I

On 26 October 1974, the Irish cabinet minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, delivered a public speech on the meaning of Irish liberalism. O'Brien was prompted by a public meeting held days earlier in Dublin's Mansion House. This was addressed by lawyers, academics, and opinion formers, protesting against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. At the meeting, a member of the “republican movement” was permitted to make an impromptu speech. O'Brien described this as an example of collusion between Irish liberals and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). “There are those, claiming to be liberals,” pronounced O'Brien,

O'Brien's denunciation of Robinson identifies a rupture in the Irish intelligentsia. Before 1974, O'Brien and Robinson declared similar liberal values.Footnote ⁷ Both came from privileged middle-class Roman Catholic backgrounds. O'Brien, a diplomat and academic, was the son of a prominent Dublin journalist and belonged to an extended revolutionary-nationalist family possessed of eclectic political beliefs. Robinson was the daughter of well-to-do provincial doctors. O'Brien and Robinson were alumni of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), which after 1969 Robinson represented as an Independent in the Irish Senate. Both had returned from the radicalized United States in 1969—O'Brien to successfully run for a Labor Party seat in the Dail, and Robinson, at just twenty-seven years of age, to become Reid Professor in Constitutional Law at TCD. Both were products of Trinity's quiet nonconformity to the social and cultural norms of independent Ireland. Between 1969 and 1974, O'Brien, alongside the Independent senator for Trinity, belonged to a vibrant, reforming liberalism that was new to Irish life. Confronted by the northern crisis, it is their disagreement over what constituted the responsibility of liberals that makes the O'Brien-Robinson dispute important to understanding developments in Irish intellectual life since 1970.

During 1974, Northern Ireland's conflict entered its sixth year; with no end in sight, the numbers of fatalities passed their first thousand. Following the December 1973 Sunningdale agreement, a unionist-nationalist power-sharing government was formed in Belfast. Resisted by the loyalist-led Ulster Workers' Council strike, in late May 1974 this government collapsed. Loyalist disruption of vital services, alongside the British army's unwillingness to challenge the strikers, meant that the best chance of a political solution was forcibly overthrown. Meanwhile, on 17 May, bombs exploded south of the border in Monaghan and Dublin, killing thirty-three. These events identified the escalation and spread of the violence, and with power sharing soon in ruins, they emphasized a growing dependency on security measures to contain the situation. Essential to this were the extraordinary legal powers both the British and the Irish governments introduced after 1970.

In August 1971, Northern Ireland's Unionist government introduced internment. Initially directed against the Catholic community, it produced a ferocious backlash. Internment continued following the imposition of direct rule from Westminster in March 1972. But the torture of internees and the failure to deliver the decisive blow against the IRA meant that by 1974 internment had become an international embarrassment for Britain. Moreover, by alienating communities from the administration of justice, internment proved counterproductive. Militarist republicans did not attack the republic with the same ferocity as they did the British state, and this partly explains why no internment policy was introduced in the republic. Instead, in May 1972, the republic reintroduced juryless special criminal courts used during earlier IRA resurgences. While the republic did augment its defense forces, it relied primarily on special legislation to meet the new situation.

Provisional IRA no-warning bombings in Britain provided the immediate context for O'Brien's denunciatory speech. These atrocities galvanized public opinion (as nothing before) against militarist republicanism. The Mansion House meeting to which O'Brien objected was organized by the Dublin current affairs periodical Hibernia. Earlier in 1974, Hibernia had started a petition against internment, which was delivered to both the British prime minister and to the United Nations in December. The Mansion House platform was made up of civil rights activists, including liberal unionist Tom Hadden. Pointedly, militarist republicans were not represented. Nevertheless, IRA sympathizers made their presence known in the audience. One of these, Sean Keenan, secured permission to speak in an attempt to restore order after Father Denis Faul called the IRA a “murder gang,” whereupon the IRA supporters erupted into disorder, reportedly shouting abuse.Footnote ⁸

For O'Brien, letting Keenan speak at the meeting demonstrated a potentially fatal paradox found among liberals: the accommodation of an antidemocratic opposition. In his speech, O'Brien seized on this apparent contradiction to define what he believed was the correct liberal response to terrorism. He argued that the true liberal “is concerned . . . foremost with the threat to the democratic State and to the lives of its citizens.”Footnote ⁹ While he conceded that the liberal tradition necessarily demanded there should be concerns about the abuse of power, O'Brien countered that if “a democratic government offends the people by what is felt to be unnecessary repressive legislation then it will fall.” Elections were to be the conscience of power.

O'Brien went on to denounce as “false liberals” all who bewailed the injustices of the state, but not those of the paramilitaries. This he complained was inconsistent and even represented complicity with terrorism. To demonstrate this point, O'Brien rounded on Robinson, insinuating hypocrisy in her protestation against internment while not “referring to the murder of two judges in Belfast last month by the same armed conspiracy whose admirers were so vocal in . . . the Mansion House.”Footnote ¹⁰ Setting a different standard a week earlier, O'Brien had successfully moved for a motion at the Labor Party conference condemning internment. This had an amendment stating that the IRA was the cause of internment's introduction as well as its chief beneficiary.Footnote ¹¹ O'Brien contended, “to condemn internment without referring to those [IRA] activities which led to internment being imposed was equivalent to condoning those activities.” Leveling this charge at Robinson had implications for all Irish liberals.

Released to the press in advance, O'Brien's speech was published in Irish newspapers and attracted controversy for weeks. An Irish Times editorial questioned whether the liberal voice was dispensable, warning it “is easily shouted down even when it is a lot less rough than . . . [the situation] is now.” The editorial concluded, “generalised smears contribute to creating just the climate of confusion which Dr O'Brien says he abhors.”Footnote ¹² The Irish Times editorial labeled O'Brien's invitation to suspend liberal values in support of the state's counterinsurgency “The O'Brien Ethic.” It is on O'Brien's invitation that the rest of this article turns.

O'Brien knew his attack on Robinson would alienate part of the liberal constituency, but it was also true he articulated a sentiment embittered by incursions of the north's pain into southern life. Writing to the Irish Times, Tommy Murtagh, a lecturer at TCD, complained of the sustenance the gunmen received. “Sometimes,” Murtagh wrote, “nourishment takes the form of tacit support or else omission: the failure to condemn . . . as we saw in the Mansion House.”Footnote ¹³ But Murtagh's final sentence best expresses the moment: “There are rats in the arras and Dr O'Brien is right to point them out.”Footnote ¹⁴ This kind of response was born of pessimism aggravated by the worsening situation. Referencing the OPEC oil crisis, O'Brien exploited related anxieties in his speech, warning, “democracy . . . is likely to be in danger in many countries under the economic pressures which loom ahead.”Footnote ¹⁵ This was even more so in Ireland, where, he added, “these pressures will combine with other pressures derived from our history.” The promise of horrific futures and a particular memory of the past partly justified the “O'Brien Ethic.”

Rival definitions of liberalism emerged in a follow-up radio debate between O'Brien and Robinson. Quoting the dictum “The history of liberty is the history of resistance,” Robinson argued that the freedom to criticize the state was vital at a time when the state was introducing extraordinary legal measures and when the risk of taking legal “shortcuts” was greatest.Footnote ¹⁶ (Earlier in 1974, in a public lecture, Robinson had been critical of the administration of the Special Criminal Court.)Footnote ¹⁷ Countering Robinson, O'Brien stated that her brand of liberalism was too focused on the threat from the state, whereas his liberalism, seeing the real danger, subordinated itself to the counterinsurgency. As late as 1997, former politician and academic John Horgan wrote that the arguments surrounding O'Brien's denunciation remain “at the core of the argument about what constitutes liberalism in Ireland today.”Footnote ¹⁸

O'Brien demanded that people choose from his dichotomies: the state or its enemies; true liberalism or faux liberalism; and, ultimately, liberty or terror. What is contested is whether these were ever true dichotomies. A problem for any liberal intellectual confronting O'Brien was that he saw the IRA as the defining problem of Northern Ireland, whereas some lawyers, political scientists, journalists, and historians were wont to protest that such a reductive causational explanation was unsatisfactory.Footnote ¹⁹ O'Brien demanded that Ulster's history of division and inequality, the failure of Northern Ireland's political structures, and the British army's inept tactics should be marginalized or jettisoned as causal factors. In his reading, deep-rooted maladies, not least partition, were overlooked or were to be suppressed.Footnote ²⁰ Those rejecting his interpretation by claiming instead that the violence was a “by-product” of partition, O'Brien argued in 1972, accepted “a formula legitimizing an indefinitely protracted sectarian guerrilla [war]” and offered “cover for the deadly reality of the Provisional[s].”Footnote ²¹ O'Brien's arguments appealed then to those who, despairing at structural solutions like reunification, British withdrawal, repartition, or power sharing, became committed to defeating militarist republicanism by force.

