Toby and Oisín, Flann O’Brien’s nephew, explore the writer as a paternal figure, an accomplished joiner and member of a formidable Northern family: voracious intellectuals, inventors and eccentric or ‘ex-centros’ builders of the Irish republic.
[00:00:00]
Toby: Welcome to another episode of Radio Myles. A podcast designed to intrigue, entertain, and perhaps, hopefully, change your perspective on the figure known mostly as Flann O’Brien or Myles na gCopaleen, but is also known as Brian Ó Nualláin.
Thank you to Birkbeck College for supporting, and today I am very excited, indeed, to be joined by Oisín, Brian O’Nolan’s nephew, : English and History teacher, a literary tour guide, and a self described madman / builder, and also a writer in his own right working on a book about his time teaching in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.. last year in Boston, Oisín and Deirdre Lamont performed “Slí na gCopaleen, Gortahork, Here We Come” at the sixth conference of the Flann O’Brien Society. I wasn’t there, but I am informed that the talk involved smells in An Béal Bocht, the place of Gortahork and the role of vendettas in Flann O’Brien’s writing.
And something to do with Irish Gonzo. Oisín, it’s an honor to have you on the podcast. Welcome. And I guess I should stress that we are here to have what is much more of a personal reflection on at least what you know of your uncle and of course your dad. It’s not necessarily an academic conversation, but I just want to check.
Did I get that intro right? Is there anything that I’m wrong about that you would immediately correct me on?
Oisín: No, not at all. Not at all. From the anarchic talk to my description it’s quite apt.
Toby: I missed. No, I did. I did miss something. Sorry, I’ve not prepared my notes properly as well as all of these things you’re a former boxer and boxing coach as well, right?
Oisín: Yeah, I am. I’m not down in the club at the moment, so I’m more like a sumo wrestler than a boxer now at the moment. What can you [00:02:00] do?
Toby: Yeah, thanks for being here and joining me. I think this is quite a, going to be quite a significant conversation just to, put some stuff on record in some ways of speaking with with a family, as a, and we’ll talk about what kind of, literary figure he was but There’s not so much of that, right? For when we think about Brian, there’s not so much of this: records of the estate and the family talking.
I’m gonna start in an odd way around. for the benefit of our listeners and ask you to give me a little portrait of your uncle first rather than your dad. I appreciate that’s not necessarily the best way around for you personally, but no.
The plan of Brian podcast will start with your uncle. And then of course talk a bit more about your dad and how about link works. But yeah, so you obviously have a I guess you, you didn’t know the man directly, but you have a very direct link through your father who was himself, as we’ll come to, a major cultural figure in Ireland of 20th century, a painter, cartoonist, civil servant, self taught scientist.
But first, can you talk about Brian O’Nolan or Brian Ó Nualláin as your uncle?
Oisín: The first thing to state just to be clear people is I was born in 1978. So he already deceased much earlier. So I suppose, for me, it’s like almost two strains or two different people, two sides of a coin.
So on the one hand, it’s the personal, in terms of the stories my dad would say at a personal level, which didn’t, which weren’t obviously involving his writing. It could have been talking about during the Emergency when my dad was very young, Brian would show him to grow vegetables in the back garden.
The Emergency in Ireland is, by the way, when we just painted our windows and we didn’t have as much money and the rest of Europe was at war. So it was a bit more sedate in Ireland, but just strange stories about, him doing DIY with Brian and stuff like that. Very personal. My dad could get emotional when he talked about him. That connection is quite strange because he’s seen as a sort of bizarre figure in Dublin that’s [00:04:00] almost not a human, with real emotions and that. My granddad would have been extremely busy in Dublin Castle and travelling for work and away a lot of the time, and when my dad was only, about nine years old, he had a heart attack, and all of a sudden, he was gone, athair, and that’s Irish for a father, was missing, and it was Brian who drove my dad, and his sibling the youngest in the family, Niall, in a car and brought them for a drive and explained that he wouldn’t be coming back. He took on the role of his father, really. So in some ways, I see him as my uncle in a familial way, but also as my grandfather. And my grandfather would seem like almost like a great grandfather. Because don’t forget my dad’s 20 years older than my mother.
He lived till nearly 90, despite what he tried to do to himself. It, it’s it’s so far back. The dates, I remember when I was talking about my dad’s family at his funeral and stuff, I was trying to explain to people, my father was born before the Wall Street crash.
My uncle was born before World War I. The span of time is different on a personal level, but I also had, in terms of my uncle, I remember like just being a little child and helping clearing out his house. And we used to go up to Evelyn, who was his wife. I used to be brought up there on a regular basis.
