Radio Myles: the Flann O'Brien Podcast

About Radio Myles: the Flann O'Brien Podcast

Poised somewhere between the pub and peer review, this podcast will entertain, intrigue and perhaps change your perspective on the writer known variously as Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O'Nolan. Featuring special guests, archival sounds and interesting theories about this fascinating figure. Made with the support of Birkbeck College, University of London. Ident and artwork by Will de Villiers: https://www.instagram.com/willdevilliersillustration/ radiomyles.substack.com (https://radiomyles.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Radio Myles

Category

arts · fiction

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Apr 2023

Latest episode

28 Jan 2026

Latest episodes

13 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Jan 2026

   13. Joseph LaBine: Flann O'Brien and Radio

   A special edition of the Radio Myles podcast dedicated to Tobias W. Harris and Joseph LaBine's special edition of the Journal of Flann O'Brien studies which focuses on Flann O'Brien and radio. You can read each article named here at no cost on the Parish Review website here: https://parishreview.openlibhums.org/issue/1700/info/ (https://parishreview.openlibhums.org/issue/1700/info/)General Editors: Ruben Borg, Alana Gillespie, Maebh Long Cover image credit: Michéal Ó Nualláin, Kilroy Is Here (Michéal Ó Nualláin, 2009), 28. Cover design: Ellie Hastings, https://www.eehastings.com/about (https://www.eehastings.com/about) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radiomyles.substack.com (https://radiomyles.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   2 Jan 2026

