The Royal Irish Academy played host this week to a peculiar conference, entitled Public Intellectuals in Times of Crisis: What Do They Have to Offer?

Such meetings call to mind Stefan Collini's dazzling book on British intellectuals, Absent Minds, which showed how debates about intellectuals and their place in society betray a fair degree of cultural fantasy and wishful thinking on all sides.

Collini showed that the British were obsessed with the idea of not having a proper intellectual caste, since they could not readily point to a Parisian Left Bank-style army of philosophers who make great pronouncements on the issues of the day.

This absent-mind thesis is, of course, nonsense in a society that nurtured the outstanding liberal philosopher Michael Oakeshott among others.

While it can be hard to define the concept of 'intellectual' with any great degree of precision, the RIA conclave suggests that one thing is certain.

Intellectuals are at their least impressive, or useful, when organising conferences about being intellectuals.

Prof Tom Garvin of UCD was on the panel of speakers at this conference, and if any of these panellists had a claim on our attention during the week of Judge Yvonne Murphy's report on abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese it is him.

Garvin's books on Irish nationalism and political culture since the Famine period show how the social and moral failures itemised so effectively by Judge Murphy have deep roots in the Irish Catholic mind.

His most recent book before his luminous assessment of Sean Lemass, was called Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so Poor for so Long? It contains one of the most penetrating accounts of Irish nationalism's deep ambivalence about the modern world ever penned.

The book contains a harrowing account of the abject failure of the police, governments and courts to protect generations of Irish children from neglect and abuse -- and should be read alongside Murphy's report for full effect.

Garvin's books show a sort of slow motion disintegration of civil society under the weight of religious hysteria and paranoia.

His most important function, so far as the public are concerned, is his insistence that for the most part we brought all these disasters on ourselves, and that the kind of moral collapse that disfigured the new State from the 1950s could not be blamed on partition, 'the Brits' or a wicked world.

With all due respect to the RIA meeting, and at the risk of offering a Hibernian version of the Collini argument, one can legitimately wonder whether modern Ireland ever produced a public intellectual to rival Conor Cruise O'Brien at full gallop in the Sixties.

Much of what made O'Brien such a special cultural critic had sadly been lost by a dull and uncomprehending emphasis on his anti-nationalist credentials, or his various intellectual contradictions.

If one steps back from these rather tedious debates for a moment, one gets a better understanding of the

enormity of his contribution to the modern Irish cultural debate.

Every interested schoolboy today will find his way to a copy of O'Brien's States of Ireland at some point; that vehement denunciation of Irish nationalism for its myopia and presumptions regarding Ulster Protestantism.

But there is a strong case to be made that States of Ireland, for all its polemical roar and dazzle, was not O'Brien's most penetrating intellectual study.

His very first book should take that garland.

This was called Maria Cross, a unique meditation on the modern Catholic imagination as seen in a select group of 20th century Catholic novelists, including Sean O Faolain.

Here O'Brien coolly assessed the way the Catholic faith's ambivalence towards mass democracy and the modern State fed what might be called the fascist impulse in certain contexts.

He also traced the paranoia and elitism that characterised many of his chosen novelists to the Catholic theory of history, which saw contemporary society as a kind of sad echo of better times.

His Catholic thinkers thought that history showed the existence of happier mirage lands in the past, and this nourished its pervasive hostility to modern liberal sensibilities.

O'Brien wrote this exquisite book in the Fifties under a pseudonym, Donat O'Donnell, as he was still on the payroll in the Department of External Affairs.

To read it again today, prompted by the RIA's rather pompous conference title, against the searing background of Judge Murphy's indictment is to feel all over the again the enormous power of O'Brien's mind.

This is what intellectuals are for.

Admirers of Viktor Klemperer's imperishable diaries might recall the passage where he is debating the nature of Jewishness with a friend similarly trapped at the midnight of the century.

His friend argues that the Jews are a seismic people, the first nation to feel the dull thud of the impending collapse, the first to reach for the packed suitcase that accompanies them down the lonely road to oblivion.

Tom Garvin and O'Brien are seismic people as well, in that they write to wound and to inspire.

Judge Murphy's report is, in many ways, one of their finer legacies to us.

John-Paul McCarthy tutors in Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford

Sunday Independent