Husband and wife returned to Trinity, where they both took Firsts. O'Brien stayed on to take another degree in Modern History. In he joined the Irish Department of Finance, from where he was transferred after two years to the Department of External Affairs. In the words of Garrett FitzGerald the future Taoiseach this journal "spewed out sterile anti-partitionist propaganda favouring reunification without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland". In his memoir Ancestral Voices O'Brien confessed that he looked back on that stage of his career with growing distaste.
I realised the anti-partition campaign was doing no good, but it took me longer to realise it was doing serious harm.
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I didn't [realise this] until the Provisional IRA campaign began in He produced a series of essays on Roman Catholic writers which were published as Maria Cross in , under the name of Donat O'Donnell. His next book, Parnell and his Party , grew out of his doctoral dissertation at Trinity, and showed O'Brien for the first time as deflator of Ireland's national myths.
He argued that Parnell might have been unlucky, but that he was scarcely the victim of injustice; in the Victorian age it would have been quite impossible for an exposed adulterer to lead the Irish nationalists. In O'Brien went to Paris as counsellor at the embassy. Then, when Ireland was admitted to the United Nations in , he returned to Dublin, where he adopted such a virulent anti-colonial and anti-American line that in the Economist described the UN General Assembly as the "Afro-Irish Assembly".
Conor Cruise O'Brien
By this time O'Brien's marriage had failed, though they were not divorced until She was also a niece of Cardinal Browne. Katanga independence moves were supported by Belgian troops and mercenaries. O'Brien, who believed that the superpowers were determined to unite the mineral-rich Katanga with neighbouring Rhodesia, was equally determined that it should remain with the Congo. His stock was still high in Africa, however, and President Nkrumah offered him the vice-chancellorship of the University of Ghana. O'Brien held this post for three years, from to , while Nkrumah sacked all the other white academics, even deporting one who was ill on a stretcher.
Nkrumah saw him off, thanking him "for what you did for the university, whatever it was". O'Brien's experience in Ghana, with its fathomless incompetence, oppression and corruption, may have sowed the seeds of disillusionment with postcolonial countries. Nevertheless, at New York he disturbed colleagues by his willingness to be caught up in student demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
And in he made many enemies when he exposed the links between the journal Encounter and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Máire Mhac an tSaoi: Contradictory views in emerging voice | Irish Examiner
Encounter riposted with an anonymous attack in fact written by Goronwy Rees, the Welsh author later exposed as a Soviet spy , which described O'Brien as the "Machiavelli of peace transformed into the Joe McCarthy of political-cultural criticism". O'Brien sued in a Dublin court, and Encounter settled with an apology, costs and a charity donation. In , when the dominance of Fianna Fail was interrupted by a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour, O'Brien became minister for posts and telecommunications. As he banned the IRA and their spokesmen from Irish radio and television, it became evident that his views on the future of Ireland had markedly changed.
He now understood that terrorist violence was wrong not only in its means but also in its ends, and that the notion of a "united Ireland" was oxymoronic.
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He saw that the million Protestants of Ulster did not want to join the Irish republic and could not be forced to do so, at least not without destroying the essentially peaceful and democratic nature of the Irish state. Even some of his enemies conceded that, having made this volte-face, O'Brien's conduct as minister was honourable and courageous: Indeed, the critics were on stronger ground in condemning the zeal with which O'Brien's enforced his new views. Having accepted the logic of his position as a censor and an upholder of order, he went about his task with almost too much relish.
The most bitter of all the political enemies he made at this time was Charles Haughey, who had been implicated in running guns to the IRA several years before becoming leader of Fianna Fail. In the coalition fell and at the ensuing general election O'Brien lost his seat. He reflected that if there had been a personal vote against him it was not because of his opposition to terrorism but because of the dire state of the Irish telephone system.
Having left the lower house, he became a member of the Senate, a largely decorative body, from to In the latter year he came to London and turned to journalism as editor-in-chief of the Observer. His time in this office saw upheavals at the paper, which was acquired by "Tiny" Rowland against O'Brien's strong opposition. In O'Brien ceased to be editor-in-chief, a role for which he was not in any case really suited.
Before long, however, he was also relieved of the column he had been writing for the Observer with the greatest distinction.
The column was O'Brien at his best: None the less, one of his pieces for the Observer was unfortunate. In he defended the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in vehement terms, stressing that they were there to promote justice through their Lebanese allies. On the morning this column appeared the news broke of massacres in two Palestinian camps, carried out by Christian gunmen while the Israelis looked the other way.
Just as O'Brien had lost all enthusiasm for Irish nationalism, so he had developed a strong vicarious patriotism for Israel. His espousal of the Zionist ideal was expressed in his long book The Siege: He had published several more books in the s: He gave the first lectures in memory of the murdered British diplomatist John Ewart-Biggs, published as Neighbours in Over the conventional age of retirement, O'Brien found no shortage of part-time jobs at American colleges.
Anatomy of Passion, says her subject is a mix of several contradictions. For example, there was every reason why feminists, artists and poets in the s wanted her to come on board with that movement but that was not her thing at all. I had a career.
I gave it away. She is quite singular and complex, and at times difficult. Anatomy of Passion with Louis de Paor, has fashioned a beguiling film, which includes 16mm home movie footage from the s and s, shot by MacEntee. Kehoe, too, has an inside track. She grew up in Melbourne, Australia, but has settled in the Connemara Gaeltacht and learned Irish as a second language, a linguistic lens that, like Mhac an tSaoi, has helped to change her perspective of the world.
The world feels more dynamic in the way it can be described. An often ignored legacy of World War I.
Máire Mhac an tSaoi: Contradictory views in emerging voice
How was it for you? No rest for the festive workers. How to take on difficult subjects.