The sage of reason In the context of Ireland, Conor Cruise O'Brien has always deplored any romantic view

No. ''So, you're going to see the Cruiser,'' said a friend before our meeting. ''Well, no better man

for the contrary viewpoint. Mad

but sound.''

Mad but sound, the ultimate contradiction. Over decades O'Brien's judgments and predictions have exasperated many of his fellow Irish, but the sheer tenacity of his opinions, his fearlessness in taking unpopular stands, and the eloquent clarity of his scholarship, have always commanded respect. Thinker, writer, diplomat, politician . . . these are his distinctions. And, on one point, there can be no contradiction: at 82, O'Brien has no intention of pursuing the ordinary life.

Even he acknowledges that

people on both sides of the Border must have considered his decision, two years ago, to join Robert McCartney's UK Unionist Party in the North as a weird development for someone of Catholic origin living in Dublin. ''The play in the press down here was less hostile than I might have expected,'' he says, as we settle ourselves on sun lounge furniture, our backs to the gloomy sea. ''But really these things affect you mainly in how they go down with those you live among immediately.'' O'Brien and Maura, his wife, reside at the summit of Howth overlooking the full sweep of Dublin Bay, and on the day of his remarkable announcement he went, as he often does, for a long, blustery walk on the Hill, which was the courting ground of Joyce's Leopold and Molly Bloom.

''I expected I might possibly get some nasty reaction and there may have been those who felt like that, but they didn't make themselves known. However, about 20 people came up to me at different points in the walk, and rather less than half told me that they thought I was doing the right thing, and to keep it up. The larger section said: 'Well, we don't agree with you but we know you believe in what you're doing and we wish you luck'.''

Peace process, or no peace process, O'Brien doesn't intend to waver in his long, outright condemnation of the IRA. As a Labour Minister in Ireland's coalition government of the mid-seventies, he was the one responsible for the broadcasting ban on anyone linked to paramilitaries, a ban which saw him branded by the IRA as ''Britain's official mouthpiece in Ireland and abroad''. But jibes have never deeply worried him. O'Brien saw it as his clear duty to warn that terrorism was taking the country perilously close to civil war, and he insists that possibility remains because he doesn't buy the line that the IRA has changed its ideology. ''If it has, let it decommission. The IRA is an army. It regards itself as such, has never dissolved, and has never accepted any form of decommissioning although

it has authorised Sinn Fein to pay lip service to it.''

This uncompromising stance, now obviously regarded by both the British and Irish governments as unhelpful, has made O'Brien something of an exile but one who chooses not to forego the country of his birth. Yet, given his sense of kinship with McCartney's brand of Unionism, might not he feel more at home in the North? A pretence at outrage crosses his face: ''This is where I belong, not there. I have a lot of friends in the North. My first wife's family were from there. They were part of the nationalist-leaning element in the Presbyterian community, but although they were liberal I never met a single Catholic during the entire time I was in their house.'' O'Brien was working then as a teacher at Belfast Royal Academy where his father-in-law was the headmaster. Not long after, he was back in the South, involved in an Irish government mission to encourage nationalists to seek a better understanding

with Unionists, but on his travels across the Border in that capacity he was never introduced to any Protestants at all, and he shakes with laughter at the recollection.

''Those two communities know basically very little about one another although quite a lot on both sides share a vague goodwill. But the ways in which they express that goodwill often strike the other as bizarre, if not downright hostile.'' And again he chuckles.

In his day O'Brien, the scourge and sage, was regarded by many as our nearest equivalent to Jonathan Swift, and indeed it's difficult to think of anyone who rivals him for what he calls ''the detested aggression of irony'', or the powerful craft of his argumentative prose. As a

thematic biography, his study of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody has never been equalled, but more recently books like On The Eve of the Millennium have revealed a darkening vision. Would he call himself a pessimist? ''I'd say I'm a pessimist intellectually, but an optimist emotionally.'' Another contradiction, another chuckle. ''Well, as Burke believed, I think wars are a part of being human, so if you believe that you have to be a bit pessimistic. But you can be optimistic about many people and the things that are close to you. The main point is that human nature is immensely various, and very disconcerting, with on the whole more decency in it than not. The problem is the decency tends to be inert while a lot of the other stuff - ambition, hostility, greed - is highly active.''

O'Brien first came to international attention during the Congo crisis in 1960 when he was the UN's special representative in Katanga. But within six months his diplomatic career was in ruins. In the British press he was vilified as the man who allowed ''all hell to break loose'' because his attempts to force the surrender of the secessionist Moshe Tschombe had failed. So, civil war erupted, and at one stage Tschombe was spirited away by the British for a meeting in Rhodesia with Dag Hammerskjold, the UN Secretary-General. O'Brien stayed behind to be battered by flak from all quarters, but in retrospect that was the better fate. Hammerskjold's plane crashed, and O'Brien is convinced he died because of sabotage.