So I would have been around his house and seen his books and knowing that this uncle used to write and going around his room and looking at old manuscripts. And, the house they had up in Stillorgan. It would have been very much there, yeah, and very conscious of it. And then the other side would have been turning up to events, my dad doing interviews at a very young age, on knowing that there was things on television that they were talking about my uncle.
When I was very young, you’re coming and saying, Oh, who is this guy? And then of course, I started reading bigger books quite early. That my dad would have had me, reading probably ahead of, by the time I was in doing my final years in school and stuff – I studied literature and history in college -I had read years ago, a lot of the, a lot of the books and stuff like [00:06:00] that. When I started reading him then. Which would have been probably starting around 12, 13 and through my teens reading him then was really interesting because you could detach a little bit. But the humor at the same time, I really got that Ó Nualláin family because I knew the madness of them. And I, I knew the way they operate and the way they speak. So the voice had a kind of, on one stage personal, but then all that bizarre stuff like my dad would be talking about the old ancient books, the Irish books and stuff like in the fantastical stories, so I could see what was interwoven into it, you could see the influences. At the same time I would have been brought up to Strabane, good few times and up to Omagh and I would have seen the relatives there and would have been brought to the house, absorbing the way they’d speak up there and that as well. There was the writer and then there was the personal, and they overlapped a little bit, but it certainly felt like two, two single people and one is like my grandfather, if that makes sense.
Toby: It will probably seem remarkable that I’m here talking to Flann O’Brien’s biological nephew. As you said, the span of time is just crazy, it’s such a you have you’re almost like a one generational link to someone who was born so long ago.
Oisín: I remember talking to my maternal grandmother and she only passed away there two years ago, but she lived till over 105. She was in her 106th year. I was always comfortable talking to older people because I’d be sitting down with my dad and he would have been the age of other people’s grandfathers.So I was at ease talking and, the familiarities of someone talking as if it was yesterday about 1950s or 60s politics and and things that happened and, a different outlook perhaps. So studying history was quite natural because I knew all the characters involved. They had been kind of nation builders. So I suppose me studying history was maybe a lazy, easy degree for me to pick up, because especially the Irish history was very vivid, very tangible. Since I was the age of four [00:08:00] or five, I was being lectured for hours on different political and literary figures and mad discussions that you shouldn’t be saying to a five year old. I was going to the theater. Because they owed, actually, I think they owed money to my dad for the Brendan Behan portrait.
He did a full life size portrait of Brendan Behan, which hangs in the National Theatre now, and they owed us money. We had free tickets for years, because they couldn’t really pay it. I used to be going from the age of five or six, with all the adults. Now, I’ve been picking up, it’s some pieces of it, but really what I realized now is I was absorbing things all the time.
Toby: Makes a lot of sense. So before we go any further Let’s let’s talk about your dad, right? The guy who is the link that you have. So most listeners to this podcast probably haven’t even really thought about this. I know O’Nolan researchers know a bit more about it but take us through who this guy was, because, he’s, as I said, like he’s quite a major influence in his own right and did a lot of stuff that you’re probably very proud of.
Oisín: Yeah, he’s certainly not as big a figure in terms of world renown or anything like that, but he would certainly be a figure that not only from his art, but education policy and changing the education system in political discourse and taking on the government, sometimes in very bizarre ways, whether it was in court or challenging them or, making fools of them, basically.
He was a very interesting One of a kind and you wouldn’t forget if you met him once you probably remember. Now some people might say. He could have been mad that day. He could have been grumpy. That’s not what you probably wouldn’t forget. So he’s a very colorful, highly intelligent articulate man. He spoke eight or nine languages and he was they all seem to have within the family, not just my father, like an encyclopedic knowledge Like, ridiculous, bizarre knowledge on areas that you’re there, how do they know that? We know there wasn’t much television around, there was no playstations and all that sort of stuff, but a vivacious reader, so he’d be reading constantly, he’d be reading three or four books at a time. He’d be putting down patents for scientific inventions, he’d be, [00:10:00] one of the heads of the department of education, he’d be writing speeches for the minister for education at the time.
