Oliver St John Gogarty poet, playwright and doctor Part I

 Oliver St John Gogarty was born in Dublin in 1878, to a well to do middle class family.  He was born at a time when the Irish Catholic Middle class was beginning to develop, to emerge after years of suppression, and become prosperous.  Some of the richer members of that class mingled with some of the Protestant middle and upper classes. However Dublin was still a very poor city, and in spite of nationalistic feelings, many of the Catholic business class had little interest in helping the poor....Oliver's father was a doctor who had a good deal of property and was well to do.  He was sent to Clongowes Wood school, run by the Jesuits, who provided education for the better off Catholics...Gogarty was highly intelligent but as a school boy, and a young man he tended to focus on sports and having a good time, more than on his studies.  He enjoyed football, cricket, and cycling and was a good swimmer... He went to Trinity College, to study medicine like his father. 

Oliver also began to develop an interest in politics and became a member of Arthur Griffiths' Sinn Fein party which promoted Irish nationalism and campaigned for self rule.  He was beginning to develop into the polymath he later became.  He had literary tastes and while studying medicine he began to write poetry and to mix with the literary salons of the capital. He enjoyed society as well as his work, and in mixing with poets like WB Yeats he became friends with the young James Joyce. 

He was popular at college and socially because of his lively wit and personality and a certain flamboyance.  

Oliver's friendship with Joyce ended when Joyce stayed with him and another student at the Martello Tower in Sandycove Dublin.  The other 2 engaged in horseplay with a loaded gun and Joyce left.  In his novel Ulysses, Joyce portrayed Gogarty as "stately plump Buck Mulligan" and Gogarty took it badly, he was by then a respectable and well known figure in society and in medicine (which warred with his love of fun and pranks and his more liberal side) and did not want to be associated with the scandalous book.