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Most notably, as a lifelong commentator on Irish politics and as a government minister in the early 1970s, he argued passionately against a united Ireland without the full consent of the Protestant north and bitterly criticized the tacit support for the Irish Republican Army then prevalent in the Republic of Ireland. With the return to power of Fianna Fail, O'Brien for a time had a good working relationship with the veteran minister for external affairs, Frank Aiken. Ireland by now was playing an active and vocal role in the UN assembly, and O'Brien was generally credited with being one of the people who formulated its policies – which included bringing on to the agenda China's admission to the UN, to the chagrin of American diplomats. His work in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo won him the admiration of many on the political left and of leaders in newly independent African countries.
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Against some sharp cavilling from Robin Dudley Edwards (qv) as extern examiner, he was awarded a doctorate in 1953. His thesis was published as Parnell and his party by the Clarendon Press in 1957. Historiographically it was almost revolutionary in its critical analysis, acuteness of insight and scholarly dispassion. O'Brien was conscious of the transition from oral remembrance, dedicating the book to the memory of David Sheehy and Henry Harrison (qv), the two survivors of Commitee Room 15 he had known.
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His appointment to take titular charge of the Observer in January 1978 was certainly an adventurous one. The great press panjandrum of the period - he had been chairman of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, as well as presiding over the Observer Trust - Goodman lived in some style, surrounded by all the appurtenances of wealth and status. As ill-luck would have it, on arriving at the apartment block's imposing entrance, Conor contrived to press the wrong bell.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, Irish Diplomat, Is Dead at 91
His last public appearance was on 7 September 2006 to deliver an address on the ninetieth anniversary of the death of T. M. Kettle, in the old house of lords chamber of the Bank of Ireland on College Green. His own ninetieth birthday was the occasion of a last large rallying of family and friends at Whitewater. His funeral was at the church of the Assumption in Howth, and he was interred in Glasnevin. Convinced that the pursuit of a negotiated settlement in Northern Ireland which involved the IRA and Sinn Féin was a propitiation of terrorism and a reverse oppression of Northern protestants, O'Brien pitted himself against the John Hume–Gerry Adams convergence course of Irish and British government policy in relation to the North.
Conor Cruise O'Brien - The Guardian
Conor Cruise O'Brien.
Posted: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT [source]
He espoused a policy of open broadcasting (involving reciprocal broadcasting arrangements between RTÉ and the BBC), but was beaten back and, after commissioning a consumer survey, endorsed the establishment of a second RTÉ television channel. This provided the backdrop to O'Brien's contest with Encounter, the glittering liberal periodical that transpired to be funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. O'Brien had in 1963 challenged its agenda, and returned to the charge in his Homer Watt lecture at NYU on 19 May 1966.
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The party included Brian Urquhart, soon to succeed O'Brien in Katanga, who was bloodied with a rifle butt and dragged away along with two others. Manhandled, Máire MacEntee acted with calm and resourcefulness, no less than O'Brien's driver, Private Paddy Wall. He wrote, still as Donat O'Donnell, for Commonweal in the US and reviewed for the Spectator and the New Statesman in England. He completed his doctoral thesis on Charles Stewart Parnell (qv) and his party.
Irish politician and journalist Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien dies
He referred to this action, which in effect formally de-recognised the legitimacy of his former wife and their children, as "hypocritical … and otherwise distasteful, but I took it, as preferable to the alternatives".[17] Mac an tSaoi was five years his junior, and the daughter of Seán MacEntee, who was Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) at the time. The couple subsequently adopted two children of Irish-African parentage, a son (Patrick) and a daughter (Margaret). Cruise O'Brien was hung out to dry by his UN boss Hammarskjöld, while his political masters in Ireland tried to wash their hands of the whole debacle. It has since emerged that while the Irish government was providing a monthly analysis of events in the Congo to members of the cabinet and some senior politicians, they weren't sharing this key information with Irish officers on the ground there.
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On behalf of the Labour Party, I wish to extend my deepest sympathy to his wife Maire MacantSaoi and to his family,” Mr Gilmore added. Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said Ireland had lost “an intellectual giant and one of the most remarkable Irish public figures of the 20th century”. He said he had “marked up a huge range of achievements during his long and varied life”. "(He) was blessed with a strong intellect and he was a man of strong convictions," he said, adding that Mr Cruise O'Brien's "political views were not always in accordance with those of my own party over the years I never doubted his sincerity or his commitment to a better and more peaceful Ireland". Expressing condolences tonight, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said Mr Cruise O'Brien had been "a leading figure in Irish life in many spheres since the 1960s", displaying a wide array of talents in politics, academia and journalism.
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There had been in some quarters an expectation, based on some of the positions he had adopted in opposition, that O'Brien would repeal section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960), which permitted the Minister to direct the RTÉ Authority 'to refrain from broadcasting any particular matter or matter of any particular class'. He quickly made plain that given the conditions that prevailed in Northern Ireland he would not abrogate the provision for a broadcasting ban. What he did was to refine the legislative regime; such was the controversy that it was as if he had introduced a form of censorship that had not previously existed. O'Brien diligently applied himself to his departmental responsibilities, but strayed into controversy, expressing himself with more explicitness or greater pungency than was either conventional or politically prudent. In February 1974 he referred to state policies on the Irish language as having created a 'bog oak monolith'. In late June 1974 his declaration that he was no longer working actively for Irish unity scandalised received opinion.
His understanding of Parnell's strategy was acute, and he elucidated the respective roles of his lieutenants, each of whom he brilliantly characterised. While he had when young been somewhat dismayed by David Sheehy's adherence to the anti-Parnellites, his conclusion on the Parnell split of 1890–91 was measuredly adverse to the Irish leader. It has been suggested that Hammarskjold's knowledge of and admiration for Maria Cross, a volume of critical essays that O'Brien published in 1952 under the pseudonym of Donat O'Donnell, was influential in his decision to ask O'Brien to serve on his executive staff.Under Hammarskjold, O'Brien was assigned to over-see U.N. Operations at Katanga in the Congo in 1961, a time of violent political upheavals. Later that year he was relieved of these duties at his own request and resigned from the foreign service altogether.
The death has taken place of the former Cabinet minister and journalist, Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was Minister for Posts and Telegraph during the Fine Gael/Labour coalition in the 1970s. In 1939, he married Christine Foster, a liberal Belfast Protestant, but the marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, poet Maire MacEntee, the daughter of an Irish deputy prime minister; two children from his first marriage; two children from his second marriage; and five grandchildren. His father was a journalist, literary critic and a friend of poet William Butler Yeats. He was also among his family’s “many vigorously agnostic members” and insisted on his son’s education in Protestant schools to avoid the religious influence of the majority Catholic population. Conor Cruise O’Brien, a leading Irish author, politician and diplomat who rose to international prominence while leading a United Nations mission in the troubled Congo and remained an independent, often contrarian thinker amid religious strife of his own homeland, died Thursday at his home near Dublin.
After serving as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana (1962–65) and Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University (1965–69), O’Brien entered Irish politics. He held (1969–77) a Labour Party seat in the Dail (parliament) and then (1977–79) in the Senate, representing Trinity College, of which he was prochancellor (1973–2008). In 1979 he was named editor in chief of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer, but he left after three tumultuous years. O’Brien remained an active newspaper columnist, especially for the Irish Independent (until 2007). His books include States of Ireland (1972) and On the Eve of the Millennium (1995), as well as perceptive studies of Charles Stewart Parnell, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Jefferson. After his mother's death in 1938, he supported himself by giving "grinds" and by dabbling in journalism.
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