What do you think?
Rate this book
Memoir: My life and themes
(My mother then retired to her room, roaring crying, and remained there for the rest of that terrible afternoon. During those hours, my grief-stricken mother seemed entirely to have forgotten my own existence. It was as if I had lost both parents, not just one. I remember sitting in the dining-room contemplating the long, shiny mahogany table, and feeling that everything that made life worth living was gone forever. That afternoon was the worst parts of my whole life to date. Conor Cruise O'Brien's moving account of his father's death on Christmas Day, 1927, shortly alter his tenth birthday. In this searching memoir. Conor Cruise O'Brien traces the forces that have shaped his life with the clarity, power, passion and tender wit that have made him a scholar, writer and intellectual of international reputation.)
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
About the author
Conor Cruise O'Brien
61 books36 followersIrish politician, writer, historian and academic.
Member of the Irish Parliament for the socialist Labour Party.
Member of the Northern Ireland Forum for the United Kingdom Unionist Party, which advocated direct rule of Northern Ireland from London.
Virulently anti-IRA.
Member of the Irish Parliament for the socialist Labour Party.
Member of the Northern Ireland Forum for the United Kingdom Unionist Party, which advocated direct rule of Northern Ireland from London.
Virulently anti-IRA.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 23, 2024
At the time of writing, Catholic nationalists’ view of the author is quite similar to the later Protestant Unionists’ vista of Ian Paisley in getting into bed with ‘terrorists’.. I will paraphrase his quote of Auden ref Herman Melville ‘perhaps THEY BOTH sailed into an extraordinary mildness’.
The author states that his supervisor for his doctorate cautioned him about the authenticity of memoirs (one sided) and this book may be evidence of that. An example of this is evident in the chapter about his work in Katanga. He never mentions the siege of Jadotville and the heroics of Pat Quinlan. Was he avoiding culpability? Who knows.
He elucidates his turmoil at the loss of the family prestige in the destruction of his high powered grandfather’s party’s wipeout in the 1918 general election and the loss of his father as a child and his near adoption by Protestant relatives. Regardless of emanating from a fierce republican family, on the distaff side (Skeffinton) he was educated in a Protestant school and graduated in Trinity College.
It’s no surprise therefore he had empathy with Ulster Protestants. In running for election to the Dail he was his own man eschewing the Catholic Nationalism which was then a sine qua non to get elected. Paradoxically, previous to this he had a favourable working relationship in the Irish Civil Service with the Ultra Republican Sean MacBride as his minister for foreign affairs and and even cosier one with MacBride’s Bete noire former IRA chief Frank Aiken. This perhaps makes him a turncoat to nationalists. But opinions don’t affect facts, but facts should affect opinions if one is reasonable and perhaps life experiences and new information changed his attitudes toward the solution of Northern Ireland.
The author is unquestionably bright and a brilliant writer and I found myself reaching for the thesaurus on a number of occasions. He is not being pretentious as this quality was gleaned I’m sure in his time working for the high brow Observer broadsheet in London. That said, I was surprised to see a couple of glaring errors in the text. He states in chapter 19 that the 10 Irish hunger strikers died in 1982 (it was 1981) and in the same chapter he claims Bob Mc Cartney asked him to stand in the 1966 Forum election. I suggest his proofreaders need to return their fees and request the services of a proctologist to remove his shoe leather.
On the peace process he was not entirely wrong in his prediction ( he died in 2008). He suggested there may have been a violent reaction to the destruction of the RUC which didn’t happen but his view that the British Government want rid of the Irish problem and he encourages unionists to deal directly with Dublin to get the best deal enforcing in law their inherent rights and have a huge influence on Irish politics. In short, unionists will have more influence in an agreed Ireland than they ever had in a Uk Government that doesn’t really want them. In this tactic SF would not have as much influence in the final outcome.
One final note, throughout the last few chapters I felt he had an antipathy towards John Hume who was non violent and wanted an ‘agreed Ireland’ which is what the author himself delineated. I detected a little bit of rivalry in that he wanted to be the best boy in the class, but Hume was always getting the apple from the teacher.
