Talk:Conor Cruise O'Brien

Wandering off-topic?.....
Towards the end of December, user Ali-oops restored the commentaries about Bowen-Colthurst and WB Yeats, which someone (not me) had earlier deleted. The summary comment for the restoration asked why verifiable info was deleted. I would tend to support the deletion (and transferring the information elsewhere if necessary). It seems to me that this material is wandering way way off the topic.

The first one reads......


 * One of his aunts, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, lost her husband Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist caught up in the violence of the Easter Rising, when he was killed on the orders of a psychotic British army officer, Colonel Bowen-Colthurst (who was looking for "Fenians"). Bowen-Colthurst was sent temporarily to a Canadian hospital after being adjudged insane in the aftermath of the Rising, but he was released with a pension to settle in Canada.

So we're essentially reporting the retirement fate of someone who ordered the killing of the husband of an aunt of CCO'B!!

The second item reads........


 *  McBride was the son of John McBride, a Boer supporter who was executed in 1916 for his somewhat nominal involvement in the Easter Rising, and of Maud Gonne, a nationalist, who had been a love interest of William Butler Yeats and who eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. 

In this case, we're discussing a former love interest of the mother of one of CCO'B's bosses!

Neither of these pieces offers any explanation as to how this activity influenced the behavior of CCO'B or his thinking. I'm sure that all this material is verifiable, but wouldn't it be better placed in the entries for those various individuals.

Thoughts, anyone? JXM 18:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Transferred B-C info to Hanna S-S page. Deleted info on Maud Gonne - it's already under her entry. JXM 21:33, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Headings
Added headings - choose better ones if you like. Also added a bit about two books.--80.4.252.114 22:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Getting mauled
Does anyone have his quote about the Irish condition, and "usually getting mauled by it"?--shtove 19:39, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Cruise
If his mother was a Sheehy and his father an O Brien, I must ask the obvious question: where did the Cruise come from? 193.1.172.163 20:59, 20 June 2006 (UTC)


 * His father's surname was Cruise O'Brien, not O'Brien. Damac (talk) 10:57, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Dodgy usage?
I know what the following means, but it doesn't seem well expressed:

"He coined the acronym GUBU on foot of a statement by Charles Haughey." qp10qp 18:25, 13 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Remember be bold (not a license for vandalism but a license to improve)! Djegan 18:34, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Ideology
I can't understand why O'Brien joined the UKUP, it makes no sense. I mean ignore the fact that he is Irish and not from Ulster, but he is also from a leftwing party, the Irish Labour Party while the UKUP is a party of the far right! Weird, can anyone here tell me if he is STILL a unionist? IF he were does that mean that he supports the Republic joining the UK?


 * "Far right" is a fairly meaningless term in a political environment that doesn't really correspond to any traditional left/right divide. UKUP was really a classic case of a "flash party" whereby a few individuals with some degree of personal appeal and some populist policies suddenly surge in support in an area where there's a vacuum and voters have supported existing parties by default for other reasons. (In UKUP's case their main appeal seems to have been to middle class Unionists who were sceptical about the direction the Ulster Unionists were going in in the peace process, but for various reasons, some of them social, didn't feel able to support the DUP.) The typical flash party gets some early success but then once it actually has to do something rather than just spout rhetoric it quickly falls apart over disputes on wider policy, tactics & direction and the main personalities fall out with one another. The electorate usually responds to public feuds and splits with a "plague on all your houses" attitude. (UKUP also suffered further as the DUP in recent years have done a lot of rebranding to make themselves "middle-class friendly". Several of the assembly seats gained by the DUP in 2003 were won by UKUP in 1998 and there's potential for a study into whether UKUP was a crucial "stepping stone" for the exodus of Ulster Unionist support.) The cycle I've described happened to UKUP, it happened with the Scottish Socialists, it happens in cycles with the UK Independence Party, to a large extent it happened with the UK Social Democrats, it happened with the US Reform Party, with the Australian One Nation Party... one could go on endlessly listing such parties.


 * In terms of UKUP's wider politics, Bob McCartney pledged in 1995 to take the (British) Labour whip if elected (although I think his application was rejected) and apparently had the support of local Labour groups in his campaigns. He may have shifted his position since (and before) but if one was looking for a vaguely credible (i.e. not a microparty with little chance of election) Labour inclined party in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and one accepted the union/border, then UKUP wouldn't be a silly choice.


 * As for people in the Republic supporting unionism, it is entirely possible for someone to accept existing borders that may not have existed or been elsewhere in the past (and the border between north and south is far from unique in Europe) and supporting the right of a territory to remain part of its current country. "26 county Irish nationalists" who completely repudiate claims to Northern Ireland are not overtly loud but a lot of studies have suggested there is an overlooked undercurrent in the south that would reject unification, whether because they see the north as "different" or because they don't want the south to have to pay for the north or other reasons. For a politician who holds such views to go north is a little strange though. Timrollpickering 12:02, 23 August 2007 (UTC)


