of Ireland (1972), he charted as a government minister a course that was widely unpopular at the time, but became central to a new ‘southern’ public consensus on Northern Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Conor Cruise O’Brien
• commemoration
• Irish government
• revisionism
• militant republicanism

Acknowledgements

This article draws directly and heavily upon my essay ‘Reframing 1916 after 1969: Irish Governments, A National Day of Reconciliation, and the politics of commemoration in the 1970s’, in Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry (eds.), Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The article was delivered as a paper at the ‘Conor Cruise O'Brien Centenary Symposium’ in Trinity College Dublin on 3 November 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On a related file, Diarmaid Ferriter has found evidence that O’Brien’s objection to the unarmed soldiers was that their appearance could appear to indicate that the IRA was the army of the Republic (See Ferriter, 2012, p. 233).

2 For the appointment of the talented Irish television director and intellectual Muiris MacConghail as Director of the Government Information Bureau on the suggestion of Joan FitzGerald see O’Brien’s Memoir (2000, p. 347).

3 Key civil servants at this time were Dermot Nally, Wally Kirwan, and Richard Stokes at the Department of the Taoiseach. In the Department of Foreign Affairs, their counterparts were Sean Donlon and Noel Dorr, and later at that level Michael Lillis. Some spoke at the Sunningdale and Anglo-Irish Agreement Witness statement seminars held in University College Dublin. See too the Centre for Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research London Witness Seminars on British Policy in Northern Ireland, 11 February 1993.

4 Ireland against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Annexes 1 and 2 to the report of the European Commission of Human Rights, adopted 25 January 1976) Strasbourg, p. 288.

5 It also clearly marked the effective end of the so-called old style southern command. But the notion that more concessions and naiveté were displayed by that older Southern leadership among the IRA has been shown to be inaccurate (White, 2006).

6 For Irish government reaction to the killings see ‘British Ambassador to Ireland – assassination, 2/7/76–18/10/78’, D/T 2006/133/708, NAID.

7 Emergency Powers Act 1976 file, D/T 2006/133/580, NAID. This extensive file is a vital source for policy in this year and shows how the Easter commemorations, the issues of cross-border incursions, the murder of the British ambassador, and the perceived requirement for greater security, the near-constitutional crisis and the resignation of the president Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh are connected.