Cats and Dogs

By Sean Callery

STATES OF IRELAND by CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN 336 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

Conor Cruise O'Brien continues to inform and dismay. He is an Irishman of Catholic ancestry and sympathies, whose family circle included agnostics, anticlericals and persons whom an old-fashioned liberal would call "emancipated." An exotic heritage, by Irish standards anyway, which perhaps accounts for his penchant for exposing outwardly altruistic policies that are, in his view, really selfish, cynical and exploitative.

O'Brien was an Irish delegate to the United Nations and served the U.N. in the Congo. His book To Katanga and Back and his play Murderous Angels were indictments of the role of the U.S. and Europe in the Congo war. O'Brien portrayed Dag Hammarskjold as a man who believed God had chosen him to bring peace to Africa. But the U.N.

Congo operation, as O'Brien sees it, was an extension of colonialism and racism, intended to deny black Africans real control over their country.

Anti-imperialism is also the dominant theme of States of Ireland. O'Brien is unequivocal in identifying the Catholics of Northern Ireland as the chief victims of a system of repressive domination by Ulster Protestants, protected and supported by Britain, though he does not neglect the sufferings of working-class Protestants who have been seduced into playing a role much like that of racist poor whites in the U.S. South. No one can understand Ireland without knowing something of her history, O'Brien concedes, and he begins his study in 1920 with the establishment of the Free State. However, he is critical of those who vainly try to right past wrongs rather than seek to create a viable community--based upon today's realities--in which Protestants and Catholics can somehow contrive to live together.

Such realities include a Protestant majority in the North unwilling to accept citizenship in a united Ireland dominated by a large Catholic majority. To force them all into a single state, O'Brien argues, would be an act of imperialism equivalent to the one committed by Britain when she ruthlessly incorporated the Irish into the United Kingdom in the first place.

O'Brien's book is important partly because it re-establishes priorities that have been lost during the bloodshed: the need for peace and liberty for Northern Ireland's Catholics without necessarily creating a single Irish state in the immediate future. What Northern Catholics still want, says O'Brien, is equality in their own state. Among those benefits they would not enjoy in a unified Ireland he cites the National Health Scheme and an elaborate system of welfare available to Northern Catholics as British subjects, both nonexistent or inferior in the Irish Republic.

The continued violence of militant Ulster Protestants and the I.R.A.,

O'Brien feels, may ultimately create further polarization and result in two fascist, sectarian and actively hostile states. O'Brien's fear may not be as ill-justified as some observers might think.

Many basic civil rights have long been denied Catholics in Northern Ireland and until a few years ago a Protestant paramilitary force, the B Specials, policed the Catholic ghetto there. The Catholic South, on the other hand, has for years maintained one of the most repressive censorships in Western Europe.

Reacting to I.R.A. pressure, it has just recently reinvoked legislation permit ting imprisonment of citizens who are merely suspected of terrorist activities.

O'Brien has muted his celebrated in flammatory style in this book, perhaps in deference to the gravity of the problems discussed. He does point out, how ever, that traveling from Northern Ire land to the South is like leaving a kingdom of dogs, gruff and demonstrative, and entering the cat kingdom of the sly, unpredictable Southern Irish.

States of Ireland is essentially a plea -- despite all that has happened -- for the beginnings of reconciliation of the two communities, to be initiated by native moderates and encouraged by Dub lin and Westminster. Perhaps a wan hope. Britain has yet to acknowledge any debt to the people of Ireland for the past. But if it moved industry to the areas of highest unemployment and insisted that Northern Catholics get a fair share of the jobs, the atmosphere might improve dramatically. Reconciliation, at any rate, is probably Ire land's best hope of obtaining equality for the oppressed Catholics of the North -- and perhaps of averting a full-scale sectarian civil war.

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