   12. Elliott Mills: Brian, Myles and the Civil Service

   Toby talks to Elliott about the fascinating ways in which Brian O’Nolan the bureaucrat manifests in the writing of Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. Toby: Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of Radio Myles, the podcast poised somewhere between the pub and the peer review which aims to intrigue, entertain, and perhaps change your perspective on the writer known variously as Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, and various other names. I’m your host, Tobias Harris, and this podcast is brought to you with the support of Birkbeck College, University of London. Today my guest is Dr. Elliott Mills, who is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin where he also completed his PhD. He is currently working on his monograph entitled Flann O’Brien’s Media Writing in Mid-20th Century Ireland, which will be published by Liverpool [00:01:00] University Press, and he is a co-editor of the volume of collected essays, Irish Writers and State Bureaucracy, also forthcoming through Liverpool University Press. As co-editor of a special issue of a Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies dedicated to Flann and the civil service. Elliott has done pioneering work on Brian O’Nolan’s career in the Irish state and we’re here to talk about precisely that topic. So welcome, Elliott. I hope you enjoyed my relatively alliterative introduction to the podcast and that I got your bio just about right. Elliott: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was very accurate. So well done for that. Toby: Thank you. Off to a good start then. We’re gonna begin with a perennial feature of a podcast, which is, for the benefit of listeners who may be totally new to Flann O’Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan, aka George Knowall, et cetera, et cetera, they would [00:02:00] benefit from a thumbnail sketch of the writer at hand. And, in this case, I think it would make perfect sense for your – I’m not trying to dictate the terms of your capsule summary here – but I do think it would make sense for your capsule summary to focus on this career as a civil servant, if possible. Thank you. Elliott: Oh, I mean, I wanted to talk about his love of dogs. But no. So yeah, a thumbnail sketch: I guess I would say: Brian O’Nolan: he is a writer who is also a civil servant and they overlap: he was a civil servant for most of his writing career. Civil servants - they’re not officially allowed to write about matters of current political interest but O’Nolan did do that quite a lot. My key point in understanding this overlap is that he develops an approach to writing, and a style of writing maybe, which is always ready to cover its own tracks in various ways. Toby: Hmm. Elliott: Hmm. Toby: Yeah, I think that’s a really [00:03:00] interesting way to look at it. This connection to the civil service forced him to produce a certain kind of style, which as you said, could conceal itself, could hide its motives, could hide what it was really about, but also make the track discernible, I guess, at the same time. That’s part of a trick, isn’t it? Elliott: Yeah. And sometimes, it’s not him hiding that he’s the writer, but it is sort of doing a sort of public performance of hiding it, even though everyone kind of knows what’s going on. I always think of that, you know, with Faustus Kelly, he’s sort of sitting in his play based on local government politics and he’s sitting in the back of the theatre and sends an actor on to do a jig when they’re calling for him to step onto the stage. But in the reviews everyone’s talking about the writer of this play as a sort of high [00:04:00] ranking senior civil servant. And so sometimes when he is hiding himself within his writing, he’s also almost like parodying the process of hiding himself. Like, because as, as I said, like he, he doesn’t really follow that directive not to write about government or politics to the letter. So yeah, sometimes he’s hiding it, sometimes he’s doing a performance of hiding it and sometimes kind of intentionally not hiding it very well. Toby: He is mocking that very process. I do agree that the use of pseudonyms to supposedly conceal identity is…. It’s almost like one of the clichés which he’s playing with because it’s so widespread at the time, it must have felt a little bit ridiculous that there’s all these people hanging around in the same pubs, in the same social settings, often in the same workplaces now all writing stuff about each other, all under pseudonyms, and yet kind of everyone knows too anyway, so… [00:05:00] Elliott: Yeah, I think tthere was a question put to R. M. Smyllie, about who Myles na gCopaleen was, in The Bell, And the guy asking clearly knows as well, and he is like: is it Sean McEntee? Or Sean T O’Kelly. And everyone in that circle kind of knowing that he’s also at times doing an impression of the ministers that he’s working for as well. So yeah, it’s an interesting nexus of performance. Toby: And we covered this in the very first episode of the podcast I recorded with Joseph Brooker because we played an excerpt of Sean McEntee reflecting on his work with Brian O’Nolan, except that he actually refers to him as Myles. So the concealment of identity worked in a reverse direction in which he was probably known by the name Myles in the civil service after a certain point. Elliott: Yeah. I wonder if there was a point in the day, at the custom house when he was referred to as Myles, [00:06:00] like if it was from sort of 4:00 PM onwards. I would’ve loved to have found him signing some of his civil service work as Myles, but unfortunately I don’t think that happened. Although some of the letters are a little bit more civil-servant-esque. And then some of them when he’s, he’s like working in the planning section and telling Cork Local Council that the stuff that you’re gonna have to fill out is pretty tedious. That’s not in the voice of the person in