Iconoclastic Writer Doesn’t Disappoint

Admirers of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the celebrated Irish writer, polemicist, statesman and diplomat, know him as a provocative and irascible intellectual whose stubborn refusal to adopt comfortable positions has drawn comparisons to Albert Camus and George Orwell.

So none were surprised Monday when they assembled to see him accept an honorary doctorate from Occidental College and were treated to an unsparing excoriation of the Vatican’s refusal to promote safe sex or any form of birth control--a position he blames for worsening the world AIDS crisis.

“The Vatican is not concerned with the spread of AIDS, but with the spread of the knowledge and means to prevent AIDS,” O’Brien, wearing long academic robes and the deceptively placid demeanor of age, told the several dozen people who gathered for the ceremony and a book-signing of his recently published memoir.

“Third World elites, and the governments which they dominate, do not regard AIDS as a problem, they regard it as a solution”--to the threat posed by the restless dispossessed, he continued dryly. “Naturally, members of those elites do not say that right out. Mostly, they prefer not to mention AIDS at all.”

O’Brien said the United Nations has been made the “dumping ground” for geopolitical problems the United States views as unsolvable--and thus a convenient alibi when attempts to resolve such foreign policy disasters fail.

If such assertions seem undiplomatically frank--even harsh--those who know O’Brien expect no less.

In his many years as a public official, literary critic, and author of more than 20 books and plays, including iconoclastic appraisals of William Butler Yeats and Edmund Burke, O’Brien has been trailed by a parade of friends and foes who have characterized him as both anti-colonialist and counterrevolutionary, leftist and neoconservative, Irish nationalist and Protestant unionist.

“I would sum him up as a public intellectual,” said Kelly Candaele, president of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees and the producer of a fictional film on the famine in Ireland that is in development at HBO. “He has not just stayed in the academy, but has been a highly visible public figure. And within the evolving peace process of Ireland, he’s been a controversial figure.

“He’s sort of sui generis--a person following his own voice as an intellectual rather than any particular political line,” he said. “He’s a brilliant thinker and writer, even if his politics, in my opinion, are often off the mark.”

O’Brien is accustomed to standing alone on his convictions--such as his contention, currently, that Northern Ireland should preserve its union with Great Britain.

Against the polarized backdrop of Ireland’s centuries-old civil strife--the expression “beyond the Pale” was first coined to describe the ungovernable Gaelic-speaking lands that began just outside of British-ruled Dublin--this makes O’Brien akin to a Roman Catholic who believes Martin Luther was right.

“It is a question of popular will,” O’Brien said. “If a majority of people of Northern Ireland wanted to join the Republic, I think they should be allowed to do that, I think in certain conditions it might be to their advantage to do so.

“But what is certain is that at the moment, the majority want to stand in the United Kingdom,” he said. “Personally, I think they are going to feel increasingly uncomfortable in a United Kingdom that no longer wants them.”

Born in 1917, O’Brien is the scion of a comfortable nationalist family who quickly went from precocious student to talented literary essayist. He rose in the Irish foreign service, distinguishing himself as brilliant, though not easily led.

Such traits drove him to international prominence when, in the early 1960s, Dag Hammarskjold sent O’Brien to oversee the United Nations effort to shore up newly independent Congo against insurgents. O’Brien soon walked off the job, accusing Belgium and Britain of supporting a puppet movement against the United Nations--a charge that made O’Brien a hero to growing nationalist movements in the Third World, and got him a job running the University of Ghana.

During the Cold War, O’Brien roiled the leftist intelligentsia as an academic in New York by opposing U.S. intervention against leftist movements in the Third World, while fervently supporting resistance to military expansion by the Soviet Bloc.

“You have been unafraid to challenge comfortable assumptions--sometimes in the face of real personal danger,” said Occidental College President Ted Mitchell as he bestowed the honorary doctorate of laws.