He’d be producing art, he’d be in the pub, I think he slept, he was like Margaret Thatcher, he’d sleep about two hours a night, so it was just life lived at full speed and everything had to be challenged. So he was born in 1928. He didn’t really start formal education until nine or ten, he would have been speaking in Irish primarily, that was their language. He would have been sneakily learning English, off close friends and people around. By the age of nine or ten, he would have had a very good grasp on French. He would have been reading Latin. He would have been taking on some Spanish. And by the time he goes to school, he only goes to a convent primary school for two or three years. But he’s already way ahead. And then his father had passed away. He went to Blackrock College. The Holy Ghost Fathers in Blackrock College, which is a prodigious private school in Blackrock here, close to where I’m sitting. They actually agreed for the last two brothers to be given the free education because they knew the family and they knew the circumstances. So he later thanked them with a big portrait and he donated to the college and everything like that. So he had a good relationship. He got to thank them formally, and they celebrated him, as well, but I suppose he would have traveled. He was a freelancer. He went to the Irish College of Art and Design. He got a scholarship very early on, and then he came out of art college and he was living in a bedsit in a bohemian sort of lifestyle. He floated around many countries in Europe, getting in a lot of trouble most of the time. I think he was arrested in most jurisdictions that he arrived in for different reasons.
And he developed his languages and he was learning. He was unbelievable with language. I could remember he was 80 and he was determined to learn Basque, and he got the old. Lingophone, this old archaic lingophone thing, and he was listening on his Bang & Olufsen record player, because he loved classical music, so he had a nice system, but he used to, and he was listening to this Basque, repeating it, and then you’d hear him go, [00:12:00] fuck’s sake, he was cursing then. And then he was going over to Bilbao, because he knew Basque people over in Bilbao who had fled from Franco, their family, and they were actually connected to ETA, that family, half of them were locked up, but he was going over to meet the other 85 year old that he’d been in school with who was Basque and to practice his Basque. And they spoke in Irish because the Basque guy actually spoke Irish, fluent Irish.
Wow. And yeah, he, his father actually used to carry around Dublin, the Basque father used to go around Dublin and used to carry a skull of the founder of ETA, of Basque separatism. And he had died during the Franco era and he used to carry the skull around Dublin. But they were settled in an Irish speaking area in Meath.
And my dad’s family then hooked up with them in the school. But he, in the end, it was the only language that eluded him that he tried to learn. So he said he said the Basque tried to learn, or sorry, the devil tried to learn Basque and he gave up. That was my dad’s excuse anyway, that was his excuse.
But he’d be he had to, he was juggling things, like Brian, and a lot of his family that did a lot of many things and did other things, he was, which probably his art would have suffered a little bit, because I suppose his most prolific period would have been, the 40s and the 50s when he was traveling, when he, was going around with easels, jumping on trains, and obviously then, he did come back and get a teaching role where he met my mother in the West of Ireland and then he came to the Department of Education.
But I suppose that gave him a lot more time because I think he was able to just drift off to the pub like his brother and work in the civil service and be quite competent, but not spend as many hours there, if so he was, but he would have had quite big in terms of his art, it would have been, he would have been probably most famous for his portraiture.
And there would have been several figures like Siobhan McKenna, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh the list goes on. A lot of actors and writers of that period of the 1950s, 1960s Ireland. He would have been a cartoonist for six decades, which is quite astounding. He was published in [00:14:00] all of the papers for over 60 years.
I think something like 65 years. And he also had like poster art installations and a lot of different things. So he’s represented in the National Gallery, he’s represented in, the National Theatre, National Concert Hall, institutions all over Ireland and across Europe, Canada, North America. So he was certainly an interesting and he would have engaged politically in a kind of combative way.
With things that he would have thought were stupid decisions or a lack of forecast and he would have been a very anticlerical. He would have taken on the Catholic Church and their role in Ireland. He would have seen as a fairly nefarious. But he would have been ahead of his time in the attacks that he did.
He would have been ahead in his time and that’s why he couldn’t use his own name for his cartoons because he would have lost his job. So that’s why he had to use the Kilroy. So I was like, yeah, so it’s not a rough picture, but on a personal level, he’d be extremely engaging, could be bombastic. Everything had to be discussed.
So any book he had or was reading at the time had to be. And talk through and yeah, and the pub was no better place to do it. I suppose it’s a bit tough,
but whatever the audience was, whoever was there in the pub would be, yeah. And didn’t take any prisoners. It was just full on, so it was, there had to be taken on board, discussed.
But. Just a vast, I can’t think, I think it’s Wordsworth, but it’s like when I was looking at him and his brothers and stuff, there was definitely a sense of, the school teacher poem, it’s something, there’s a line, something to the effect of and how the students amazement grew, and how much knowledge could be held in that little head or something like that.
But you could say I remember coming home, being in school in, in very young, 12, 13, and there was some obscure figure and he said, Oh, no, [00:16:00] that’s your homework. If anyone knows anything about him, and I regret asking my dad, cause he came, cause he’d come in from the pub or something. And I asked him and I got three and a half hour lectures.