At the radio debate's conclusion, Robinson complained that in the future she would have to self-censor and be more careful about with whom she shared platforms. By forcing a debate on the meaning of liberalism and extracting concessions from Robinson, O'Brien achieved victories.Footnote ²² “If she feels cramped,” he said, “it is not because I am a terrifying individual as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, it is because she sees that there is a certain amount of force in my argument.” But some of that “force” derived, not from the power of O'Brien's argument, but instead from associating his opponents with pub bombers. This was intellectual thuggery, and arguably the times justified it: alternatively, they did not.

O'Brien's denunciations of Robinson demonstrated that, aside from those taking an unequivocal stance against the IRA, there would be consequences for publicly commenting on Northern Ireland. Robinson warned: “This . . . could amount to a real and practical encroachment on the liberty of expression of the individual.”Footnote ²³ It is the aggravated context in which choices about freedom of association and speech were forced that we turn to next.

II

“O'Brien . . . was the pre-eminent Irish intellectual of his generation,” Roy Foster tells us.Footnote ²⁴ While O'Brien always attracted both antipathy and applause, few deny his influence on Irish public life during the Troubles. He was well placed to do so, matching his formidable intellect with wide-ranging experience, as diplomat, literary critic, UN envoy, historian, academic, and eventually as cabinet minister. By the mid-1960s, he had established an international reputation as a Left-leaning writer. After a troubled stint as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, he took a chair at New York University, before returning to Dublin in 1969.Footnote ²⁵ At this point, his talents appeared boundless. A combative debater, he possessed the ability to communicate complex ideas to expert and lay alike in an accessible journalistic register. His early Irish civil service career was spent writing antipartition propaganda, which gave him insights into the hypocrisy of official separatist-nationalism (which, O'Brien noted, was decidedly pro-partition).Footnote ²⁶ After electoral defeat in 1977, O'Brien, however, returned to writing ever more polemical op-ed pieces. By 1996 when he joined the UK Unionist Party, he appeared to some a spent reactionary crank. He opposed Sinn Fein's participation in the “peace process,” issuing warnings of doom.

Within sections of the academy there remained a respect for O'Brien's analysis. Above all, one book published in 1972, a rushed, polemical, quasi-historical meditation, States of Ireland, long retained its influence. Following O'Brien's death in 2008, Foster noted how many memorial writers likened reading States of Ireland to an “epiphanic moment.”Footnote ²⁷ In a critical intervention, O'Brien presented an insider's-outsider's critique by challenging the assumptions, emotionalism, and woolly thinking professed by some separatist nationalists. In the book, O'Brien combined a familial history with a critique of Irish separatist nationalism, most particularly southern attitudes toward partition. But his vigorous and iconoclastic analysis sometimes reduced the “Irish crisis” to blaming the “Republican Movement” and the literature, ballads, and histories supposedly inspiring republican violence. As Foster suggests, O'Brien's views in States of Ireland about the dangers of a particular historical memory exerted important influences on an emergent generation of commentators. In the book and in later writings, O'Brien raised a kulturkampf against the already crumbling settlement the republican revolutionaries had institutionalized inside the southern state after 1920.Footnote ²⁸ O'Brien's favorite example of history translating into political violence remained the martryology of the 1916 rising and, notably, its celebration in the jubilee commemorations of 1966. In 1972, O'Brien wrote: “These celebrations had to include the reminder that the object for which the men of 1916 sacrificed their lives—a free and united Ireland—had still not been achieved.”Footnote ²⁹ He continued, “[C]alls for rededication to the ideals of 1916 were bound to suggest to some men and women not only that these ideals were in practice being abandoned . . . but that the way to return to them was through the method of 1916.”Footnote ³⁰ For anyone accepting the causal connection between history and violence, a purely academic interest in the recent past became untenable. Moreover, O'Brien gave new meaning to scholarship at a time when the relativists were in the ascent and the aspiration for objective scholarship was becoming a subject for doubt, if not derision.Footnote ³¹ For the doubters, O'Brien ably demonstrated that once liberated from the pretence of objectivity, interpretations could be applied in a war he understood to be historical and cultural in origin.

“I am afraid that this country,” O'Brien told the Dail in early February 1972, “may be on the verge of . . . a disaster comparable even to the Great Famine of the last century.”Footnote ³² In the aftermath of British paratroopers killing thirteen unarmed protestors on Derry's “Bloody Sunday,” such foreboding perhaps was understandable. Nevertheless, apocalyptic prophesies became a mainstay of O'Brien's rhetoric. D. H. Akenson writes sympathetically that, to prevent a debacle, O'Brien “had to eliminate from the pile of explosive chemicals the catalyst that could set everything off. That meant suppressing the Provos, and therefore manically, using every opportunity that came to hand, Conor fought them.”Footnote ³³ Reconciling O'Brien the liberal academic with his denunciation of liberals, Akenson adds: “Conor . . . was not in this period a balanced person, or anything close. He was in the grip of a passion, a passion for his country.”Footnote ³⁴ While not arguing for consistency or coherence, some of O'Brien's positions in 1974 chimed loudly with those he later championed.

Former foreign minister Dr. Garret FitzGerald has recalled the anxieties in 1974 that a threatened British withdrawal from Northern Ireland created inside the coalition.Footnote ³⁵ “Neither then nor since,” wrote FitzGerald in 2006, “has public opinion in Ireland realized how close to disaster our whole island came during the last two years of Harold Wilson's premiership [1974–76].”Footnote ³⁶ FitzGerald continued, “Wilson in his first meeting . . . with Liam Cosgrave . . . in April 1974 . . . placed so much emphasis on British political and public pressure for withdrawal as to suggest he himself might be thinking along these lines.”Footnote ³⁷ Shortly afterward, British defense minister Roy Mason said as much publicly.Footnote ³⁸ The perceived threat of British withdrawal created a crisis for the Dublin government and may help explain O'Brien's behavior during 1974. While withdrawal was always an option for the British, it is also true that in a statement at Westminster following the collapse of power sharing Wilson said, “[T]here is no easy solution through the withdrawal of troops unless the House [of Commons] is prepared to risk a holocaust.”Footnote ³⁹ Flying the “troops out” kite, Mason, it seems likely, had earlier attempted to nudge Ulster loyalists toward power sharing. Meanwhile, the Irish government generated a crisis in Dublin either out of genuine concern about what the British intended or because a heightened sense of crisis in itself was desirable.

Whatever British intentions were, no Irish government could be assured that the British would stay in Northern Ireland. This identifies an anomaly. If we accept that national security is the first responsibility of sovereign government, then defense readiness gives us the best indication of perceived levels of threat. This becomes important where we need to distinguish real threats from the rhetorical threats deployed by politicians from time to time. Identifying this distinction bears heavily on debates around liberty and terror in the republic because these were often predicated on the threat of an island-wide civil war. By 1974, the republic's combined air, land, and sea Permanent Defense Force (PDF) stood at just 11,333 service personnel, with 5,500 of its soldiers available for “operational duties.”Footnote ⁴⁰ (The 1974 PDF strength bears comparison with the 53,000 raised during the civil war from 1922 to 1923, and the 38,000 strong neutral army of the “Emergency” from 1939 to 1945.) In the five years after 1968, the Irish army had expanded by just 2,500 troops, while the Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil (the local reserve) contracted by 2,000 volunteers.Footnote ⁴¹

Throughout the crisis, the state's first line of defense remained the mostly unarmed Garda Siochana, standing at 8,500 in 1975. In 1973, the Garda Special Branch “Crime and Security” section, C3, having primary responsibility for countering subversion, was staffed by five gardai ranking above detective sergeant, supported by nine uniformed gardai working in two rooms. A judicial report in 1974 concluded that “filing, indexing, and co-relation of information obtained has fallen below the adequate and proper standard,” and recommended its reorganization and increase in strength.Footnote ⁴² Five years into the crisis, this situation described a bewildering approach to the defense of the state.

