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Cruiser sails on ahead

  • 18-12-2008 10:46pm
    #1
    Snickers Man
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭


    Conor Cruise O'Brien, who among his many accomplishments was a former editor-in-chief of the Observer and a frequent columnist for a variety of Irish publications has died.


    He was a multi-talented and accomplished individual having been a diplomat, Irish delegate to the United Nations, international trouble shooter (some might even say trouble maker) in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, a Labour Minister who brought in some of the most draconian censorship laws in the West during his stint as Minster for Posts and Telegraphs in the 1960s, an academic in the US and Africa and latterly a journalist and writer.

    There is no doubt that he had a wonderful style of writing and a talent for the bon mot. After all, he gave the word GUBU to the nation. But he was also probably the most arrogant supercilious intellectually contrary individual this country has produced, veering from being the darling of the international left during his anticolonial phase in the 1960s to becoming an archetypal neocon from the 1990s onwards.

    Brought up as an agnostic, out of respect to his similarly inclined father who died when he was a child, he had an abiding contempt for the church and many of its adherents, not least those in his own family. He formed the opinion at the time of his father's death that "those who didn't believe in God tended to be much kinder than those who did".

    Being a non believer and a remarried divorcee in Ireland in the 1970s was mould breaking for a cabinet minister at the time and meant he was always treated with suspicion by a large section of the community.

    He always seemed to view politics as a sort of intellectual parlour game, based around the logic of arguments and empirical calculations. He never "got" the importance of emotion and identity whether ethnic, sectarian or national as a political force.

    But he was most entertaining to read, even when, as was frequently the case, one heartily disagreed with him.

    The nation is poorer for his passing.


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