Flann O'Brien Part 1

Brian O’Nolan who wrote under many pen names, most famously as “Flann O’Brien” was born in County Tyrone in 1911. He was an intelligent and talented writer, who was influenced by the experimental fiction of James Joyce.  However unlike Joyce, he remained in Ireland, worked at a conventional career and did not become hostile to the Roman Catholic Church.  He was conservative in many respects.  However, he did dislike and satirise many aspects of post-Independence Ireland, particularly the hypocrisies of the “Gaelic Revival” which promoted the Irish language and Irish “peasant” culture.  The new state, desperate to show that “Ireland was different to and better than” England, tried to give the impression that Irish was still a spoken language, although relatively few people could speak the language and people left the impoverished Gaelic speaking areas as fast as they could, due to a lack of jobs and the terrible poverty.

O’Nolan attended University College Dublin, where he was a prominent member of the Literary and Historical Debating society and where he began his writing career.  In the 1930s he studied German and wrote his first stories. 

Due to family problems, he was left as the sole support of his mother and several siblings and took a job in the Irish Civil Service, which was steady and prestigious employment.  Becuase of his job, he was not supposed to write, without official permission, but he got round this by writing for newspapers and producing fiction under the many pseudonyms that he used.  One was “Myles Na gCopaleen” which he used for his newspaper column.

One of his funniest works was  “An Beal Bocht” or “the Poor Mouth”, which is a satire of the “Irish peasant novel” or autobiography, which tended to emphasize the poverty, hardship and miseries of people living in the west of Ireland.  O’Nolan wrote the parody initially in Irish, and it was translated into English.  He exaggerates all the misery and problems of the “true Irish people”, the smells, the pig in the house etc. etc.. and the book is extremely funny.