Years later he would experience a similarly eery escape when at short notice he had to cancel a speaking engagement in Northern New Hampshire. O'Brien asked the distinguished historian, Peter Netl, to take his place. ''He agreed very graciously and caught the appropriate flight but that plane also crashed in the mountains and Netl was killed.''

six months later, O'Brien, still very troubled by the tragedy, caught the same flight to fulfil the appointment, and found himself sitting next to the great philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. ''I don't think he would have been aware of my discomfort - I certainly didn't voice it. He was utterly calm and he talked, my God how he talked, for two solid hours. He spoke, without interruption, about Russia as it was before the First World War. He recreated the whole splendid, complex picture, getting you to see the people, the things, the issues. I completely forgot I was in a plane. Berlin really was a wonder, and I liked him enormously.''

Decades later they would meet again at the American Embassy in Dublin where Jean Kennedy Smith gave a dinner in Berlin's honour. ''She, of course, is very pro-Sinn Fein and would never have initiated my presence in her house, but clearly she had asked Berlin whom he would like to meet, and so we were there. As it happened, most of the conversation was between us, to the chagrin of some of the others.'' O'Brien whoops in merriment at the memory. But the trauma of his Congo period has no doubt shaped his perspective on paramilitarism although, in the context of Ireland, he has always deplored any romantic view of nationalism.

For him now his main objections to the Good Friday Agreement revolve around the decommissioning issue, prisoner releases, and RUC reform which, he says, will destroy the force's morale and cripple it. Thus, as the Assembly election on June 25 draws closer, O'Brien maintains a significant number of referendum Yes voters will slide away from David Trimble's official Unionists and into the ranks of the McCartney/Paisley Unionist alliance.

''Before he got his Yes vote Trimble gave the impression that Sinn Fein would not be seated unless decommissioning was happening. There was that letter from Blair which seemed to confirm this, but as the weeks go by that undertaking will be seen to be dishonoured. The official Unionists know this and, I think, they have very cold feet on the subject.''

So, where will

that leave Trimble? ''I'm not too worried about him and his emotions. I'm concerned about Sinn Fein being included in the Assembly while the IRA still has all its weapons. That's where Trimble is headed while pretending, or perhaps falsely believing, he had prevented it.''

Surely O'Brien must acknowledge that decommissioning, in such conflicts, never occurs before political settlements are up and running. ''Well, yes, it is possible to maintain that argument, but only if that has been the official Unionist line all along. As it hasn't, Trimble is in trouble.'' And what of O'Brien and Ian Paisley? Theoretically they're now in the same camp, but the idea of any empathy between them seems incredible. Yet two years ago, when O'Brien went back to the peace talks table after recovering from a stroke, it was Paisley who rose and proposed a vote to celebrate his return. ''I expected some sectarian chill when I joined the UK Unionists, but even then Paisley was extremely cordial towards me. Now, whenever we meet, we have a kind of jokey relationship over Roman Catholicism. The jokes, though, are rather poor, not very remarkable as jokes go.''

O'Brien's attitude to Catholicism has, of course, always been fractious. ''I'm not a Catholic although I was baptised one, made my first communion, and was confirmed, which means that in the Church's terms I'm a Catholic whether I like it or not. But my wife, as a practising Catholic, has different feelings about it although she completely respects my position.'' So, no priest was called when he suffered his stroke? ''No. There was a time when I hated and feared Catholicism in Ireland, but Catholicism has changed a bit and so have I and, even though I don't like the Pope, I no longer feel a collective bitterness towards Catholic people.''

Recovering from that stroke, however, convinced him not to postpone his memoirs any longer. My Life and Themes is now complete but for one chapter on Northern Ireland which O'Brien will finish after the Assembly election. But inadvertently the book, to be published in December, now encompasses ''the most terrible journey'' O'Brien has ever endured, the death two months ago of his second daughter, Kate.

''It was terribly sudden and I'm only kind of half beginning to recover from the shock of it.'' For the first time in the interview he hesitates over his words. ''She was the editor of Poolbeg Press, a small but successful publishing outfit here, and she was publishing my memoirs. As I had nearly finished them we agreed to meet for lunch which would have been a discussion and a bit of a celebration.'' It was something O'Brien was looking forward to tremendously and, when he arrived at Kate's Dublin house, her son opened the door. ''She was stretched out on the floor and had just had a stroke from which she never recovered. She lived only 24 hours after that,

so that naturally that was the

worst trip ever for me.'' On the mantelpiece there is a recent photograph of Kate, her strong, handsome face framed with thick, wavy hair, her gaze steady and penetrating. ''It's a nice one, very characteristic of her,'' says her father. ''Sceptic and shrewd.''

Eavan Boland, one of Ireland's most respected contemporary poets, has said of O'Brien: ''He has sought no allies, entered no agreements . . . refusing any assistance in this making of his own view of the Irish nation . . .'' Few doubt that a mighty intellect burns there, but many will question its wisdom for it seems to have isolated him from the great tidal shifts now reshaping his country's outlook. It may be, of course, that ageless divilment is as integral to Conor Cruise O'Brien as anything else. As yer man says, human nature is very disconcerting.