Tom Griffin (London, OK): As a footnote to Neal Ascherson and John Horgan's excellent obituaries of Conor Cruise O'Brien, I thought I would post an extract from a document that I came across in the National Archives a while ago.
In April 1975, M. F. Daly of the British Embassy in Dublin wrote a letter to the Foreign Office entitled Conor Cruise O'Brien and Republicanism. It concerned an Irish Times article in which O'Brien argued that the attitudes of Ireland's Fianna Fail government at the outset of the Troubles in 1969 had paved the way for the emergence of the IRA:
Perhaps the most sensible comment of Dr O'Brien's article was made in a letter to the paper on 1 April which, while agreeing that Dr O'Brien had "brilliantly" analysed the way in which Fianna Fail had virtually cornered the Irish market in nationalism and used it to gain and maintain power, said that the tradition of a violent undemocratic republic had existed in Ireland long before Fianna Fail. The latter had embraced it, but at the same time had defused it, and that far from being responsible for the revival of such a tradition, Fianna Fail, had done much to tame the beast.However, like all tamers of wild animals the party was constantly in danger of being devoured by its charge.
Two things are interesting about this. One is Daly's recognition of the need to deal with moderate republicanism, which prefigures the British approach to the peace process that O'Brien found so abhorrent.
The other is that the Foreign Office man nevertheless sees republicanism as "the tradition of a violent undemocratic republic [that] had existed in Ireland long before Fianna Fail."
In reality, mass democracy was a very new development in these islands at the time when Fianna Fail was founded in the 1920s. In the nineteenth century, Irish republicans were at the forefront of those calling for universal suffrage. Indeed, republican separatism emerged in part as a result of impatience with British democratic reforms.
Expansion of the franchise did ultimately come, most notably in 1918, which, not coincidentally, was the election won in Ireland by Sinn Fein, which withdrew from Westminster and declared independence.
"I was just over a year old at the time of those elections, which had negative implications for the status of our family, and therefore for my own prospects in life," O'Brien wrote in his autobiography. "If Home Rule had been achieved by the parliamentary route, [my grandfather] David Sheedy would certainly have had a seat in the Irish Cabinet. Our whole family would have been part of the establishment of the new Home Rule Ireland. As it was, we were out in the cold, superseded by a new republican elite."
Meditating further on this, O'Brien noted that "In the heyday of the Second British Empire, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Irish had been among the ruling peoples of the Empire. The Irish Parliamentary Party had made and unmade Governments of the Empire. It's importance was recognised by no less an imperialist than Cecil Rhodes, when he sent a large donation to Charles Stewart Parnell. Irish people were prominent in the Indian civil Service and in the colonial service - and this at a time when neither India not any other colony was represented in the Imperial Parliament."
As it was, Ireland was not quite finished with the British Empire. In 1922, Lloyd George's threat of 'immediate and terrible war' compelled Michael Collins to accept a Free State within the Empire.
It was this prospect and not partition which led to the Irish Civil War. Both Fianna Fail and the modern IRA emerged from the defeated republican side.
It was in part because he thought of republicans primarily in terms of those southern origins that O'Brien continually and wrongly predicted the demise of the peace process.
O'Brien's analysis cast a mystical caricature of the most elitist and militarist versions of IRA theology as the authentic face of Irish republicanism, obscuring the existence of a deep democratic republican tradition in Ireland.
His own account suggests that this owes something to his roots in a nineteenth century elite, which in Ireland as in the rest of Europe, found its social position threatened by the rise of mass democracy in the wake of the First World War.
O'Brien's frequent attacks on the SDLP (noted in Niall Meehan's obituary), his insistence on the superior republican authenticity of the IRA, and his opposition to the peace process ultimately gave succour to the extremists on both sides.
This is something the British Embassy seems to have recognised. They nevertheless recommended O'Brien's article for distribution by the Foreign Office's covert propaganda arm, the Information Research Department. O'Brien would not have known about this, but it was an ironic fate for a man who a decade earlier had helped to expose Encounter magazine - a joint project of the IRD and the CIA.