So it’s up to half two in the morning, it’s this diatribe about late 1880s, Fenian leader, and it was like, he could just, so it was fairly full on. But Yeah, very different generous and supportive. Could be mad, could be truculent as I said to you always ready to engage in, in battle, whatever that may be.
Yeah. And looking at things from a completely different angle. Yeah. And I think there was, I think he was dyslexic as well, and I think it ran through his family. And I have it and my brother, who’s a professor in America has it as well. Yeah. Yeah.
my great uncle would have been teaching in St. Enda’s, which was, just to explain to people that might not be familiar with Irish history, would be a school that Patrick Pearse, who was the leader of the 1916 Rising, he set up to basically create an Irish education through Gaeilge, and with a different outlook on Irish history, a sort of precursor to independence, and what we would nowadays call Gaeil Sculina. He was a teacher there and then he was the vice principal, or do you call into the UK as a assistant head teacher or head? Yeah, I guess assistant
Toby: head teacher. Yeah.
Oisín: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose, so that movement, a lot of the actual rising in 1916 as well, a lot of it was planned in that building, and they, if when my granddad came down was asked to come down, From his customs job in, in Northern Ireland, where he was based in Straban, he also did work across in Belfast, of course, as well.
And he had worked in Glasgow and he was asked to come down with when the formation of the state happened. He was asked to come down and the man at the helm of the finance department finance at the time was Michael Collins, of course. And Michael Collins would have known of my dad’s family through St.
Enda’s, through the Irish language movement, et cetera, et cetera. Although they weren’t perhaps in terms of advocating armed resistance, they were very much in [00:18:00] the cultural milieu of the new nationalism, the Irish language movement, the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association.
My granddad had been one of the first presidents of Tyrone GAA. for a brief fell study in as Ulster GA president and he refereed the first hurling Ulster final. So it’s not just the language. The intellectual pursuit is also the sporting and he would, he was a musician as well. So there was a lot going on, but they were certainly known as a family.
Who were high level pro nationalists, up the north, a lot of connections, and on my grandmother’s side, so my dad’s mother she, several of her relatives were arrested for their involvement in national movements and stuff, and they were put on Larn and in prison ships and interred in different places and that so yeah, so there is that that as well, whether, I think later it develops with my dad’s siblings into A sort of cultural reevaluation, sometimes through humor, sometimes through political action is a sense that they are nation builders coming from the north.
This new project is the Republic of Ireland, which would have been initially called the Free State and later becomes a republic. My dad when he died, he was in town writing up letters. Complaining, and attacking politicians or whatever, but there was a sense that, yeah, it was almost like this strange duty, but it was represented in a completely anarchic fashion or angle to attack the state. Culturally, they were well ahead of their time and a lot of the stuff that they would have attacked or given out about or saw as ridiculous in a kind of Catholic dominated Ireland way.
Has come to pass and has proved to be, certainly the change that has happened would be more in the way they would have envisaged the state, I would have said.
Toby: Yeah. So there’s a kind of left, a left leaning progressive nationalism around, around that runs through the family.
And it’s harder to trace that. And Brian, I often think is sometimes mistaken the Cruiskeen Lawn columns for a kind of conservatism, but I think you need to understand the nature of the opponent that facing and the [00:20:00] nature of clerical control and how imbricated it was in the state and state welfare systems.
So you need to bear that in mind when he’s whinging about or satirizing state institutions, but it’s not really just the state
Oisín: And the contradiction was, and I can see why it’s very confusing as well because part of them is Victorian respectable householder with the hat and crombie on, so my dad had all that madness and then at the same time he could be almost boorish kind of qualities and certain things.
So that was definitely a contradiction. But if you look at the reality: taking on and criticizing the Catholic Church, the state, and all that in a place that all it was holding on to was nationalism. We didn’t have any real wealth. We were leaking people in terms of immigration decade after decade.
The, they were holding on to this notion of we’re nationalist, we’re free, we’re independent. But it’s when in reality, their cultural policy was stifling, their economy was failing. So he was taking on these in a real way. And he could have been stronger, I’d say, in, in, in some ways, particularly in the orphanage, the fire that broke out in the orphanage.
He alludes to it in a limerick and privately talked about it. But the thing is in Ireland at that time as well, you were simply going to lose your job. He did have a lot of responsibilities. They certainly waned as he got older, but he did initially have a lot of responsibilities in terms of providing for other siblings and that.