I’m a lot more educated having read this book and I encourage others who disagree with him to read it. As the dust jacket on the book states ‘if you don’t make a good number of people angry by what you write you are certainly wasting your time, and theirs.
The author states that his supervisor for his doctorate cautioned him about the authenticity of memoirs (one sided) and this book may be evidence of that. An example of this is evident in the chapter about his work in Katanga. He never mentions the siege of Jadotville and the heroics of Pat Quinlan. Was he avoiding culpability? Who knows.
He elucidates his turmoil at the loss of the family prestige in the destruction of his high powered grandfather’s party’s wipeout in the 1918 general election and the loss of his father as a child and his near adoption by Protestant relatives. Regardless of emanating from a fierce republican family, on the distaff side (Skeffinton) he was educated in a Protestant school and graduated in Trinity College.
It’s no surprise therefore he had empathy with Ulster Protestants. In running for election to the Dail he was his own man eschewing the Catholic Nationalism which was then a sine qua non to get elected. Paradoxically, previous to this he had a favourable working relationship in the Irish Civil Service with the Ultra Republican Sean MacBride as his minister for foreign affairs and and even cosier one with MacBride’s Bete noire former IRA chief Frank Aiken. This perhaps makes him a turncoat to nationalists. But opinions don’t affect facts, but facts should affect opinions if one is reasonable and perhaps life experiences and new information changed his attitudes toward the solution of Northern Ireland.
The author is unquestionably bright and a brilliant writer and I found myself reaching for the thesaurus on a number of occasions. He is not being pretentious as this quality was gleaned I’m sure in his time working for the high brow Observer broadsheet in London. That said, I was surprised to see a couple of glaring errors in the text. He states in chapter 19 that the 10 Irish hunger strikers died in 1982 (it was 1981) and in the same chapter he claims Bob Mc Cartney asked him to stand in the 1966 Forum election. I suggest his proofreaders need to return their fees and request the services of a proctologist to remove his shoe leather.
On the peace process he was not entirely wrong in his prediction ( he died in 2008). He suggested there may have been a violent reaction to the destruction of the RUC which didn’t happen but his view that the British Government want rid of the Irish problem and he encourages unionists to deal directly with Dublin to get the best deal enforcing in law their inherent rights and have a huge influence on Irish politics. In short, unionists will have more influence in an agreed Ireland than they ever had in a Uk Government that doesn’t really want them. In this tactic SF would not have as much influence in the final outcome.
One final note, throughout the last few chapters I felt he had an antipathy towards John Hume who was non violent and wanted an ‘agreed Ireland’ which is what the author himself delineated. I detected a little bit of rivalry in that he wanted to be the best boy in the class, but Hume was always getting the apple from the teacher.
I’m a lot more educated having read this book and I encourage others who disagree with him to read it. As the dust jacket on the book states ‘if you don’t make a good number of people angry by what you write you are certainly wasting your time, and theirs.
December 24, 2023
obviously read for historical reasons, I disagree with everything this man represents. first thing that struck me is how obsessed he is with the notion that there is a respectable stiff-upper-lip world of Irish Protestants that finds itself, due to its inhabitants' tendency towards self-abnegation, without advocates, making it incumbent upon him, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Eoghan Harris and other cranks to take the job up themselves.
I have no idea what to make of this pathology, but I do know that it did irreversible damage to Cruiser's ability to understand the world, he is incapable of viewing anything, whether historical, literary, social, interpersonal outside of the rubric of 'Catholic nationalist' versus 'Protestant unionist'. For example: his father died when he was very young and there seems to have been the possibility that he was to be adopted by a wealthy loyalist Protestant family, though I actually do wonder if this isn't a kind of novelistic scenario he dreamed up. His mother rejected this idea, and Cruiser interprets this as a manifestation of her implicitly sectarian Catholic nationalism.