Following a possible British withdrawal, three scenarios were envisaged for Northern Ireland by an Irish cabinet interdepartmental committee appointed in May 1974: negotiated independence; repartition; and collapse into anarchy. FitzGerald offered two reasons why “strengthening of the [Irish] army had to be ruled out.” First, expansion “could create serious unrest and a threat to public order within our state.” Second, enlarging the army “might well be interpreted by Northern Unionists as a threat to them.”Footnote ⁴³

Rapid expansion might indeed have antagonized Ulster loyalists, among them the 25,000–40,000 strong paramilitary Ulster Defence Association.Footnote ⁴⁴ This still left the possibility of civil defense measures, which the interdepartmental committee discussed but about which it is difficult to find evidence of implementation. As for a policy of military enlargement encouraging mayhem in the republic, this remains contentious. What can be said is that after 1970, in anticipation of a British evacuation or an equivalent crisis, successive Irish governments left the state vulnerable—particularly its border communities.

Unreferenced by FitzGerald, the interdepartmental committee recorded a third reason for not expanding the army. It insisted, “[I]f we were to appear to be ready to face up to the security and economic burdens of intervention in the North, it might lead the British to hasten their own relinquishment of those burdens.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A year later, FitzGerald endorsed British direct rule in a secret memorandum: “[E]very effort should continue to be made privately to secure it.”Footnote ⁴⁶ At length, the interdepartmental committee's report dwelt on the cost of increasing military expenditure in the wake of the oil crisis, and this, arguably, was the most important incentive for maintaining a tiny PDF.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a percentage of gross domestic product, defense spending in the republic fell between 1966 and 1994. Of the western European democracies, Ireland spent the least per capita on its army in the 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁸ As a percentage of gross domestic product, only one country spent less, Luxemburg.

III

The offensive against dissenting liberals coincided with a “get tough” policy against dissidents and suspected terrorists. From 1974, reports appeared in the Irish press about gardai interrogating suspects allegedly using strong-arm tactics. In February 1977, concerned about police morale, two gardai approached FitzGerald. The gardai dismissed previous allegations of abuse, but in pending trials they feared some gardai might perjure themselves over coerced confessions. FitzGerald wrote to the Taoiseach recommending safeguards for prisoners while in police custody, but otherwise he did nothing. In his memoir, FitzGerald claimed that he had contemplated resigning on the issue of garda brutality in September 1976, when he proposed an inquiry to other ministers. He was then told any official inquiry would send confused messages to the public when the government was introducing legislation to extend the length of detention in police custody (see below). FitzGerald says only, “I was deflected from my purpose by a consensus in the government.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Garda brutality emerged into the public light in February 1977, when Irish Times investigative reporters exposed what they called an interrogation “Heavy Gang” operating inside the force.Footnote ⁵⁰ The implications of defeating subversion confronted every citizen with real-life dilemmas about what to condone and what to condemn. But condoning and condemning could be, and were, taken as declarations for or against the state. The problem this posed for the liberal intellectual professions is explored in this section.

In November 1974, Hibernia published a letter alleging that some people were refusing to sign its anti-internment petition because they feared their names would become known to the Garda Special Branch.Footnote ⁵¹ Nonetheless, by December almost 90,000 people had signed Hibernia's petition in Ireland.Footnote ⁵² Around this time, accusations began to accumulate about police intimidation of political activists—some militarist republicans, others dyed-in-the-wool constitutionalists. Among the former, were four men associated with the official Sinn Fein Party (so called “Stickies”), who were charged with the murder of Larry White in Cork city. White belonged to the paramilitary organization “Saor Eire” and was killed in June 1975 during a feud among republican factions. One of those accused of White's murder, Bernard Lynch, was (and remains) a prominent political activist in Cork city politics.Footnote ⁵³ The solicitor of the accused men, Gerald Goldberg, complained the investigating gardai denied him access to his clients during interrogation, and afterward withheld their sworn statements from him. Subsequently, Goldberg wrote an open letter to the minister of justice protesting that his clients' confessions were made under duress. The letter was copied to Irish Press journalist T. P. O'Mahony and became the basis for the headline: “Torture Being Used on Suspects, Says Lawyer.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The Special Criminal Court sentenced Goldberg's clients for murder, but the Court of Criminal Appeal subsequently overturned two of the convictions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both courts rejected the defense plea that the confessions were coerced. Remarkably, the appeal court found no admissible evidence for murder in one conviction, and it set aside another. In the meantime, the director of public prosecution issued proceedings for contempt against Goldberg, O'Mahony, the Irish Press, and its editor. In a sworn affidavit in August 1975, Goldberg explained why he had gone public with his letter; “I do not see how I can discharge my professional obligations and reconcile my conscience with my knowledge of the facts and events in this case,” he wrote, “without being false to my clients, to myself, to the profession of which I am a member and to the State of which I am a citizen.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The High Court later judged the publication of Goldberg's letter was not in contempt of court, because the letter merely stated the case for the defense that the confessions were falsely obtained and therefore inadmissible as evidence.Footnote ⁵⁷

There were alternative views to Goldberg's. In 1998, O'Brien recounted his garda driver's story about an IRA suspect who in October 1975 divulged the whereabouts of kidnapped Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema. Transferring the suspect, the Special Branch driver pulled over and O'Brien's garda informant told him, “Then the [Special Branch] escort started asking him [the prisoner] questions and when at first he refused to answer, they beat the shit out of him. Then he told them where Herrema was.”Footnote ⁵⁸ O'Brien continued, “I refrained from telling this story to Garret [FitzGerald] or Justin [Keating], because I thought it would worry them.”Footnote ⁵⁹ O'Brien concluded: “It didn't worry me.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Following a siege, Herrema was freed by the gardai. Extralegal “shortcuts” could indeed win results, but where legal transgressions emerged, they did so at some cost to the justice system. The overturning of four convictions, also resting on confessions, following the 1976 Sallins' train robbery proved a case in point.Footnote ⁶¹ Whatever the short-term gains, the chief objection to removing the law's protection from any suspect was that in so doing it removed it from every citizen. This became the concern of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which Robinson helped found in July 1976.

At this time, anyone adopting views interpreted as critical of the state risked being associated with subversion. Lecturer in architecture Martin Reynolds lent his name to a campaign for the commutation of the death penalty for anarchists Noel and Marie Murray, convicted in 1976 for the murder of a garda. Reynolds, an officeholder in his local Fine Gael branch, accepted the Murrays were rightfully convicted, but he objected to capital punishment on principle. After addressing a public meeting in Dublin, Reynolds claimed his home was visited three times by Special Branch detectives.Footnote ⁶² On the first occasion, in Reynolds's absence, his mother was informed that her son “could lose his job.”Footnote ⁶³ Reynolds wrote a letter protesting this treatment to FitzGerald, whom he knew personally.Footnote ⁶⁴ In a radio broadcast on 5 September 1976, the minister for justice, Patrick Cooney, said allegations of brutality by gardai, “emanated from people on the subversive side and their fellow travellers.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Two days later, O'Brien accused members of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties of living in the “foggy middle ground” between the IRA and the law.Footnote ⁶⁶ When Goldberg, a respected lawyer of many years standing, addressed the Special Criminal Court during the White murder trial, he felt obliged to declare: “All I know of the IRA is what I read in the newspapers and see and hear on television. I am happy to say I am not often consulted by these people.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In July 1976, Britain's ambassador to Ireland was murdered by the IRA, and in September extensive counterinsurgency legislation was introduced in the Dail. An Emergency Powers Bill extended police powers of search and arrest, including an increase in the time suspects could be detained in garda custody without being charged from two to seven days. When the president of Ireland the respected jurist Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh exercised his prerogative of referring emergency legislation to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality, he was denounced as a “thundering disgrace” by Defense Minister Patrick Donegan.Footnote ⁶⁸ This precipitated a constitutional crisis and the president's resignation. A recent assessment claims Ó Dálaigh attempted to “block” the legislation, but this is disputed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Establishing in advance of its enactment whether or not the legislation was constitutional anticipated likely challenges in the courts and later lengthy delays. In so doing, Ó Dálaigh had the support of one or more cabinet ministers.Footnote ⁷⁰ Alongside the office of the president, Ó Dálaigh became the most senior casualty to fall prey to the O'Brien ethic.

