Family and early life O'Brien's father, Michael Vincent O'Nolan, was a pre-independence
United Kingdom civil service official in
HM Customs, a role that required frequent moves between cities and towns in England, Scotland and Ireland. Although of apparently trenchant
Irish republican views, because of his role and employment, he needed to be discreet about them. At the formation of the
Irish Free State in 1921, O'Nolan senior joined the Irish
Revenue Commissioners. O'Brien's mother, Agnes (), was also from an Irish nationalist family in
Strabane, and this largely nationalist and Catholic town formed somewhat of a base for the family during an otherwise peripatetic childhood. Brian was the third of 12 children; Gearóid, Ciarán, Roisin, Fergus, Kevin, Maeve, Nessa, Nuala, Sheila, Niall, and Micheál (in that period, known as the
Gaelic Revival, giving one’s children Gaelic names was somewhat of a political statement.) Though relatively well-off and upwardly mobile, the O'Nolan children were home-schooled for part of their childhood using a correspondence course created by his father, who would send it to them from wherever his work took him. It was not until his father was permanently assigned to
Dublin that Brian and his siblings regularly attended school.
School days O'Brien attended
Synge Street Christian Brothers School, Dublin of which his novel
The Hard Life contains a semi-autobiographical depiction. The
Christian Brothers in Ireland had a reputation for excessive, prolific and unnecessary use of violence and
corporal punishment, which sometimes inflicted lifelong psychological trauma upon their pupils.
Blackrock College, however, where O'Brien's education continued, was run by the
Holy Ghost Fathers, who were considered more intellectual and less likely to use corporal punishment against their students. Blackrock was, and remains, a very prominent school, having educated many of the leaders of post-independence Ireland, including presidents, taoisigh (prime ministers), government ministers, businessmen and the elite of "
Official Ireland" and their children. O'Brien was taught English by the President of the College, and future Archbishop,
John Charles McQuaid. According to Farragher and Wyer: Dr McQuaid himself was recognised as an outstanding English teacher, and when one of his students, Brian O'Nolan, alias Myles na gCopaleen, boasted in his absence to the rest of the class that there were only two people in the College who could write English properly, namely, Dr McQuaid and himself, they had no hesitation in agreeing. And Dr McQuaid did Myles the honour of publishing a little verse by him in the first issue of the revived College Annual (1930)—this being Myles' first published item. The poem itself, "Ad Astra", read as follows: Ah! When the skies at night Are damascened with gold, Methinks the endless sight Eternity unrolled.
Civil service A key feature of O'Brien's personal situation was his status as an Irish civil servant, who, as a result of his father's relatively early death in July 1937, was for a decade obliged to partially support his mother and ten siblings, including an elder brother who was then an unsuccessful writer (there would likely have been some pension for his mother and minor siblings resulting from his father's service); however, other siblings enjoyed considerable professional success. One, Kevin (also known as Caoimhín Ó Nualláin), was a Professor of Ancient Classics at University College, Dublin; yet another, Micheál Ó Nualláin was a noted artist; another, Ciarán Ó Nualláin, was a writer, novelist, publisher and journalist. Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy. The
Irish Civil Service has been, since the
Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical. Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views. As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis. This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings. O'Brien rose to be quite senior, serving as private secretary to
Seán T. O'Kelly (a minister and later President of Ireland) and
Seán MacEntee, a powerful political figure, both of whom almost certainly knew or guessed O'Brien was na gCopaleen. Civil servants selected to be a minister’s private secretary are usually considered to be potential “high flyers.” Though O'Brien's writing frequently mocked the civil service, he was for much of his career relatively important and highly regarded and was trusted with delicate tasks and policies, such as running (as "secretary") the public inquiry into the
Cavan Orphanage Fire of 1943 and planning of a proposed Irish National Health Service imitating
the UK's, under the auspices of his department—planning he duly mocked in his pseudonymous column. In reality, that Brian O'Nolan was Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen was an
open secret, largely disregarded by his colleagues, who found his writing very entertaining; this was a function of the makeup of the civil service, which recruited leading graduates by competitive examination. It was an erudite and relatively liberal body in the Ireland of the 1930s to the 1970s. Nonetheless, had O'Nolan forced the issue, by using one of his known pseudonyms or his own name for an article that seriously upset politicians, consequences would likely have followed—contributing to the acute pseudonym problem in attributing his work today. A combination of his gradually deepening
alcoholism, legendarily outrageous behaviour when, frequently, inebriated, and his habit of making derogatory and increasingly reckless remarks about senior politicians in his newspaper columns led to his forced retirement from the civil service in 1953 after enraging a minister who realised he was the unnamed target whose intellect was ridiculed in several columns. One column described the politician's reaction to any question requiring even a trace of intellectual effort as "[t]he great jaw would drop, the ruined graveyard of tombstone teeth would be revealed, the eyes would roll, and the malt eroded voice would say 'Hah?'" (He departed, recalled a colleague, "in a final fanfare of fucks".)
Personal life Although O'Brien was a well-known character in Dublin during his lifetime, relatively little is known about his personal life. He joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, working in the Department of Local Government. For a decade or so after his father's death in 1937, he helped support his brothers and sisters, eleven in total, on his income. The couple had no children. Evelyn died on 18 April 1995.
Health and death , Dublin O'Brien was an
alcoholic for much of his life and suffered from ill health in his later years. He was afflicted with
cancer of the throat and died from a
heart attack on the morning of 1 April 1966. In a piece published a few months before his death, he also reported a secondary cancer diagnosis and hospitalisations due to uraemia (a sign of liver failure) and pleurisy: in typical good-humour O'Brien attributed this declining health to "St Augustine's vengeance" over his treatment in
The Dalkey Archive. ==Journalism and other writings==