Being a Writer

In what ways did the conflicts of Irish history direct you to the intellectual themes that you pursued? You found your voice as a writer in thinking about your country's history.

Yes, my first book is about the religious imagination, specifically the Catholic imagination. I found Catholicism in Ireland quite distasteful, but I knew that some Catholics had reached out to wider things in the Catholic community. And I was really interested in those patterns, those imaginative patterns that came there, and this was something that I was struggling about internally myself.

The next book had to do with Irish history, it's called Parnell and His Party. My grandfather had been a member of Parnell's party, the party founded by Parnell, but when the party split in 1891 he was one of those who went against Parnell, which came to be regarded retrospectively by Irish nationals as very much the wrong side. And again, I was puzzled by that, I wanted to explore it and see how he came to get that way and how others went the other way, and to try and bring that together both imaginatively and historically.

How does a writer, especially in nonfiction, have an impact on his readers? You are demanding of your readers that they think differently, that they think courageously about some of the important issues of our time.

Impact is very hard to assess. All you know about are reactions. I expected a lot of negative reactions to my critique of aspects of Irish nationalism. I got a fiercely negative set of reactions, of course, from sympathizers with Sinn Fein and the IRA, that is to say, people who are so nationalist that they were prepared to kill for nationalist objectives. But then I got a lot of other reactions from people who were interested in what I was saying. Lord Barnetson, then Chairman of The Observer, Lady Barnetson, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, with 'Valiant for Truth' media award (1979). These include a number of other writers who have agreed that they were in some ways influenced by me, in other ways fought off that influence. But there's quite an area in which there is a meeting of minds, first of all within nationalist Ireland, and then, as I became more and more associated with the politics of Northern Ireland, with Unionist people there with whom I'm closer now than I am to any Northern nationalists. So I am seeing different sides of contemporary Ireland. And it's not all positive, but it's not all negative, either. I don't feel I've been wasting my time.

In writing about Edmund Burke, you focus in on the factors that led him to write about the revolution. You make the point that he was against the French Revolution on rational, theoretical grounds from the beginning, because of his objection to radical social innovations. But he was emotionally involved in the debate of his contemporaries in England, who defended the Glorious Revolution and saw the French Revolution as comparable. This bothered Burke because of the anti-Catholicism that was embedded in the Glorious Revolution. So his reaction was not only theoretical, but also emotional. There was a rational basis but there was also an emotional basis to his argument. Is this also true of you as a writer? Can we apply the same analysis to you, that you are in a similar dilemma, torn between rationality and emotions about issues?

Yes. I would take that to be a constant in people who write at all about social and political issues. You have to think about the issues, but the feelings precede the thought, as it were, and then, of course, are qualified by the thought. There's a dialectic process going on the whole time. I'm very conscious about that. I'm not someone who could claim that I've been consistent in all things in all my life, but I think I have been consistent in trying to think things through and then qualify the thinking in the light of experience and moving along from there. I find this rewarding in many ways.

You characterize Burke as a prophet. His argument about the French Revolution anticipated events that were going to happen. What makes for prophetic writings when you are writing about the politics and passions of the times?

With Burke, first of all, most politicians of his time -- like most politicians of our own time -- more or less think off the top of their heads. He did an enormous amount of reading. He dug deep into it. His reading, for example, in Indian history and Indian politics when he was impeaching Warren Hastings, which went on for nearly twenty years -- the work is prodigious. He studied French affairs over a long period with equally close attention. In short, he was a man who always profoundly knew what he was talking about and that enabled him, quite often, to make predictions which seemed even crazy to his contemporaries. For example, he predicted the execution of the king and queen of France when nobody either in France or elsewhere was talking about that. He also predicted, nine years ahead of the event, the coming of military dictatorship to France, the forces that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. His critics, many at all times, have either played down or ignored all that and some of them give the impression that he was merely a rhetorical ranter who basically didn't know what he was talking about.

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