IV

Throughout the 1970s, O'Brien vigorously proclaimed his liberalism. But defining what “liberalism” means, beyond believing in “liberty,” always presents problems. John Dunn tells us, “[B]eing liberal is often a matter of broad cultural allegiance and not of politics at all. . . . If the central dispositional value of liberals is tolerance,” Dunn says, “their central political value is perhaps a fundamental antipathy toward authority in any of its forms.”Footnote ⁷¹ Paul Kelly offers a useful working definition, writing: “Liberalism is best seen as a social and political theory of freedom that conceives liberty in terms of non-interference.”Footnote ⁷² In functioning societies some interference is inevitable, but most liberals agree that encroachments on liberty should be proportional according to prevailing circumstances and the need to secure the maximum liberty for society as a whole. Where the compromise between freedom and interference is struck in moments of terror or panic, the problem of proportionality presents a significant challenge. Gerald Gaus claims liberalism rests on a “fundamental liberal principle”: that the freedom of the individual is both normative and basic.Footnote ⁷³ Alongside this, Gaus argues, the onus of justification for limiting freedoms rests with those who would encroach upon our liberties.

Out of ministerial office in 1977, O'Brien answered critics who denied he was a liberal. Scorning his opponents' supposed refusal to define their philosophical foundations, O'Brien named his own influences as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Emile Faguet, and John Stuart Mill.Footnote ⁷⁴ In particular, he cited Mill's “harm principle”: “That the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.”Footnote ⁷⁵ By declaring, “I regard myself as a liberal in terms of that principle,” O'Brien made the principle of justification central to his own liberal philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁶

In 1990, O'Brien called for the republic to introduce internment and criticized the liberal southern media for complaining about Britain's “dirty war” in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁷⁷ “This type of liberalism is for export only,” he opined, before prophesying that in the south, “[t]he beating of suspects and a ‘shoot to kill policy’” would be routine, and public opinion in the republic “would have no fault to find with it provided it worked.”Footnote ⁷⁸ While complaining that “media pundits of the Republic dilate on such impeccable themes as the security forces must never ‘descend to the level of the terrorists,’” O'Brien identified another dilemma confronting all liberal democracies. “[A]s well as being impeccable,” he concluded, “[this kind of liberalism] is very helpful to the terrorists.” Here, O'Brien invoked a lesser evil argument.

To better identify O'Brien's politics, it is useful to reference Berlin's essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”Footnote ⁷⁹ At the height of the Cold War, Berlin described two by no means comprehensive ideas of freedom, identifying what he called “negative liberty” with the Western liberal democracies and “positive liberty” with communist and other authoritarian regimes. This positive freedom is achieved by the realization of the “true self” through collective action and is compatible with coercing the individual toward that goal. Referencing Mill, “negative liberty” was defined as the “maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimum demands of social life.”Footnote ⁸⁰ On social issues, such as the right to divorce and access to contraception, O'Brien and other Irish progressives remained “freedom to” liberals. On security matters and issues of intellectual freedom, O'Brien tentatively moved alongside some public opinion in the 1970s toward an authoritarian positive liberty. The republic's reactivated special powers and courts, parliament's annual vote renewing special censorship legislation, and other laws curtailing civil liberties were defined as necessary to secure the community's minimum freedoms. It is likely scholars will continue to debate whether some or all of these measures were justified or excessive, liberal or illiberal. But interpreted either way, they were delivered by a representative Parliament and implemented by all the political parties that formed governments during the crisis.

Nonetheless, O'Brien condoned ignoring constitutional rights to uphold order before law. It is true Mill's harm principle can be invoked to justify great limitations on individual liberties where, for example, a threat to the state's security is apparent. Repeatedly, O'Brien invoked the threat to the state to justify interference in individual liberties. But the anomaly persists, that the protection of society's minimum freedoms by curbing individual rights was never matched by the state's preparedness for the war sometimes said to threaten those freedoms. This strongly suggests that the threat of an escalating war, while no one doubt it existed, was sometimes used as a scare tactic.

The defense of freedom, O'Brien claimed, justified his wish to censor cultural and historical interpretations he understood encouraged murder. Introducing a Criminal Law Bill in September 1976, O'Brien referenced the Irish Press decision to publish correspondence defending the killing of the British ambassador.Footnote ⁸¹ Interviewed by a Washington Post correspondent before the Dail debate, O'Brien stated (confidentially, he believed) that he might use an incitement clause in the Criminal Law Bill against offending newspaper editors. A public furor broke out after this was disclosed, and the incitement clause was narrowed. But O'Brien's definition of “subversive propaganda” included other equivocations. The Washington Post reported, “O'Brien acknowledges the measures could punish music teachers who lead classes in IRA ballads or even history teachers who glorify the Irish revolutionary heroes.”Footnote ⁸² This begins to identify the scope of O'Brien's thinking about the “wrong” history inspiring violence and the necessary interference to prevent this from happening. It is to the historians and their historiographies that we now turn.

V

Alan Bennett, playwright and sometime historian, reminds us “that there is no period so remote as the recent past.”Footnote ⁸³ In examining the influence of the O'Brien ethic on history and culture in the 1970s and after, our close proximity confronts us with a historical problem. Arguably, historians are most insensitive to the past immediately preceding the beginning of their own professional careers. This cannot be remembered, and likely it has not been historicized, but it is precisely this history that shapes the profession into which they are quietly initiated. Post-1970, it is true, historical research on Ireland was enhanced by methodological innovations. These included, it has been argued, postmodernism alongside continental philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Invigorated by an expanding and diversifying profession, this research enjoyed access to new archives and, for a brief time before 2008, expanding resources. Pointedly, it was also influenced by attitudes reacting to the protracted political violence in Northern Ireland.

On occasion the reaction involved casual associations among some ideas, criticisms, historical interpretations, and narratives with inadvertent or even overt support for terrorism. In 1995, novelist Colm Tóibín gave expression to a form of liberal prejudice referencing the Field Day theater company in the Times Literary Supplement. “There were times in the 1980s,” Tóibín wrote, “when it was hard not to feel that Field Day had become the literary wing of the IRA.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Founded in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea, Field Day explored the possibilities of cultures and identities, and attempted an artistic intervention into the calcified politics of the Troubles. Joined by poet Seamus Heaney and academics like Seamus Deane, Field Day, alongside its theater productions, published politico-cultural pamphlets with contributions from varied literary critics, including Tom Paulin, Terry Eagleton, and Edward Said, among others. Quoting Tóibín's accusation against Field Day, a cultural historian from a younger generation, Frank Shovlin, wrote in 2009: “It is hard to believe now, a decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, that the stakes in the Irish culture wars were ever raised to this high a pitch.”Footnote ⁸⁶ But Tóibín's “pitch” is all too believable for those experiencing or studying Irish intellectual life during the Troubles. Referencing what she calls Ireland's “history wars,” historian Margaret O'Callaghan said in 2007 that these, “marginalised important intellectuals” and that “people have paid career prices for not going along with a prevailing consensus.”Footnote ⁸⁷

This section considers how the dilemmas of conscience confronting other liberal intellectual professions affected some Irish historians. During the 1970s, and since, all Irish intellectuals were questioned about their attitudes toward the northern crisis and partition, and, ultimately, toward terrorism. The historical profession experienced particularly close scrutiny. In part, this was because the conflict was understood as a product of historical “processes” and “divisions” some historians said originated in seventeenth-century Ulster.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the early 1970s, the dominance of this idea is partially explained by the absence in Ireland of a full-fledged political science profession. Consequently, it fell disproportionately to historians to fill the expanding role for public intellectuals by explaining the “roots” of the crisis. Married to the historical explanation of origins was the belief that the violence was inspired by separatist nationalist historiography. The assumption that endorsing the “wrong” history sanctioned terrorism burdened historians with special responsibilities during the crisis. The assumed relationship between historiography and terrorism helps clarify why in 1976 O'Brien was adamant that teachers of the “wrong” history should be prosecuted before the law.

Only recently have historians begun publicly to discuss problems associated with this coercion. In 2010, J. J. Lee and Gearoid Ó Tuathaigh spoke about historians being seen to sanction terrorism. Ó Tuathaigh referred to what he called the “ideological frisking” to establish “where you stood.”Footnote ⁸⁹ This, as both Ó Tuathaigh and Lee attested, became an acute problem for early career historians, and some of these made explicit declarations against the Provisional IRA in their published research.Footnote ⁹⁰

Confusion arising about some historical interpretations sanctioning or being perceived to sanction terrorism presented difficulties for all. This, arguably, provides the critical interpretative context for some aspects of modern Irish historiography. In 2006, addressing a conference on the meaning of the Easter 1916 rising, Charles Townshend delivered a paper titled “The Worst Event in Twentieth-Century Irish History? 1916 in Perspective.”Footnote ⁹¹ As he explored the Rising in its changing historiographical context, Townshend spoke humorously about polemical interpretations written during the Troubles. He prefaced these remarks saying, “[B]elatedly, it has become possible to discuss this question publicly.”Footnote ⁹² Townshend explained that this represented a “change from the experience I've had most of my life working on some aspects of Irish history.”Footnote ⁹³ But Townshend did not aver to why public discussion had been impossible (though he may have assumed the audience understood well enough). Inevitably, after 1970, the Northern Ireland conflict affected all Irish historians, but for those writing on political violence, their subject invited new sensitivities.

