Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Northern Ireland conflict: formulating a revisionist position

This article focuses narrowly on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s shaping of Irish government policy towards Northern Ireland in light of his revised assessment of the dangers he saw implicit in what he called ‘the cult of 1916’. Casting aside his former position during his career as a diplomat in the Department of External Affairs, where he had a complex role in the Anti-Partition campaign of Seán MacBride, and building at a tangent on his peculiar critique of the Rising in the essay ‘The Embers at Easter’ (1966), he formulated an analysis of Irish militant nationalism and republicanism as a contagion that could destroy the achieved state of the Irish nation. The most important articulator of a revisionist position through his essays and through States of Ireland (1972), he charted as a government minister a course that was widely unpopular at the time, but became central to a new ‘southern’ public consensus on Northern Ireland.