One of the saddest sentences I have read in a long time is this: "I am glad to be an ally of Paisley's in the defence of the Union." It appeared in the latest Sunday Independent.
It was written by the most distinguished Irish intellectual of his generation, Conor Cruise O'Brien. It was written about the most destructive Irish politician of his generation, Ian Paisley. And it was perhaps the sorriest evidence in recent times of the way the Northern Ireland conflict has distorted intellectual life in Ireland.
Although it was intended to encourage a No vote in the Belfast Agreement referendums, it actually provided a powerful argument for voting Yes. One of the many advantages of peace might be that the thin stream of independent thought in Irish politics will no longer be diverted into such aridity.
Conor Cruise O'Brien is, of course, a member of the UK Unionist Party which, along with Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, the Loyalist Volunteer Force and the Continuity IRA, is dedicated to the destruction of the agreement. It is a tribute to his immense talents that there is only one polemicist who could do full justice to the grotesque nature of his proud alliance with Paisley: Conor Cruise O'Brien himself.
It would be absurd to suggest that any individual is responsible for the North's horrors over the last 30 years. But Paisley is certainly in the front rank of those who have done most to pollute the political atmosphere.
He pushed the relatively liberal unionist prime minister, Terence O'Neill, from office, destroying any hope of modernisation in Northern Ireland. He fought tooth and nail the establishment of the Housing Executive, one of the few institutions created since the Troubles started that actually worked.
He helped to destroy the agreement negotiated at Sunningdale by, among others, Conor Cruise O'Brien. He has been, at every juncture, a self-fulfilling prophet of doom whose stock in trade is to predict disaster, do his best to bring it about, and then, when it comes, proclaim his own Godgiven foresight.
But his new apologist, Conor Cruise O'Brien, claims to the Big Man's credit that Paisley "has no present paramilitary ties". The word "present" is eloquent, though its implied absolution for past deeds is not one that Dr O'Brien has been notably inclined to grant to others.
What's sad, though, is that it was Conor Cruise O'Brien himself who forced those of us who grew up in the culture of Irish nationalism to see the connection between violent rhetoric and violent action. His great service to modern Irish politics was his forceful demonstration that, in a divided society, there is no such thing as harmless indulgence in tribal bombast. Yet who but Paisley has been the foremost master of the kind of rhetoric that stops short of explicit threat but is laced with implicit menace? His style can be exemplified by one incident from many that could be cited.
In 1986, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, when loyalists were burning the homes of RUC members, he was carried out of Stormont by four policemen. When they put him down, he shouted at them, in front of the television cameras: "Don't come crying to me the next time your houses are attacked. You'll reap what you sow."
It is just about possible to believe that Paisley did not intend this a threat. It is entirely impossible to believe that a man who, as Conor Cruise O'Brien told us last Sunday, "can see where a given utterance, however guarded, is tending, and calculate reactions accordingly", would not know what his admirers among the hard men watching on television might make of it.
And while we're on the subject of where utterances might be tending, what does Conor Cruise O'Brien think the average follower of Billy Wright in Portadown might have made of Paisley's statement during the Drumcree stand-off in 1995 that the confrontation was "a matter of life or death"?
What does he think the LVF made of Paisley's call last September when the peace talks were under way for unionists to "do what their fathers did and resist to the death this vilest of treacheries"? Does he really believe that what he calls Paisley's "remarkable capacity for almost instant astute analysis" would have convinced him that such words would be heard as encouragements to peaceful and democratic politics?
Conor Cruise O'Brien was, in his time, subjected to more abuse than any other politician in the Republic. But his reputation has never been so woundingly insulted by anyone as it was by himself last Sunday.
Such is his desire to defend his new friend from charges of bigotry he actually equated his own long-standing criticism of the Catholic Church with Paisley's lurid fulminations: "I personally cannot throw any stones at Mr Paisley for his occasional anti-Papal references. I have done worse in that line than make occasional - comparatively genial - references to Old Red Sox."
It was Conor Cruise O'Brien who memorably remarked that if religion is a red herring in the Northern Ireland conflict, it is a herring the size of a whale. He might have added that Paisley is Moby Dick, looming largest in the mad fusion of religion and politics O'Brien used to regard with keen-eyed suspicion.
But now, apparently, anti-sectarianism is to him the same as sectarianism. To criticise the Pope for being obscurantist in his teaching on contraception is to be engaged in the same kind of activity as Paisley's denunciation of the Queen Mother for visiting the Pope and "committing spiritual fornication and adultery with the anti-Christ".
Opposing the Pope's intolerance towards homosexuals is somehow siding with the man who campaigns to "save Ulster from sodomy". Those who campaigned against the separation of church and state are somehow on the same level as the great practitioner of theological politics.
How comforting it must be to the ghost of the late Bishop of Limerick, Jeremiah Newman, to know that his old antagonist now sees no difference between liberal critiques of conservative Catholicism and Paisley's bigoted thunderings. How pleasant it must be for the sneaking regarders of violent Irish nationalism to know their greatest adversary is now himself in the business of making excuses for ethno-religious warriors.
Yet how sad it is that one of the bravest thinkers of our times has been trapped in the mad logic of "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
And how poignant that a man who should be honoured for breaking the intellectual ground in which the possibilities of lasting peace have taken root asks instead that we should remember him marching arm-in-arm with a foolish old reactionary into a swamp of decaying obscurities.
Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York.