To begin to explain the assumptions about the relationship between historiography and violence, it is necessary first to examine wider debates about the relationship between culture and politics. As ever, O'Brien applied himself to this discourse. Art, he argued, translated into action, and in Ireland writers bore special responsibilities for directing culture toward positive channels.Footnote ⁹⁴ “The area where literature and politics overlap has, then, to be regarded with suspicion,” O'Brien wrote in 1975. “It is suffused with romanticism, which in politics tends in the direction of fascism.”Footnote ⁹⁵ What concerned O'Brien were the mobilizing powers of separatist nationalist mythologies and their transmission of the tragic-heroic motifs of Irish republicanism—sacrifice, martyrdom, failure—into the public consciousness.Footnote ⁹⁶ O'Brien saw republican narratives, carried by poetry, plays, ballads, and histories, combining with Catholicism to form a lethal atavistic nationalist-religious force.Footnote ⁹⁷ The “intertwining” of politics and religion exerted, he claimed, a metaphysical influence on Irish consciousness, which found expression in the fascistic IRA. O'Brien adapted an analogy taken from Albert Camus's La Peste to demonstrate the persistence of these hatreds: “The bacillus of the plague can be dormant for years in furniture and linen,” O'Brien warned, adding it may again “awaken its rats and send them to die in a happy city.”Footnote ⁹⁸ (This was the analogy Murtagh referenced in his allusion to liberals as “rats.”)

In political office, O'Brien challenged the separatist “story of Ireland” and the certainties it carried about the progressive uses of political violence, alongside the inevitability of reunification. Introducing the Broadcasting Authority Amendment Bill in March 1975, O'Brien returned to the responsibilities of liberal intellectuals. He first addressed journalists, criticizing them where they referred to “republican prisoners” as if “they were jailed for their opinions not their crimes.”Footnote ⁹⁹ What was significant about this, O'Brien pleaded, “is the . . . equivocal approach to the IRA it implies.” O'Brien wanted militarist republicans criminalized in journalistic writing, adding that “other categories—clergy, teachers, businessmen, trade unionists—bear responsibilities.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Here, O'Brien identified as a problem what he called a “kind of neutral professionalism.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the struggle between liberty and terror, it was no longer acceptable to hide behind professional obligations, and this, he stated, extended beyond journalists to all liberal intellectual professionals.

In May 1971, reviewing F. S. L. Lyons's Ireland Since the Famine, Terence de Vere White complained, “I am not quite sure where Dr Lyons stands on what seems to me the most vital issue in Irish historical controversy—the use of force.”Footnote ¹⁰² White added, “[Lyons] faces the moral dilemma by describing as ‘a soldier’ any patriot who puts forward a bloodthirsty, as opposed to a peaceful, solution of a problem.” Lyons’s study, mostly written before 1969, appeared to White (and to others) almost to excuse terrorism. This presented Lyons with his own dilemma: by giving “undue prominence to the concept of revolutionary militancy,” historians bore responsibilities for the new men of violence.Footnote ¹⁰³ Should he write a history consciously responding to the contemporary crisis? Or alternatively, should he continue, as before, to study the past “for its own sake”?Footnote ¹⁰⁴

White's critique alongside O'Brien's later suggestion, that those who did not abandon professional neutrality were somehow aiding terrorism, had to inform responses to Lyons's dilemma. It is impossible here to assess the effect any of this may have had in a comprehensive survey of Irish history. Nevertheless, it is feasible briefly to consider Irish state formation historiography covering the period from 1916 to 1923. Using a recent analysis, it is possible to comment on the influence of the O'Brien ethic on at least some of this writing.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The guardians of a past-centered approach (though they were less doctrinaire on the issue than their detractors sometimes suggest) were T. W. Moody and Robin Dudley Edwards, who together in 1938 founded the journal Irish Historical Studies (IHS). Under the auspices of IHS, Moody and Edwards oversaw a professionalization of Irish historical research, placing it on a regulated and more scientific footing. It was Moody's protégé, Lyons, the founding professor of history at the University of Kent in England, who led the defense against history purposefully applied against any side in the post-1970 conflict.

The first contest between a more past-centered approach and a more politically self-conscious applied history occurred in 1971. In this year, Lyons identified historians who were reacting to the resurgence of violence by exaggerating the importance of constitutionalism in their interpretations. In a rebuke delivered in Dublin, Lyons warned against replacing the teleology associated with a popular physical force narrative (“1916 and all that”), with an equally Whiggish constitutional alternative.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such interpretations, Lyons said, were predicated on the overbearing needs of the present, and inevitably, these prejudiced the selection of evidence. Instead, he argued, the balanced approach associated with the historical research IHS promoted would be the way to proceed.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Lyons also warned that “the study of constitutional history in revulsion to the present” jeopardized the “temper of sweet reasonableness” that professionalization supposedly had inculcated among Irish historians.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The argument between the “constitutional historians” and Lyons continued into a published collection of radio lectures titled The Irish Parliamentary Tradition, edited by Brian Farrell.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Farrell, a broadcaster and political scientist, denied Lyons's accusation of Whig history leveled against a so-called constitutional tradition.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, Lyons's influence inside the academy (in 1974 he became provost of TCD), buttressed by Moody and Edwards, ensured that any bid to align the historical profession behind a constitutional-nationalist teleology was temporarily thwarted.

For those subscribing to the idea that the “right” history might save lives, the behavior of Lyons may have looked like criminal folly. Adapting lines of Yeats for his purposes, Lyons responded to such suggestions, writing: “Did that play/book of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?” Lyons's answer was emphatic: “Historians,” he said, “have never aspired either to such influence or arrogance.”Footnote ¹¹¹ There is nothing to suggest he changed his mind.Footnote ¹¹² O'Brien too asked Yeats's question, and as Diarmuid Whelan demonstrated, O'Brien's answer became an increasingly unequivocal “Yes!”Footnote ¹¹³

For historians subscribing to O'Brien's thesis, any concession to Whiggish constitutional history risked placing themselves in professional difficulties while Lyons held sway. They could do historical research on contemporary history, but their results might sanction militarist republicanism where, for example, the origins of the Irish state were located in unmandated violence.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Discouragement before the 1970s of contemporary history within the Irish academy—from which Lyons famously dissented—meant that the twentieth century remained relatively underresearched before the 1990s. This deficit was noticeable in Irish universities, but it is unlikely historians were uninterested in the recent past. Rather, the void probably indicated an unwillingness to write contemporary political history on Lyons's terms or, indeed, on O'Brien's.

Reviewing two major television histories of Ireland in 1981, Foster vented the frustrations of impatient historians. “[T]hose scholars, now about to retire, who launched a heroic effort to explore the more ambivalent dimensions of Irish history,” wrote Foster, “must feel some doubt at the simplifications on their television screens these last two months.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Aided by television producers, the “wrong” history proved persistent, and it reached enviably large audiences. The republican hunger strikes of 1981 can only have exacerbated the disappointment. Lyons and Moody died, respectively, in 1983 and 1984, and Edwards (following a long illness), in 1988. After nearly fifty years, the domination of the so-called founding fathers came to a close, and this invited questions about who and what should replace them.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Almost immediately, the struggle began anew between past-centered historians and those self-consciously addressing the Troubles. This consciousness gained notable expression in two essays published in 1986. Roy Foster's “We Are All Revisionists Now,” demonstrated a robust attitude toward historiographical engagement. Lampooning the “influential popular histories written by zealous converts [to Irish separatist nationalism] like Cecil Woodham Smith,” Foster ridiculed, “naively hilarious works of piety about the Young Irelanders, written by amateur historians on the British left . . . joined by the half baked ‘sociologists’ employed on profitable never-ending research into ‘anti-Irish racism’ [in Britain].”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Criticism of reductive analysis and even poor scholarship was justified. That the recipients of Foster's attack went unidentified was not. Moreover, Foster's derisory tone broke with the Moody-Edwards professionalization, ushering into Irish historical discourse a sardonic register. Foster's concern, not unfairly, was that the “best” historians “barely penetrate to the popular audience.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Here, “best” identified revisionist historians who were busy debunking separatist nationalist mythologies. Foster concluded that ‘“revisionist’ should just be another way of saying ‘historian”’ and advocated promulgating the “best history” to the widest possible audience.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The second essay, Ronan Fanning's “‘The Great Enchantment’ Uses and Abuses of Modern Irish History,” shared Foster's concern with popular historical understanding, but it pointed toward a more hazardous direction.Footnote ¹²⁰ Fanning endorsed—transparently for the cognoscenti—a history applied against the republican insurgency, wherein, he noted, nowhere else “in the European, North American or antipodean democracies does the writing of twentieth-century history demand so constant a confrontation with mythologies designed to legitimize violence as a political weapon in a bid to overthrow the state.”Footnote ¹²¹ A sense of doom worthy of O'Brien's worst forebodings accompanied this, where Fanning contrasted Lyons's predicament in the 1970s with his own in the mid-1980s, confronting the electoral success of the Provisionals' “ballot box and armalite” strategy. “[T]he pessimism of the historian who believes the worst will happen,” warned Fanning, “must be distinguished from the pessimism of the historian who witnesses the worst happening and believes there may be still worse to come.”Footnote ¹²² In the Irish history wars, the self-proclaimed revisionists declared they were losing to the gunmen.