Toby: I just want to trace back different aspects that seem to me things that haven’t been very well understood or addressed so far. The family the Ó Nualláin family is from County Tyrone, from from in, around Strabane and Omagh. And that is a very distinctive place and, not maybe as visited as other parts of Ireland .
Oisín: No. Not at all. No.
Toby: And it has an impact on the kind of person that, that the family were. And it’s easy to forget that this kind of, especially for, I’m sure [00:22:00] the same applies to your dad as well, but especially for Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, the Dubliner, that actually that background runs very deep and especially the situation of a Catholic nationalist family in that part of what is now Northern Ireland, but of course, before the Civil War was simply just a part of the island of Ireland
Oisín: It’s an area, still, in Ireland that would be very little visited from outside people. The areas that would have resisted, say, in the most recent conflict that we had from 69, right up into the 90s, both Armagh and Tyrone would be known as bandit country, and it was areas that the might of the British army with helicopters couldn’t fully control. But it goes back way, way further than that.
It’s been a very tough people. A lot of the best land was taken in the Ulster plantations in the 1600s, lot of the… The Irish were thrown into these areas, in which perhaps land wouldn’t have been as good. The strongest chieftains, the strongest clan and the strongest people were up and around Tyrone. The biggest resistance to many queens and kings has been from that area and the O’Neill clan come from there as well, so when you you think of that, and then you mix in the reality of the geography, it’s colder, it’s tougher, it’s hilly, there’s not many people coming from outside: the humor is very strong. I think very strongly the mixture between their first language being Irish which obviously leads to a much larger wealth of words and the way of working with words than when you’re using English, which is a much more modern bastardised language, that mixture of the characteristics of the people being very tough, their humour is really important and dry humour.
There is some comedians up there, actually one or two prominent ones, that are very funny, but their humor is dark. It’s unforgiving, it’s uncompromising, satirical just naturally. [00:24:00] And I would think, and even though my dad was born up in, in Dublin, for example, and some of, one or two of his siblings was born in Dublin and one in the Midlands and then the rest up in the North.
But they’re very much a Northern family in Dublin. They think in a different way. The accent slightly is not a true Dublin accent. It’s not a really posh South Dublin. It’s twanged with a bit of North. They’re willing to, they’re willing to have a go.
And they won’t stand down, physically or intellectually, they’re not going to stand down from someone. It’s quite, if you see how difficult it is to try and get settlements up the north and try and get, there’s a great tradition of, not exactly accepting things.
There could be a little bit more done on that and their association with Donegal . , that dialect of Ulster Irish is perhaps the best. And my grandfather would have really made sure that all his children went to that part to learn that exact form of Irish, which they believe is the richest form of Irish. It’s three dialects.
There’s Connacht, Munster and Ulster and even when they had moved to, to, to Tullamore and then on to Dublin when they’d come, they always had a girl from the heart of the Gaeltacht in Gortahork and they would have brought them down to help out with the family, but more for the language. They had a with the Gaeltacht there, they had a very close association all their lives and it didn’t stop it there actually, because my dad and his other siblings would often visit the family. When these were girls that they came down to to help them they’d always go up and either stay with them or meet them again.
So there’s a very close association with the community and the Ó Nualláin family. They didn’t have any time for, it’s funny, they didn’t my dad didn’t either, any time for what you would have seen as sentimental nonsense, all this the great, about, oh, there’s a nice poor Irish peasant, how pure they are, all this poor my uncle had said, If they like the Blaskets so much, the likes of Synge and fucking Yeats why don’t they fuck off and live in a rock themselves and kinda thing, so basically you say, it’s grand for these gentlemen, landed gentry, to come over [00:26:00] and, record a few peasants and then hop back and write a few plays and get lauded around London, and it’s one thing to, do all this but he had a genuine.
Love of the actual like The Islandman, for example, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, different Irish writers, which he absolutely, loves and had massive respect for. And a lot of them were, could have been just fishermen and stuff like that and farmers. So he had respect for that, but not for the sort of parodying of them, playboy of the Western World, like it’s, he had no time for that kind of stuff, he just thought that was, and my dad, all of them were like that to thinking that they’d be more thinking about the islands should have like high speed trains with a new invention going straight off at high speed internet.
And do you know, they were practical in that sense because I suppose they were scientific. So they would have seen, I definitely think they would have been seeing the role of science in bettering people’s lives. Like my dad was doing patents until he was, his last patent I think was 87, some of them are completely mad
Toby: What inventions did your dad invent?
