He broke the spell --and helped save the souls of all on this island
MY generation was born in the grip of an evil spell. It had sent us sleepwalking through 50 years of republican rhetoric with no regard for the rights of one million Northern Protestants. Without Conor Cruise O'Brien, it might have sleepwalked us into a civil war.
He broke the spell. He saved our souls. He created the modern Irish conscience, where pluralism is paramount, without which the peace process would not have been possible. And he did it almost alone.
Back in 1970, around the time of the Arms Trial, we were all mad nationalists and the Sinn Fein shark could safely swim south of the Border. But in 1972, O'Brien began his long war against armchair republicanism, hothouse Haugheyite nationalism, and the murder campaign of the Provisional IRA. And he won.
By 1993, thanks to O'Brien, the Provisional IRA was perceived as ideologically incoherent in the Irish Republic. In that year, John Hume helped the IRA face the fact that they could not win in the North.
But the IRA only listened because they had already lost the South.
They lost it to the lethal pen of Conor Cruise O'Brien, who drew us a new moral map. When he began we were still using an old map with a fourth green field on the top, temporarily coloured red. All we had to do was get the Brits out, push the Prods around, and we could fly the tricolour over that field. We never thought about what we would do about the one million Protestants who ploughed part of that green field.
They never rose from the rhetoric to reality. Not until Conor Cruise O'Brien forced us to face the fact that these Protestants did not suffer from false consciousness. And he did it with one book.
States of Ireland (1972) changed our states of mind. In his weekly columns, he hammered home the message: Northern Protestants did not want to join the Irish Republic.
And every time we avoided thinking about that awkward fact he would seize us by the scruff of the neck, and with a Swiftian wit and savagery force us to face that fact again.
And so, at first slowly and sullenly, and finally with a sense of liberation, we pushed the Provisional rhetoric aside, altered Articles 2 and 3 and tried to forget the prophet who had first pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Although admired around the world, he was never properly honoured in his own country. Which merely proved he was a prophet.
What drove him? Love, actually. Conor Cruise O'Brien was a passionate man: a husband in love with his wife, a patriot in love with his country. And he loved his country too much to let it commit murder in the name of nationalism.
He was the greatest living Irishman of my generation. Now he is the greatest dead Irishman of my generation. For the first time I realise what Gore Vidal meant when, watching the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, he remarked: "Well that's that. We're really on our own now."
Not quite.
His books beckon a new generation. They will warn them against what he called "sacral nationalism", that murderous mix of religion and nationalism which seduces each new era by dressing in new garb.
But at least the form it took in my generation, that of the Provisional IRA, is finished forever.
That vampire of violence is in the grave with a stake through its heart. Written on the wood is one name: Conor Cruise O'Brien.
- Eoghan Harris