Fanning's endorsement of an applied history supporting the state's counterinsurgency is important, because earlier he had sided with Lyons. In 1975, Fanning exposed the teleology at the center of Farrell's revisionist essay “Irish Political Culture and the New State,” vindicating Lyons and humiliating Farrell.Footnote ¹²³ Written before the Troubles began, Farrell's essay provided the master narrative for a constitutional, later democratic, foundation myth for the Irish state. Reasserted in the historiography after 1980, this foundation myth increasingly displaced a rival in the physical force story, which located the origins of the state in the Easter 1916 Rising. In 1983, months after Lyons's death, Fanning published Independent Ireland.Footnote ¹²⁴ Fanning's textbook embellished Farrell's constitutional narrative, where Fanning awarded the 1922 Irish Free State a democratic legitimacy. The crowning achievement of this seamless democratic narrative was the nonrecognition of the contradictions relating to Michael Collins's leadership. At the time of his death on 22 August 1922, it is argued, Collins had affected a de facto military dictatorship.Footnote ¹²⁵ But evidence contradicting the constitutional and democratic narratives went unrecorded by Fanning alongside other historians endorsing the new foundation myth.Footnote ¹²⁶

It is difficult, if not impossible, to measure the influence of historiographies on violent action. Recognizing O'Brien's interpretations were often propagandistic, his assumption that historiographies nurtured terrorism deserves careful consideration. For example, the hero cults of the separatist pantheon had been available to earlier generations, but it is noteworthy that during the IRA's “border campaign” (1956–62), those cults failed to mobilize popular support, north or south.Footnote ¹²⁷ After 1970, though all northern and southern separatist nationalists had been exposed to similarly romantic historiographies, support for antistate organizations in the republic remained nominal. This observation again invites other causal explanations for the reappearance of militarist republicanism. Unsurprisingly, these identify rising expectations among Northern Ireland's Roman Catholic minority amid the radicalizing international tumult of the 1960s and the inability of unionist governments to introduce reforms while containing growing unrest. Arguably, it is the inadequacy of political structures—among them partition—rather than plague-carrying histories that better explains the resurgence of violence. This is not to dismiss outright O'Brien's cultural cause and effect argument, but rather to argue it cannot bear the weight he and others placed on it.

O'Brien amplified after 1972 the substance of what sociologist Stanley Cohen calls a “moral panic.” Cohen (also in 1972) defined this term as a “condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values.” This in the republic describes some responses to anyone rightly or wrongly associated with resurgent militarist republicanism. Cohen continues, “[I]ts nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In the republic, a moral panic found expression in the idea that separatist historiographies inspired separatist terrorism. (The belief that historiographies can directly affect human action is described here as “historical agency.”) Official anxieties about commemorating Easter 1916, the banning of rebel songs from the state's broadcaster RTE, and removal from public places of symbols associated with revolutionary republicanism were symptoms of a moral panic over historiographies and formed part of a “Green Scare.” By predicting catastrophes and claiming that separatist historiographies nurtured terrorists, O'Brien, alongside other commentators, stoked fears about historical agency. In some quarters, the resulting hysteria is still heard.Footnote ¹²⁹ Cohen warns that moral panics “might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy” or “the way society conceives itself.”Footnote ¹³⁰ There is little doubt that some Irish self-perceptions were altered by the revisions to historical understanding O'Brien supported, and these may be traced to recent historical writing.Footnote ¹³¹

Revising his influential essay “History and the Irish Question” for republication in 1993, Foster added the sentence: “By then [1972] the results of simplistic historical hero-cults had become obvious in carnage of Northern Ireland.”Footnote ¹³² When the essay was delivered as a lecture in 1982—perhaps in deference to Lyons—these “obvious” results went unmentioned.Footnote ¹³³ In the 1990s, Foster's revision demonstrated that O'Brien's endorsement of historical agency had penetrated the emerging mainstream inside the academy.Footnote ¹³⁴

Inevitably, the belief that some narratives inspired terrorism informed the discourse on Northern Ireland—notably, by helping to silence opposition to O'Brien's “primitivist” explanation of the conflict. Claiming the violence was the product of “irreconcilable,” “atavistic . . . tribal hatreds,” primitivist explanations displaced structural ones. But O'Brien's analysis, Richard Bourke now argues, was unequal to the conflict's complexity.Footnote ¹³⁵ Describing O'Brien's primitivist interpretation as fallacy, Bourke demonstrates its influence in the work of Foster, Townshend, Richard English, and Marianne Elliott.Footnote ¹³⁶

In the 1990s, some present-centered historians superimposed conceptualizations of the contemporary Northern Ireland conflict onto the earlier period of state formation. Alongside interpretations of the Irish civil war (1922–23) as a struggle between the democratic state and antidemocratic republicanism, Ulster's contemporary ethno-sectarian violence was projected southward on to the 1920s. Both narratives found expression in the work of the late Peter Hart, who provided a controversial revision of revolutionary republicanism in The IRA and Its Enemies 1916–23: Violence and Community in Cork 1916–23 (1998).Footnote ¹³⁷ Central to Hart's identification of sectarianism in the revolutionary period was the massacre of thirteen Protestants near Bandon, West Cork, in late April 1922, killed by Roman Catholics, or so he speculated, inside the IRA. In 1993, Hart described this event as an attempt by the IRA to “exterminate or drive away all Protestants in the area,” and in 1996, he claimed the massacre was indicative of “what might be termed as ‘ethnic cleansing’” in half a dozen southern counties.Footnote ¹³⁸ This raised suspicions that beneath the assumed ecumenism of southern life lurked primordial hatreds similar to those tearing at the Balkans and Ulster. That memories of ethnic violence in county Cork (and similar events elsewhere) were supposedly suppressed made Hart's discovery more unnerving. All of this endorsed O'Brien's primitivist interpretation, and for those advancing O'Brien's analysis in the academic literature, Hart's work was of strategic importance.Footnote ¹³⁹ I argue, however, that Hart constructed his account of an unambiguous sectarian massacre from some very contradictory evidence.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Hart argued the massacre's Protestant victims were murdered primarily because of their religion, not because they had informed against the IRA. In making this claim, Hart ignored evidence, some of which identified the exceptional intelligence work done by Protestant loyalists around Bandon.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Drawing on the same evidence in 1977, David Fitzpatrick wrote: “Army historians later lamented the inability of the secret service to penetrate the inner circles of Republicanism, and the increasing reluctance of loyal citizens to turn informer.”Footnote ¹⁴² But Fitzpatrick added, “[A] number of Protestant farmers near Bandon who did were killed by the IRA.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Oddly, neither Hart nor his doctoral supervisor and internal examiner (Fitzpatrick) referenced or explained their differing interpretations of the same evidence. What is now noticeable is that neither did any other historian during years of controversy over Hart's work.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ That this happened raises questions about academic rigor. It may also identify a consensus impervious to the evidence contradicting Hart's primitivist narrative.

Similarly, when in 1996 Tom Garvin erroneously denied the British government's repeated threats of renewed war should Sinn Fein reject the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty, Garvin's negation of the facts went almost unnoticed.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Hitherto, recognition of British coercion was integral to all but the most partisan historical writing.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Elsewhere, ignoring or marginalizing British coercion in 1922 facilitated interpretations of Irish decision makers more-or-less freely entering the treaty settlement.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In turn, this downplaying or negation of British coercion aids a perverse reduction explaining the Irish civil war as a war fought by the Irish state in defense of democracy against republican tyranny. This again describes the Irish state's new foundation myth—Garvin's eponymous Birth of Irish Democracy thesis. Edited by Ronan Fanning, Michael Kennedy, Dermot Keogh, and Eunan O'Halpin, Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (vol. 1), 1919–1922 features eighty-seven documents covering the period from the treaty's signing (6 December 1921) to the civil war's outbreak (28 June 1922).Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Of these documents, only one cryptic note references British threats. At the Sinn Fein cabinet held on 8 December 1921, the words “It was war or not” acknowledge the British ultimatum Sinn Fein's signatories confronted at the conclusion of the treaty negotiations in London.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ That this editorial selection does justice to the influence of British coercion on early Irish foreign and domestic policy may be doubted.

O'Brien awarded historians a special responsibility in the Irish crisis. Responses to this burden identified historians, to differing degrees, as consenting or dissenting liberals. Endorsement of a pro-state and antirepublican historiography, or any historiography understood to relate to the Troubles, became a litmus test identifying “where you stood.” This greatly complicated what has been imprecisely termed “Irish revisionism.” A common thread linking Irish revisionism to similar processes elsewhere, Stephen Howe observes (notably referencing Israel), is “the critique of a nationalist historical narrative.” In part, revisionist controversies, in Ireland as elsewhere, resulted from unavoidable frictions generated between historical research and nationalist mythology.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It is increasingly clear in some Irish examples that critiques by professionals of separatist nationalist narratives were simplified or exaggerated and sometimes ahistorical. This begins to identify important distinctions between revisionism born of bona fide historical research and ahistorical revisionism identified by the abandonment of historical method and “professional neutrality.” Speaking at Oxford University in February 2013, Fitzpatrick said of Hart's critique of the IRA attempting to “exterminate” Protestants in 1922, “I think he overstated the case.” Fitzpatrick continued:

Fitzpatrick concedes he has found no statistical basis whatsoever for Hart's claims for anything approaching ethnic cleansing in county Cork or elsewhere in Southern Ireland in 1922.Footnote ¹⁵²

The consensus emerging around the state's constitutional/democratic foundation myth could only survive with the endorsement of those who earlier had witnessed Lyons's intervention against it. The corollary of an applied, teleological, history has been to introduce errors and confusions into historical understanding, as Lyons earlier warned it would be. The common denominator of both the constitutional and the sectarian narratives was the selection of evidence on the basis of a priori decisions, and this now accounts for some major distortions. What remains impressive (in some cases) is the sophistication with which some ahistorical narratives were constructed and others concealed. While some historians embraced both applied teleological histories and their skewed historiographies, it is doubtful the consensus scaffolding this was ever wholly voluntary. It is therefore necessary to be reminded that Irish historians still live with the threat of being denounced as “republican apologists” and worse by fellow academics.Footnote ¹⁵³ In the next section, possible justifications for liberal intellectuals adopting such approaches are explored.

VI

In 1975, Robinson accused O'Brien (for reasons aforementioned) of a “refined form of McCarthyism as it was used in the United States.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ A decade earlier, the influential journal Encounter called O'Brien, “a politico-cultural Joe McCarthy.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The contrasting origins of these accusations now throws light on O'Brien's journey from the liberal intellectual of the 1960s to the politician and propagandist of the 1970s.

In the 1960s, O'Brien was a strident critic of both the United States and its communist enemies. Reviewing an anthology of Encounter articles in 1963, O'Brien took issue with British academic Denis Brogan's introduction to the collection, which made claims for the journal's impartiality in the Cold War: “[F]rom its foundation,” wrote Brogan, “Encounter . . . has been a journal de combat, an organ of protest against the trahison de clercs.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ O'Brien replied that in Encounter, “[g]reat vigilance is shown about oppression in the communist world, apathy and inconsequence largely prevail where the oppression is non-communist or anti-communist.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In April 1966, the New York Times alleged the CIA funded Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This was rejected by Encounter's coeditors, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Stephen Spender, and Frank Kermode. Buoyed by the New York Times' revelation, in May 1966, O'Brien repeated his allegation of partisanship in a public lecture titled “The Writer and the Power Structure.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ O'Brien's “power structure” described those who encouraged “a favourable presentation of . . . [the state's] own image” to the world outside as well to the domestic public.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This “encouragement,” O'Brien warned, was provided “by the secret services, by defense forces, by business, and by the mass media.” While the power structure's activity had “been mainly directed outward—toward combating communist influence in the third world,” it had also helped “to mold teaching and research in the United States and, to a slightly lesser extent, in Britain.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Elsewhere, O'Brien argued, “[T]he writing specifically required by the power structure was done by people [in Encounter] who, as writers, were of the third or fourth rank but who could . . . take a hint.”Footnote ¹⁶² Responding, Encounter (still denying any CIA connection) deployed the slur of McCarthyism against O'Brien, claiming he looked for CIA agents under its editors' beds.Footnote ¹⁶³ O'Brien sued for libel. When later it was independently established that the CIA had funded Encounter, its editors settled out of court. It then emerged that Lasky, and journal trustee Arthur Schlesinger Jr., knew of the CIA connection, while at the same time denying it.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

During the Cold War, the Encounter episode became a test case for liberal intellectuals and their commitment to “truth.” But O'Brien's role in the controversy contrasted with his subtle transformation during the 1970s into a liberal consenting to the Irish state's power structure. O'Brien argued his criticism of Encounter was borne of antipathy toward neither the United States nor any pro-communist partisanship. Simply, he objected to the hypocrisy of Encounter's claim of editorial “neutrality.” Introducing an edited volume in 1969, Power and Consciousness, O'Brien struggled to define an adequate relationship between intellectuals committed to the pursuit of truth and those power structures that in the United States, as elsewhere, were preoccupied with a global counterrevolution against communism. The Cold War, O'Brien reflected in 1969, confronted intellectuals with a choice between revolutionary change and the status quo, adding the rueful conjecture that the Cold War truly began in 1790, with the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Since then, O'Brien noted, the idea of revolution inspired, “fear or hope of it, produced contrasting mental anthologies from reality . . . dreams and nightmares.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ He also observed the intellectual's support or rejection of revolution depended “on whether he really hates the existing society enough to fight it . . . without scruple about deceit or cruelty.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

“[S]acrifices made for the revolution or for the counterrevolution,” O'Brien argued in 1969, “constitute, of course, the abdication of the intellectual.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ After 1970, O'Brien the politician abandoned his commitment to O'Brien the liberal intellectual, alongside his obligation to tell the truth. From then onward, in support of the Irish power structure O'Brien began to apply strategies he had witnessed in America. Inevitably, any analogy between the O'Brien ethic and McCarthyism invites imprecision. Nevertheless, there were similarities between the “Red Scare” in America and the “Green Scare” in Ireland. Typically, O'Brien exploited anxieties about threats from inside society and fears about what the future held. His dichotomies were used to press liberal intellectuals to declare for the state or for terrorism. All of this was vaguely reminiscent of the loyalty pledges that became a grievance in some American institutions.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ What distinguished the “Green Scare” from the “Red Scare” was that unlike in the United States, in Ireland there was no formal pledge around which to mobilize. Instead, Irish declarations of loyalty or dissent manifested in the public positions liberal professionals (and others) took. Much as “pinko” or “red” had been assigned to America dissenters (and some bystanders), so in the Irish vernacular “Provo” or even “republican” could be deployed with similarly damaging intent.

After Encounter's CIA funding became public knowledge, Berlin wrote to Lasky: “The proper role of Encounter is simply to say . . . [the editors] acted . . . in ignorance. . . . Men of sense and goodwill will understand; those who lack it will snipe any way.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Berlin's outright refusal to condemn the CIA connection could be reconciled with his own liberal philosophy, as he explained in 1994: “I did not in the slightest object to American sources supplying the money—I was (and am) pro-American and anti-Soviet, and if the source had been declared I would not have minded in the least.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Berlin is sometimes cited as a major influence on O'Brien,Footnote ¹⁷² and another of Berlin's essays on liberty, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” is instructive when explaining liberal responses during the Irish crisis.Footnote ¹⁷³ In the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, Berlin observed, social engineers believed human evils—poverty, ignorance, disease—could be rationally displaced by sometimes brutal politicians, psychotherapists, and technocratic social engineers attempting managerial solutions. Berlin argued against social engineering in the pursuit of unobtainable utopias. Instead, he argued that because knowledge is relative to the society in which it exists, there could be no absolute truth, no immovable position, no final solution. Berlin concluded that people are obliged to proceed with a healthy suspicion of certainties, as well as those who profess them. He also warned similar dangers confronted liberal democratic societies, wherein individual choice was ceded to decision-making “experts.” For every gain in social justice the technocrats delivered, there might be a corresponding loss of freedom, and these needed to be weighed carefully one against another. Berlin's essay was another of his arguments against dogmatic monism, and it was a warning against the barbarous contempt for freedom that utopianism sometimes entails. What human reason called for, Berlin insisted, “was not . . . more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organisation. Rather it is the opposite—less Messianic ardour, more enlightened scepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Fighting injustice was essential, but men “do not live only by fighting evils.” They live, Berlin argued, “by choosing their own goals—a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Berlin's reasoning afforded liberals license where they identified an objective like the defeat (or support) of the Soviet Union, the creation of the Israeli state, or, indeed, the defeat of Messianic Irish republicanism.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In Berlin's estimation, there are no rules and no loyalties, only choices for those who are described here as “mercurial liberals.”

In support of a liberal philosophy straining against extremism, Berlin liked to quote an epigram attributed to the eighteenth-century French statesman Talleyrand: “Surtout, Messieurs, point de zéle.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The technocratic “zealots” and the “zealous” are the enemies of Berlin's liberalism. (And here it is impossible not to notice how promiscuously the “z” noun and the “z” adjective are applied by some Irish historians.)Footnote ¹⁷⁸ For Berlin, the enemies of pluralism were sometimes found among self-believing technocrats who organized societies. For fifty years, during which they stamped the Irish historical profession with an unbending scientific method, historians like Moody, Edwards, and Lyons could be fairly counted by their detractors (and, perhaps, among several acolytes) as falling among Berlin's technocratic zealots.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Maintaining a safe distance between the historical profession and the Northern Ireland conflict, IHS protected one form of freedom—the pursuit of abstract truths. Against this had to be weighed the freedom to write present-centered and applied histories, directed against what some understood to be the conflict's root causes: separatist nationalisms driven by their mythologies, cults, and historiographies. Resolution of the very real dilemma of what type of freedom to pursue rested on perceptions of the threat confronting Irish society and the influence liberal intellectuals might have in either supporting or challenging that threat. For those convinced the “wrong” history might cost lives, the choice can only have been obvious.

In 1960s America, O'Brien criticized anti communist scholars, who bent their research and teaching toward “counterrevolutionary subordination,” and blamed them for contributing to “a society maimed by the systematic corruption of its intelligence.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ While O'Brien noted such corruption was limited in America, he predicted its long-term influence in the academy where “young scholars are particularly sensitive to the kind of pressure involved. . . . [They] are likely to believe that if they write with excessive candour . . . doors will close to them: certain grants will be out of their reach . . . influential people alienated. The view propagated the young man [sic] is unbalanced and unsound.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Precisely, O'Brien understood that scholars could be coaxed, intellectual trajectories adjusted, and the academy honed for a purpose. In this light, Howe's comment in 2000 now appears significant: “Among [Irish] professional historians, there is little ‘revisionist anti-revisionist’ dispute: almost all are in the former camp.”Footnote ¹⁸² “‘Anti-revisionist’ attacks in recent years,” Howe adds, “have come overwhelmingly from literary and cultural critics, not from historians.” While alone the O'Brien ethic cannot fully explain any consensus existing among Irish historians, fear of denunciation remains a disincentive for those raising a critical voice against Irish “revisionism”—even when in its ahistorical mode. That for forty years none of this went noticed by the now senior academics in the historical profession is untenable.

VII

It is difficult to estimate the long-term influence of multiple editorial decisions and evidence selections by writers, journalists, lawyers, and broadcasters in an intellectual economy straining against Irish republicanism.Footnote ¹⁸³ Evidence now emerging from within Irish historiography indicates important problems of analysis, which challenge the reliability of some contemporary Irish history. In an atmosphere of moral panic, the Irish academy demonstrated how a counterinsurgency could become an organizing principle of a body of knowledge like history. Historians should, of course, be free to write the history they wish (and more besides), just as all should be free to dissent without fear of defamation or sanction. Nevertheless, recent experiences in the republic argue that in time of perceived crisis dissenting liberals are made to feel inhibited and sometimes become repressed. Confronted by terror—as likely we always will be—liberal intellectuals will be called upon to consent to the moral arguments of all-seeing counterterrorists.

If we are to accept the invitation of Ignatieff, Berlin's former student and biographer, to discuss and make decisions on issues like torture, internment, and lethal violence, it is best to see things for what they are.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ This is the aspiration for professional neutrality distancing the manufacture of knowledge from the influence of direct political engagement and the force of gravity that power structures radiate. Where these forces are denied, the results may present difficulties for Ignatieff's call for antiterrorist policy to be kept under “the bright public light of ‘adversarial justification.’” By this, he means “defending a democratic system both against those who use false necessity arguments to justify secret government proceedings and those who use perfectionist arguments to claim that we need make no sacrifice of liberty” though public debate.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Ignatieff places his faith in the ability of societies to rise above terrorist crises to have an “open contest of opinions. . . . Ultimately, if open proceedings fail to produce answers . . . it is up to citizens themselves to force the institutions—through public criticism and the electoral process—to come up with better answers.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ This again is the argument of elections being the conscience of government. But how truly open these contests are is queried by Irish experiences. In the United States, an immediate objection to the “open contest” is raised by the McCarthy era, to which Ignatieff responds: “If McCarthy persecuted innocent people in open proceedings, he was also brought down by open proceedings.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ This surely is too simple a formulation. Long after the spectacle of McCarthyism disappeared, O'Brien identified anticommunism had profoundly informed the manufacture of knowledge. Something similar may influence Ignatieff where he tells us the “IRA bears as much relation to the Mafia as it does to an insurrectionary cell” and adds the qualification “it is a mistake to . . . appease a group like the IRA with political concessions [because their] goals may be a subsidiary to their criminal interests.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Without arguing that the IRA was free of gangsters, it is worth considering whether the republican prisoners who for years protested, living amid walls they covered with their feces or by dying on hunger strike, did so for something so contradictory as criminal gain. Historian of the IRA Richard English argues the IRA's representation by British governments in the 1970s and the 1980s “as merely criminal” was counterproductive and inaccurate because “the IRA's motivation and character were in fact profoundly political.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Irish experiences suggest it is too easy to be outfoxed.

For O'Brien the liberal academic of the 1960s, the intellectual's responsibility to defend “scholarly integrity” was a “vital function” in society.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ For O'Brien the politician-publicist of the 1970s confronted with the Troubles, these principles were sacrificed. Berlin might have applauded O'Brien as an example of the “freedom of choice to act according to one's, perhaps deeply mistaken, convictions.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ “Liberty,” Berlin wrote to O'Brien in 1991, “is surely what we normally mean by the word: freedom . . . to be wrong as well as right, wicked as well as virtuous except that in the case of too much wrong or wickedness it is right to restrain such conduct. . . . But restraint is not freedom.”Footnote ¹⁹² Restraint justified by too much wrong or alternatively Mill's harm principle can be defended as a liberal measure, but arbitrary restraint may not. Nonetheless, for over forty years, in the name of the greater good, the O'Brien ethic encouraged restraint by employing the menace of denunciation. Ultimately, justification for this rested on the catch phrase “the state in danger,” but the Irish state's response to any such threat was so anomalous as to suggest the threat was by any standards marginal.Footnote ¹⁹³ Justification for the O'Brien ethic needs, therefore, to be weighed carefully. Was any loss of freedom encouraged by the O'Brien ethic compensated by vital gains to the state's security elsewhere? Was the preservation of the state dependent upon illiberal attitudes or the abandonment of neutrality in the liberal professions? Where the threat to the state is understood to be negligible, the answer to these questions is likely no.

Whatever way the balance tilts, it has to be recalled that recent perceptions of Irish society, past and present, were conceived within a polemical climate. In its turn, unsurprisingly, this has informed and arguably distorted the manufacture of knowledge. For the moment, the effects of these influences can only be sketched by historians. Studying the Irish historical profession after 1970, and pointedly its state formation historiography, we can say with some certainty that the distortions in our historical understanding are sometimes significant. All of this is only to question how bright the public light of “adversarial justification” truly is in times of terrorist threat, real and imagined. It also queries whether or not we may safely entrust the defense of liberal values to liberal intellectuals, mercurial or otherwise.