Oisín: Oh from a weeding machine where you didn’t have to bend down to a giant rug to a giant natural rug making machine where you could build this, make this massive rug in one day. That actually went to a, that’s what started a factory in Donegal, actually, up near the Gaeltacht area. Then, there was a glass mirrored glass kind of boxes in a all different types of shapes and forms that you put in front of the television . Then he had electric poker for porter, like for Guinness for stout that you could put in that was rechargeable. It was just bizarre. I think he had loads, lots of, I should, you know what, I should go to the patent office and see what’s there.
Toby: That would be something, there’s also something weird here, which is, It’s like living out.
I know Brian had a, an element of this, he proposed a new design for a typewriter, right? So he had his own ideas about patents, but of course he had the the Research Bureau of Cruiskeen Lawn, which was to some extent parodying the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, but on a, [00:28:00] in another sense was actually coming up with really intriguing inventions.
Thank you. Yes. Yeah, ideas that actually some of the ideas almost did make their way in, in different ways and actually are objects that we use today.
Oisín: It was interesting. My dad’s other one was, he was trying to amplify sound to create energy using the same principles as a speaker controlling it in a different way. He was working on turbines up to time he died. And the other thing he was, he was talking about dispersing clouds so you could, to some extent, control the worse ravages of the rain, say, for example, in the west of Ireland or somewhere in Scotland.
It was this idea of, low level sonic booms that would make the clouds disperse over the sea. It’s funny with my uncle’s work when I think now that the British Foreign Office have actually employed science fiction writers in a special unit to evaluate and write stories and evaluate other ideas, which, you know, because what they’ve realized is loads of ideas that were laughed at and were thought were bizarre have completely come to fruition.
The Home Office and the Department of Defense in Britain have just done this. The FBI and the CIA have been doing this for decades, using science fiction writers. So there’s something there’s something in it.
Toby: Yeah, absolutely. There’s just something interesting about the way in which engagement with technology and modern technology was so central. And particularly the kind of engagement that you get when you are writing or working in a small nation that’s, to some extent, economically isolated, although certainly not really culturally isolated, quite the opposite. And so that produces it’s not like you’re going to go and work for IBM, right? You’re then forced into these schemes and ideas that are more practical and more realizable.
Oisín: And not just my dad, they all used to, I used to see his brothers, some of his sisters. And what they do is they’d be coming up with something, they’d say, “Oh, there must be a solution to that”. It could be silence; it [00:30:00] could be two or three of them drawing out schemes. “How can you make this better? How can you do this?”
Toby: I t must be so interesting to live around all the books, thinking of books in the library as like an extension of someone’s mind. You must feel like you’re in his head a bit when you’re in this room.
Oisín: My dad designed it actually. This is my dad’s design and me. He insisted on all these mad lines, if I can show you, it’s not a standard house, it’s totally different. The bookshelves are central to the design.
It’s all completely. Different shapes it’s just a different type of design, but he was brilliant with the angles and would fit in everything
Toby: now you’ve got me thinking about the link between the kind of literary architectures of, Brian Ó Nualláin and the barracks in the house of the of The Third Policeman and the conceal, the concealment of another world within its walls and like having “one customary dimension subtracted.”.
And also the the story about the the kind of homemade table that At Swim was being written on in the room that your dad and your uncle shared. And then later in life. Much later, Brian’s writing to Niall Montgomery and saying, I’m going to build another trestle table. he’s asking him to help.
They have a bit of an argument about it, of course, but he’s asking him to help him plan to build an extension to his house and then he’s talking about this table. So there’s this thing that I’m circling around , like hand crafting, like the physical world around you.
Oisín: Yeah, since I was the age of about four, I was helping my dad because he’d also be doing he’d also be doing like like projects, like he’d be fixing, he’d be making things out of wood.
He didn’t want me to have a gun because he didn’t agree on toy guns, but eventually I was going mad. So he made me sit down with him and craft a really amazing wooden gun by hand. Everything the whole thing. But he could [00:32:00] make, he could actually make even windows, like joinery-level stuff.
It was just bizarre. But, and again, they all could. They could all use their hands, and actually my dad was actually really handy. If I had pictures of the old studio, his old studio was amazing, all in wood. The house we grew up in Glenageary, that’s the place where he got the awards for the idea of, he completely conserved all the heat, and put in these Velux windows, and made this beautiful pine, they were almost like sculpted stairs, and he opened up the whole ceilings and put in stuff and I know he learned a lot of that off Brian. He learned a lot of his carpentry off Brian, not his dad. Brian taught him nearly all his carpentry. So he was very handy at carpentry. And he did, the dovetail joints, and the tennisons, all that stuff.
