O'Brien, Conor Cruise (1917-2008), politician and man of letters. Born in Dublin to a nationalist family, he was educated at Sandford Park and TCD, where he wrote a doctorate on Charles Stewart Parnell before joining the Department of External Affairs in 1944. In 1960 he went to the Congo as U.N. representative, and in that capacity undertook measures to prevent the secession of Katanga. His account is given in To Katanga and Back (1962). He subsequently accepted the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Ghana, before entering Irish politics to serve as a Minister and spokesman on Northern Ireland in the Coalition Government, 1973-7. As a critic O'Brien is centrally concerned with the ‘unhealthy intersection’ between politics and literature. Maria Cross (1952), published under the pseudonym ‘Donat O'Donnell’, was a study of a group of modern Catholic writers. States of Ireland (1972) is a statement on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The title-essay in Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism, and Revolution (1988) examines the growth of W. B. Yeats's political thought. His study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Siege: A Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986), argued against Arab nationalist thinking. The Great Melody (1992), a thematic biography and anthology on Edmund Burke, argued for the influence of Catholicism on Burke's conservatism. Ancestral Voices (1994) is a study of the role of Catholic sectarianism in the Republican tradition. An autobiography, My Life and Themes (1998) is an evaluation of the ideas that shaped his life and writing. In the 1990s, as the peace-making process evolved in Northern Ireland, his political allegiances vacillated as events confounded his confident predictions. At one stage, in 1998, he shifted from Unionism to advocacy of a United Ireland in a matter of weeks.

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