 * O'Brien has shifted gradually to the right and reactionary politics over his long career. Huangdi (talk) 07:46, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

de Valera
The claim that in de Valera's time, "those who did not conform to Catholic mores were generally not preferred in the public sector appointments process" needs to be challenged. In de Valera's time, two Protestants, Robert Hyde and Erskine Childers, became Presidents of Ireland. Millbanks (talk) 10:08, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Ummmm, not sure about this. The comment basically refers to job discrimination, and anyway the presidency is not a "public sector appointment".  Douglas Hyde was selected specifically to avoid the outward appearance of Catholic dominance, and Erskine Childers wasn't elected president until Dev retired at age 90.  One would probably also draw a distinction between the concept of 'protestant' (for the presidents) and 'agnostic', which might more properly reflect CCOB's outlook at the time he got the public service job.  I think the 'Catholic mores' comment may come from CCOB's own memoirs - when I get a chance, I'll look it up.   jxm (talk) 02:59, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
 * jxm, that is not true. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Donn300 (talk • contribs) 17:10, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
 * It does need to be challenged- big time. And referenced. And contextualised. And balanced. And if this is not forthcoming, it needs to be removed forthwith. 86.42.119.12 (talk) 22:11, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

a Brit
He was a brit who lived in Ireland - what was he doing joining the hardline (upper middle class) UK Unionist Party ? if he was an Irish man ? - if we Irish did 20% of the murders and land stealing in britain of what the brits did to us in Ireland over the last 800 years, you would never have heard the end of it from the english. - 86.148.39.221 (talk) 15:38, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

States of Ireland
There is a section in States Of Ireland (1972) where Cruise O'Brien blames the Civil Rights marchers for starting the Troubles. The essence of his argument was that Irish Catholics knew that if they marched for Civil Rights that their marches would result in a violent loyalist response. That they marched in the knowledge of this probable response consequently made them culpable for starting the Troubles. He used an analogy from Greek to convey his point. People who defend this man should be made aware of this view (and probably many more). 86.42.119.12 (talk) 22:40, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * so by that logic, Dr. King and the civil rights activists should not have marched in Selma in 1965 and elsewhere since it would provoke racist violence and of course Jews should not have fought back against Nazis. It is a fatuous and complacent argument that trivializes the realities of oppression, to say nothing of the democratic rights of protestors.

Interestingly, in recent times, nationalists who had insisted on marching anywhere they wanted in the late 1960s became rigidly opposed to Orangemen walking where they had paraded before (e.g. Drumcree)86.143.63.147 (talk) 10:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * the difference is that not only do these marches glorify the subjugation and oppression of the Irish, they were also often occasion for attacks and pogroms through the Catholic communities they marched through. The Nazi march through a predominantly Jewish community in Skokie, Illinois was in a similar vein.

New Source
I'm a bit rusty...can someone throw this up as a source? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/world/europe/20obrien-conor-cruise.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

NPOV
This article has been mostly written and edited from a fairly anti-O'Brien perspective, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the general tendency of the article is to make O'Brien seem less contradictory and more straightforwardly anti-Republican, pro-state power and pro-Unionist than he always was. I am not a fan of his work by any means, but he could sometimes write very eloquently about the value of civil disobedience. His first book Maria Cross is a very interesting study of some Catholic novelists, and is much more rebellious and strange than some of his later stuff. His book on Albert Camus is a small masterpiece. It's very good about how Camus essentially betrayed his own principles when it came to the Algerian war of independence (Camus announced that he'd fight to defend his own mother), but one of the most interesting things about it is that in its very accurate and discomforting depiction of intellectual and moral betrayal, it's also a disguised portrait of O'Brien himself in later life. He undoubtedly became more boring, predictable and pro-Union as he got older, and his last couple of books are ridiculous scaremongering, but he is a more interesting and contradictory figure than this article makes him out to be. I would have a go at revising it but a.) I have a bad flu right now, b.) I'm not an expert on his work (read a few of his books and some articles about him) and c.) it's Christmas, for crying out loud. There is a very funny portrait of O'Brien in Richard Murphy's otherwise depressing memoir The Kick.  Murphy paints O'Brien as breathtakingly vain; he goes to a party and chats to O'Brien, who spends most of the conversation smiling over Murphy's shoulder and nodding at someone at the other end of the room.  At the end of the talk, Murphy goes to leave and he realises that all that time, the Cruiser was smiling and nodding at his own reflection in a huge mirror. To sum up - I think that anyone who has read a fair bit of O'Brien would agree that this article currently has WP:NPOV issues and needs more information.  Lexo (talk) 00:33, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

O'Brien
Re O'Brien's shocking behaviour, apparently he was not interested in Outer Mongolia or the rest of the world.

Writings
Penguin's dead tree edition of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, the edition they've had for decades, has a preface by CCO'B. It's not short, and I'm wondering if it merits inclusion in the list of CCO'B's writings. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Frankenab (talk • contribs) 13:09, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

The preceding unsigned comment on Outer Magnolia is actually not mine... I couldn't figure out how to add my comment on the Reflections without tagging it on to the section above. Sorry for any confusion.Frank Lynch (talk) 23:41, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

There is no reference to his tax dodging. He claimed that his journalism was not subject to tax under the artists exemption which anyone knew was not the case yet it gets no mention here. 86.43.110.186 (talk) 10:43, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I recently came across a reference to a forward Christopher Hitchens did for a book O'Brien wrote about George Washington, but don't see that book listed here under "Writings." Can someone familiar with the book add it? Ken Kukec (talk) 18:04, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Atheism source?
What is the source for inclusion of the bio in Category:Irish atheists? What religion was he raised and should that be included in the infobox? (It seems relevant to his interventions in sectarian politics.) --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 12:50, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

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