Outrageous attack on a man of wisdom

TOM COOPER’S diatribe (Letters, January 5) against the late Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien cannot be allowed to go unanswered.

Mr Cooper seems unmindful of the fact that those who turned a political problem in Northern Ireland into a law and order emergency were redemptive nationalists who resorted to terror and mass murder.

His attachment to the foundational myths of the Irish Republic compels him to portray Dr O’Brien as a tool of gratuitous oppression who revelled in the adoption of measures that would have damaged any other liberal democracy almost beyond repair.

This is outrageous — wholly the opposite of what this brave and tenacious intellectual Goliath represented.

Mr Cooper’s gratuitous insult is grounded in the misguided belief that a representative democratic state — whether within the UK or the Irish Republic — should yield to terrorists and their irrational demands.

Such a return of good for evil was imposed upon us in the summer of 1921 when the British yielded to Dick Mulchay’s terror and began to negotiate with its former enemy completely unconcerned about those whom these killers had terrorised and bereaved.

Dr O’Brien, with his inherent perspicacity, understood the link between 1916 and what was emerged in the North in the 1970s, and the grievous error of making peace with unreconstructed redemptive nationalists.

When viewed within its proper context, Mr Cooper’s attempt to besmirch Dr O’Brien’s reputation vanishes like smoke in the wind.

He also avoids the fact that Dr O’Brien had a special empathy with those doubting nationalist young men and women drawn into violence by their peers; his understanding of their situation belies the propaganda image of Dr O’Brien as cold and unsympathetic to the tricks history can play on the young.

Then Mr Cooper outrageously attempts to smear Dr O’Brien once more by linking him to an alleged cover-up concerning of the 1974 bombing atrocities in the Republic.

As one among many who witnessed ambulances flying through the streets on that awful day, I regard this insinuation regarding Dr O’Brien as an outright slander.

Dr O’Brien was a wise man with plenty to say, and he said it and wrote it with an eloquence and a defiant spirit almost unequalled in 20th century Ireland.

Pierce Martin

31 Willowbrook Grove

Celbridge

Co Kildare.