There's other stuff here too, his infamous support for Garda brutality and torture meted out for the purposes of securing intelligence on Republican activity, his engagements with the UN, the US, the Belgians and the Tans as they worked to overthrow the Lumumba government and sabotage Congolese independence, but the pettifogging, self-justification and to be fair, detail, means I'd have to read a bit more and then come back to a lot of this. His account of teaching in a university in Ghana under Nkrumah was very interesting, as was the backstabbing and catalogue of resentments between him and the other socialist Labour TDs in the coalition government.
Final chapter is a critique of the peace process which comes to the roundabout conclusion that in order for Irish Protestants to receive adequate protection Ireland must be united, not in a Republic, but as a kind of shared island type-entity. This would have the advantage of freezing out Cruiser's political enemies, Sinn Féin and John Hume (who he regards as an enabler and accomplice of the former) because they would oppose unity in this form, while ensuring that the unionist constituency becomes a hot commodity, with remaining parties competing to guarantee e.g. Orangemen's rights to march down the Garvaghy Road. Since Cruiser died in 2008 we presumably don't have any recorded impressions from him on Sinn Féin's steady movement towards exactly this conciliatory programme.
I have no idea what to make of this pathology, but I do know that it did irreversible damage to Cruiser's ability to understand the world, he is incapable of viewing anything, whether historical, literary, social, interpersonal outside of the rubric of 'Catholic nationalist' versus 'Protestant unionist'. For example: his father died when he was very young and there seems to have been the possibility that he was to be adopted by a wealthy loyalist Protestant family, though I actually do wonder if this isn't a kind of novelistic scenario he dreamed up. His mother rejected this idea, and Cruiser interprets this as a manifestation of her implicitly sectarian Catholic nationalism.
There's other stuff here too, his infamous support for Garda brutality and torture meted out for the purposes of securing intelligence on Republican activity, his engagements with the UN, the US, the Belgians and the Tans as they worked to overthrow the Lumumba government and sabotage Congolese independence, but the pettifogging, self-justification and to be fair, detail, means I'd have to read a bit more and then come back to a lot of this. His account of teaching in a university in Ghana under Nkrumah was very interesting, as was the backstabbing and catalogue of resentments between him and the other socialist Labour TDs in the coalition government.
Final chapter is a critique of the peace process which comes to the roundabout conclusion that in order for Irish Protestants to receive adequate protection Ireland must be united, not in a Republic, but as a kind of shared island type-entity. This would have the advantage of freezing out Cruiser's political enemies, Sinn Féin and John Hume (who he regards as an enabler and accomplice of the former) because they would oppose unity in this form, while ensuring that the unionist constituency becomes a hot commodity, with remaining parties competing to guarantee e.g. Orangemen's rights to march down the Garvaghy Road. Since Cruiser died in 2008 we presumably don't have any recorded impressions from him on Sinn Féin's steady movement towards exactly this conciliatory programme.
March 3, 2023
Ive wanted to understand this man in recent years as he's popped up in other books Ive read and held in high esteem by the authors so I was naturally drawn to his work as a result. I confess now that I am a fan, somewhat. His writing is effortless and his background, to me anyway, was fascinating. Also sounds to me that he's gotten a bit of a raw deal from a certain Netflix film, from reading this book, again the nuances of the situation completely left out in the film (of course they were)
He's always been on the edge of public opinion in Ireland from when I was growing up. This book sheds some light on why this might have been. I disagree with him on some points he's made and as this book is old, they do seem outdated but at the time of writing maybe it was a concern. He was bang on about the Catholic church though and its disastrous effect on Irish society as a whole.
I'm off to delve into his 'Great Melody' now as a result of this read
He's always been on the edge of public opinion in Ireland from when I was growing up. This book sheds some light on why this might have been. I disagree with him on some points he's made and as this book is old, they do seem outdated but at the time of writing maybe it was a concern. He was bang on about the Catholic church though and its disastrous effect on Irish society as a whole.
I'm off to delve into his 'Great Melody' now as a result of this read
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews