Background

Mr. O'Brien, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Let's start with your childhood. How did your parents shape your character?

Well, it's hard to say that. My father died when I was quite young, O'Brien at age 9 and I was really very close to him, more than to my mother. My mother loved me and tried to bring me up well, but there were occasional tensions. And then there was the question of my schooling, which was related to my parentage.

When your father died when you were very young, your mother courageously sought to fulfill his wish about your education.

That's right. She remained all her life a practicing Catholic. My father had been an agnostic who disapproved of Catholic schooling, and he was right, for the Catholic schooling of that time and that place. She then sent me to this school of Protestant ethos. One third of the pupils were people of Catholic origin like myself, but somewhat detached from that background. One third were Protestants, somewhat disoriented in the new Catholic-dominated state and feeling nervous. And one third were Jews who had their own sensitivities there. So we were all a bit disoriented, a bit hypersensitive, which I think is good in some ways, because it stimulates thought. When we are educated in an entirely homogeneous background, we simply inhale a comprehensive but possibly deceptive body of thought, but in the kind of [school] I was brought up in you have to start thinking for yourself, and we all did in different ways.

Looking at your story in your remarkable book -- and you begin with your family and tell the stories of your parents and your aunts and uncles and your grandparents -- I was left with the sense that on the one hand, you're nurtured by Irish nationalism, but on the other hand, you rise and transcend it, and education was key to doing that. Throughout your life there's a remarkable tension between your commitment to Ireland and Irish nationalism and your cosmopolitanism. Is that a correct reading?

That's right, and let me give a concrete example of that. In the home I was brought up in we were conditioned to think about Northern Ireland as a place that would like to be reunited with the rest of us but was being mislead in various ways. It was only when I went to Sandford Park School that I learned from one of the teachers, who was from the North and was a Protestant, that Northern Ireland was in the United Kingdom because a majority of its population wanted to be there. Nobody had ever told me that was not so, but nobody had ever told me that it was so, either. It was a dimension that got left out by nationalist thinkers and talkers. They knew it but they suppressed it.

But at the same time, your Irishness was central to your identity.

Yes, that's so. So in a rather peculiar way, it developed both in my cousin and in myself in being educated in the way we were. We were by that detached from most other Irish people. We were detached in terms of religion, and it was like having lost one lung; the other lung was political and you held on to that as a matter of both pride and ancestral loyalty. That, then, produced secondary tensions, further stimuli.

It was your Aunt Hanna who put you onto reading, and gave you Rudyard Kipling to read.

Yes, that's right. Which was very, very interesting because she was almost fanatically anti-imperialist, and of course Kipling is the imperialist par excellence of the period. But she was able to put that aside and she saw that the Jungle Books were wonderfully written and wonderfully stimulating and passed them on. She didn't even give me a health warning about Kipling, which was quite interesting and rather untypical, I think.

So for an Irish nationalist that was a weakness, but a virtue in terms what it accomplished for you.

Yes, absolutely.

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