I don’t do it now, I just screw stuff in, you get lazy. But he’d do it right, and take his time doing it right, and everything would be sanded, measured three times and he would have learned a lot of that off Brian, because he used to go around copying Brian, and then there was totally different ways of building shelves and stuff, which I still do today, and he learned that off Brian, and then I learned it off him. But he, in his house in Blackrock Brian would have shown him to do stuff. They would have been doing stuff all the time. They would have fixed stuff all the time, yeah.
Toby: And of course, Brian is the father figure of this large household. He would have had a lot of jobs to do anyway, right? So it was practical
Oisín: Yeah. It would have saved money. And don’t forget there was, at the time, there was only really one salary coming in, his salary coming in. In a big household to try and keep running that big household, and back then you didn’t get like life insurance policies they might have just got a small little payment off the state, very small.
It was probably vital to have those skills. Yeah. And to train up the young lads to do it when he was at work.
Toby: Yeah.
Oisín: I always thought when I was very young, there was another, like, when I was young, I just presumed uncle Anthony, because he was bald. He used to mumble a lot. He seemed to know too much. And I just presumed he was one of the Ó Nualláin brothers, but it was actually Anthony Cronin, which would have been my uncle’s biographer. And he looked very similar. He looked like one of them.and basically I [00:34:00] I always found when he was around, he was obviously interviewing them.
My father and my aunties and his brothers and everything like that when you, when they were doing the biography, but I really got a sense that like culturally the struggles that my uncle had with his own life and, and with drink later in his life, eventually taken over and the struggles that Patrick Kavanagh had, that Brendan Behan amongst others of that stifled time in the 40s and 50s, very early 60s. I think that one thing that came out of that was that Anthony Cronin had said, he’d experienced real genius when he was talking about my, uncle in that sense. He felt like he was in the presence of genius, and he said he never wants to see artists go through this struggle again, and I think in a very real way, because he was like, he was looking like I’m doing, he would put something into a sort of like a pragmatic approach to it, and he lobbied, particularly Charles Haughey, which led to lots of art organizations, a much better appreciation for the artists because Charles already understood that we don’t produce Mercedes cars, we don’t produce champagne. We don’t produce straws. Ireland doesn’t produce much, but we do produce sculptors, painters, writers, musicians, and good Guinness, but that’s really all we, so when he understands that, that’s when you start getting the Aosdána, the arts council is formed, the Writers Museum opens, does the refurbishment of the galleries first, the first one is done.
And, you get this kind of turnaround. And I think Anthony Cronin brought his experience of those darker days when you’re seeing people stifled and, in that current, in that situation where they’re not supported in what they should be doing, I remember I was up to, he was up to to our house. I would have grown up with a lot with him and he was at my dad’s funeral in a wheelchair. Just a year before he died, and I had a good chat with him and he hadn’t been, he hadn’t been drinking, he was off the drink for 12 or 14 years or something. And he drank because it was the last Ó Nualláin, so he drank some whiskey and he fell [00:36:00] out of his wheelchair and I had to call an ambulance.
And he was bleeding out of his head and everyone was like, Jesus Christ, this fella’s got so drunk, he flew down the ramp and came off and cracked his head open and then he was mumbling to me, that’s the last time I’ll be drinking with any Ó Nualláins.
Toby: One thing that’s inspirational about to some extent, a lot of members of that generation, but particularly in the case of your family is how many lives it’s possible to live at the same time, how many roles you can perform, how many people you can actually be if you want to be.
Oisín: Yeah. And you very early, you see it and the way you just see what you copy, you copy what or you realize. Your parents are flawed like anyone else, and, but at the same time they can do, my dad could do maybe twelve different disciplines, speak eight languages, do all this. When I was growing up, if I was saying, when I started doing building to put myself through college, I would learn it and just learn it and then start reading about it and find ways to do it and then work with carpenter’s weekend and then learn it.
And learn how to nearly be able to build my own house. Which I can do, basically build a house completely, yeah, apart from electrics. There was a sense that I didn’t have to be just a teacher. You can, if you want to be a builder, if you want to do this, if you want to write, if you want to, whatever you want to do, there’s a possibility you can do multiple things.
So a lot of my cousins would do multiple things. It’d be still a concurrent thing running through. I suppose even my generation, but certainly my dad’s family would have done. I can remember his two sisters Roisin and Maeve and they had retired from teaching
and Roisin was the principal, and Maeve was like her aid, but she was a teacher there as well. And she was in this kind of, to do nuns order. They wouldn’t take orders, and when they stopped teaching, they took off and went into the centre of 1980s Dublin, one of the roughest parts of Dublin when heroin was ravaging the area.
