Conor Cruise O'Brien (3 November 1917-18 December 2008) was an Irish Labor Party TD from 18 June 1969 to 16 June 1977 and a Senator from 1977 to 1979. O'Brien also served as a United Nations representative at the time of the Congo Crisis in 1961, and he was known for his involvement with Operation Morthor and the Siege of Jadotville.
Biography[]
Conor Cruise O'Brien was born in Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland on 3 November 1917, coming from a family that was involved with Irish politics for years. O'Brien would receive a Presbyterian education before entering politics as a member of the Department of External Affairs, opposing the partition of Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1961, United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold made O'Brien his personal representative in Katanga at the time of the Congo Crisis, and he was forced to step down from the UN and the Irish diplomatic service in response to the massacre of 30 unarmed Katangese civilians at the Radio Katanga building in Elisabethville during Operation Morthor. O'Brien was also infamous for ignoring the plight of the ONUC peacekeeper defenders of Jadotville, claiming that all of his troops were needed for Operation Morthor. In 1969, he was elected to the Dail Eireann as a member of the Irish Labor Party, and he served as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1973 to 1977; in this post, he combatted militant Irish republicanism by banning Sinn Fein and Provisional IRA spokespeople from RTE and supporting Garda Siochana brutality. From 1977 to 1979, he served as a senator, and he also worked for The Observer newspaper in Britain and supported the UK Unionist Party and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He died in 2008 at the age of 91.