Page 154 - Gullivers

or since. O’Brien wrote under a series of pseudonyms and his collected works include novels, plays, extensive journalism, essays, epigrams and television scripts. He, like Edgeworth, Shaw and Joyce enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with Irish culture and with his compatriots.
He was born in Strabane in 1911 and was initially educated at home in
an Irish-speaking household, only attending school at the age of twelve when
his family relocated to Dublin. He remained throughout his life a passionate supporter of the Irish language and his M.A. from University College Dublin was a study and translation of Middle-Irish pœtry. On graduating in 1937 he began his career as a Civil Servant in the Department of ‘Yokel Government’,
as he called it. His working life was spent simultaneously writing a daily column for The Irish Times under the pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen. This ran for twenty five years, was hugely popular, enormously varied, topical and erudite
and osten very funny. No element of society escaped his criticism, his satirical
wit and invective. He continued the mock philosophical dialogue – the satirical debunking of maxims, to wonderful effect with his frequent epigrams on Marx and Engels, Keats and Chapman, adapting the Swistian method in a lighthearted fashion and following his predecessor’s penchant for word games and puns.
All of O’Brien’s writing is Swistian. He is Swist incarnate – Swist with a slightly more urbane, modernised consciousness. It is almost as if Swist himself were re- incarnated, equipped now with a full knowledge of Gælic culture, with the Irish language, and well acquainted with all the developments of modern life and the history of the intervening years.
Post-independence Ireland would seem to make redundant the motivations for hard hitting political satire but, for O’Brien, this was not the case as he astutely recognised that one set of determinants and controlling principles had merely replaced another. The Irish Free State and, later, the Irish Republic was, for O’Brien caught in the grip of a repressive fever of nationalistic piety to the extent that individual freedoms were again threatened. Cultural nationalism,
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