And they went in and just started offering free education, getting people to read and write, took a real practical approach. So they didn’t sit there. They wouldn’t listen to their superiors to tell them what to do. They took off [00:38:00] and took on a different role, completely different way of teaching and different people.
And then they were doing all sorts of other stuff there, like arts projects, cultural projects, all of them had that running through them. And his other brothers and stuff, they take on different roles or try and things. And it’s probably down to learning and I don’t know, a touch of arrogance, just saying I can do anything kind of thing. But my dad used to always say, nothing’s impossible. And your imagination, he always used to say to me when I was, since I was a child, your imagination is your most powerful asset. It’s like what Oscar Wilde said, anything imagined is real. Do you know what I mean? From that point of view. So that concept, that’s probably a concept, from the 1870s, the 1880s really
Toby: yeah, it’s actually a useful way to to figure your way around what people describe as metafictional traits. Metafiction is the wrong word because it assumes they’re wrapped up, you’re wrapped up in a world of fictions upon fictions. It’s it’s not really what’s going on. It’s much more of a I know Brian for sure. And I’m sure you’re that as well, just saw ideas as themselves, like quite concrete things. The distinction between abstract ideas and the concrete, everything was material and malleable and could be manipulated.
Oisín: He, when my dad was convinced that sure, even when he was working towards the end of his life, he was convinced now he might’ve never done it. He probably wouldn’t because he wasn’t a trained scientist. He was convinced that having this to to control and amplify sound as an energy source. He thought like the, I, he said once the idea’s there, he was over the moon. He said, now this is the rest of it’s easy. This is just the application. “I’m gonna change the world of energy.”. So he was obsessed, “Change the world of energy, no need for this fucking oil nonsense and all this”, and he said “There’d be no more wars” and, so he wasn’t a shrinking violet. But the interesting thing was that once the idea was there, then it was only a matter of time before either he or someone else would put that into fruition. So the most important thing was the imagined idea, and then everything else would fall into place. And that, that could have been about anything. That could have been [00:40:00] about breakfast. That was about large scale things and small scale things. That’s, that was the important bit.
Toby: It reminds me I don’t know if this has come up in your research or the tours you do or whatever, but there’s this trace of Bishop Berkeley’s version of idealism, where actually it’s not idealism in the way of a German, idealist philosopher, it’s the opposite. It’s a very skeptical form of idealism to our eyes, which only, which sees ideas as the real things in the world and everything is already an idea. And everything is material and concrete in that way, but the idea is the important thing. The concept just that just reminded me that’s exactly what Berkeley would think. As soon as you have an idea, there’s no real distinction anymore between it being real, that it doesn’t need to be realized.
Oisín: We’re going back to Wilde, not just because I have a big interest in him, but in, in his work, De Profundis, his last great work, he discusses the centrality and importance of imagination. He said, nothing’s possible without this. He said, even the idea that like, that a Galilean peasant carpenter can imagine the burden of the world on his shoulder; that alone is the most powerful idea. So what comes from that then is the birth of Christianity. That’s the way he sees it.
There’s definitely an energy and it’s attacking, it’s attacking the centre. I think hugely the, the, the concept of Republic, which he was really proud and in the end and happy to have lived, to be living in Dublin, it’s not coming from a bad place, but I think his way of expressing it is vitriolic and also like, and you know, in terms of when I saw my dad arguing with people in a pub or in a, you know, outdoors about politics, he would go nuts.
You know, you think there’s nearly gonna be a fight. Like it wasn’t, he, he didn’t think the centre could be let be the centre of, or it would rot, so you had to attack it. The example I use like in his eulogy, is that, like the real word: we’re eccentric. Eccentric comes from ex-centros, which means out of centre.
Okay, [00:42:00] so Athenians, for example, in the golden era of a Athenian democracy, viewed the more people from ex-centros that they had within their society, the stronger that their centre was because they were being attacked from all angles. So they could absorb some of those attacks and see how you could adapt and change.
Which meant that the, that debate is healthy. Eccentric isn’t someone wearing, you know, this cool hat and having a Che Guevara t-shirt and a few tattoos, that’s, you know, there has to have substance in it. So the substance for me is: to be eccentric is really to have a, a duty to attack in whichever way you can . And they had that in spades, all of them. And I think I was summing my dad’s up, I was saying I was summing my dad up, but he was the last to die. So I was also representing the rest of them and saying, look, they were state builders, but they were eccentric ones who attacked the centre continuously.