charge of the planning section. They’re supposed to be a bit more of a job’s worth than saying like, this is exactly what you’re meant to do. Whereas like sometimes he’s almost kind of commenting on the, the boring nature of his job from within the civil service documents as well. Toby: Yeah. So that voice comes out in the work itself which is not entirely unexpected, but definitely a useful facet, to understand. The other, section, that I tend to ask, every, contributor to, contribute [00:07:00] something on is, this question of how you found Flann O’Brien. Because I remember: I think the first time we met was, an event that we were doing at Birkbeck on At Swim-Two-Birds back in 2016. Seems like a long time ago now. That probably wasn’t the first time you came across Flann. So how did you encounter Flann O’Brien? Elliott: Yes. So, I think I first read At Swim-Two-Birds when I was an undergrad. I was already a bit of a tiresome Joyce enthusiast. I remember At Swim was on a list of a hundred greatest novels in The Guardian, I think. I was interested in metafiction, so I picked it up straight away and then read all the other stuff pretty immediately. It served as a really interesting counterpoint to the Modernisms modules that I was doing at the time, you know, in England, which didn’t feature Flann O’Brien. And then I ended up doing my undergrad dissertation on Flann. And then, by the time I got to my [00:08:00] master’s, I was then obviously obsessed with Derrida, so I combined that interest with The Third Policeman in an essay. But yeah, so it was, it was kind of fun that it was my own little personal interest that I was developing. And then obviously when I started to do work on Flann in Ireland, it was a completely different situation. And in fact, the person I was sitting opposite in the Trinity Long Room hub - his dad was related to Brian and O’Nolan - so it was becoming a lot more, connected to that network of people who are working on Flann O’Brien and maybe even have like stories about him. Toby: Yeah, this is a trajectory that I can empathize with: coming from this space of, well, firstly, you’re just interested in, um, Flann O’Brien because the writing, it is kind of adjacent to the modernism that you get taught at undergraduate level, but seems very different. Something [00:09:00] strikes you, in particular because it’s just so, so funny, you know, so that kind of piques your interest. And then you kind of go through the stage of understanding the theoretical importance of what he’s doing and the relevance to a lot of different types of critical theory or psychoanalytic theory. You know, take your pick really, but Derrida is a good one. And then almost like, I dunno if it’s a final stage, or if there’s a level of evolution after this. As you get deeper into it, you start to understand the Irish context and the people that knew him. And something very different emerges, right? There are these different layers, to the onion of exploration. Elliott: And then, when you get to that stage, you have to pick a course through all the various contexts that you, approach his works through over those different stages. Toby: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely – and make it work together, which I think your work absolutely does – the next bit we wanted to cover was one of your favorite extracts. I wonde, [00:10:00] which you’ve picked up. We have not prepared this at all in advance. I’m completely new to it. I quite like this, actually. This sense of danger at this point of the podcast in this context because I just don’t know what you’re gonna read. Over to you, Elliot. Elliott:, I thought I’d read a bit from Cruiskeen Lawn – his column in the Irish Times which he writes on the name of Myles na gCopaleen. This is a column from the 21st of August, 1946. And Myles writes: ‘I’ve been studying the characteristics and habits of civil servants for years because they are in reality, very interesting persons, persons mind, not people.’ He starts to describe the sort of work of the civil servant: ‘There are large mounds of documents on his desk. These represent his work. He frowns slightly. He views his work with grave concern. Certain portions of it he views with anxiety. In his view there is pressure of work. The work is however, under consideration. Certain separate [00:11:00] matters are under review. Others are under active consideration. A decision will be taken only on consideration of the facts in all their aspects. These facts will, in the meantime, be under continuous and active review, and a decision will be announced at an early date. At the moment, he finds himself unable to concur in any suggestion that any of these matters at the moment fall to be dealt with by him. At two thirty, he is again engaged on having matters under active consideration in all their aspects. He requests the early submission of further details.’ There are lots of bits like this in the column where you get a sense of… he does write about the civil service quite a lot under the persona of Myles. And here there’s the identity being consumed by the sort of medium of bureaucratic communication and these sort of linguistic tendencies which leave [00:12:00] no stone unturned, but they take the unturning too far and they start with the stone furthest away. And I thought I also might just read a bit of genuine bureaucratic literature to give you a sense of the kind of stuff which might be influencing this particular kind of penchant for recursive, quite lengthy, sentences. So this is from the local Government Act in 1941 which is about the minister being, corporation sole of the departments. And this very long sentence reads: ‘Where any doubt dispute or question arises or in the opinion of the minister is likely to arise as to whether any particular position under a local authority is or is not, for the purposes of this act or of any of the acts which may be collectively cited with this act, an office, or as to whether a particular person is or is not for any of the said purposes, an officer such doubt, dispute or [00:13:00] question shall be decided by the minister, and such decision shall be final.’ Toby: That… Elliott: On the level of the prose and like the, the kind of meaning of it is that the civil servant does not take decisions and kind of bits of work that the civil servant will be, you know, working on each day in the end, that they will cease to be under the kind of ownership of that civil servant. Things are decided by the minister, but it’s also like the kind of prose that Myles is working with also enacts this idea, like on the level of the sentence where these phrases like under consideration and then even under active consideration, like the consideration becomes slightly more passive when it’s repeated and when active is sort of added to it. It seems like this was a sort of rich vein of influence in terms of comic prose style, but also there’s something going on here [00:14:00] to do with O’Nolan’s conception of the writer also in his literary works in a way which sort of problematizes independence, like active agency of the writer, which he doesn’t necessarily get from being a civil servant, but which is also clearly relevant to his civil service work. Toby: Yes, absolutely. And just, to weave in a bit of exposition into my response, he joins the civil service in the mid 1930s. And he remains there for quite a few decades, until the mid 1950s when he is retired from the civil service under circumstances we might want to discuss. And the work that’s happening on his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, although it’s a product of his undergraduate and graduate years at university in many ways as a finished product. It’s also something that’s sort of edited and [00:15:00] produced and and finished and finalized under the auspices of the civil service. And there’s the anecdotes that suggest that John Garvin, his civil service manager, was actively involved in some ways in reviewing the text, suggesting improvements, and even suggesting potentially the epigraph for it. Elliott: Yeah Toby: It’s woven into his development as a writer. What I like about the two examples of the prose that you’ve shared, from the column from August 1946 and the Local Government act for some reason, I just see this act as among –somehow in my brain – the more notorious of Irish government acts of the 1940s. It seems to have so many strange, like resonances. It had very positive purposes, I suppose. But it seems to be notorious in some other ways. There’s a displacement of agency in the case of the Myles excerpt, from the act of doing [00:16:00] something, to a form of doing as contemplation through the weaving of language. So, as you were saying, the prose is performative in the sense: if we keep saying that something is under consideration, under active consideration, the facts involved will be under constant review, more details will be requested. There is a form of, attenuated power happening here through the construction of this fabric of passive, voice, phrases and cliches, which all put together suggest a kind of vague power around the idea that this contemplation is happening in the first place, like the veil itself, that that language froze over the matter at hand. You know, it’s like describing the work around the work or the work around the [00:17:00] work around the work. There’s a power to it that almost seems quite prophetic and meaningful. But then the second extract that you read from the Local Government act made it clearer that the context of this is that this active form of contemplation or this very prosey form of contemplation, very prolific, but yet low on decision-making density, that is, kind of the lack of power that servants felt they had. I guess what I’m rounding on is: what’s the form of power that’s at work here in this convoluted approach? Elliott: Well, yeah. I think you use the word performative there, and I think that’s really key, isn’t it? And I guess neither of us are talking about, performative in the common way that’s used now. I mean, a performance of pretending that something’s the case. It’s not quite that. It’s kind of more, I know Joe Brooker has talked about the importance of, J. L. Austen’s idea of the performative sentence: it’s not quite describing, it’s actually performing the action. It happens in Faustus Kelly as well, where there are small examples of the things that Kelly doesn’t want to read. If he says [00:18:00] ‘mark them as read’, then officially they kind of have been read and that also sort of decides the action that he wants that he wants to be taken in relation to whatever it was, which in other words would just be to kind of ignore it. But it’s a way of framing that decision, through sort of official terminology that actually does carry out an action in itself. And then also, yeah, but at the same time, as you say there is also a diminishing agency in the language as well. And I increasingly think it is important when you go to a novel like The Third Policeman: this protagonist is a murderer, but it kind of seems as though he’s being punished for a kind of bureaucratic way of looking at the [00:19:00] world and sort of writing and expressing himself. So just as we had, in those examples, a kind of idea that the civil servants, increasingly frames things in a sort of passive way. Like at the start of, I was thinking about how in the start of The Third Policeman, we have like the first person in how, and everyone knows how I killed Old Philip Mathers. But then like everything after that is a carefully defined clause which kind of provides subsidiary information. And by the end of the first page that, that I, that was there in ‘I killed old Philip Mathers’ is lost and it’s replaced with a description of the weapon and then who the person was who had the original plan and, he was personally responsible in the first place he brought this. It’s almost like in the same way that, that the civil servants describing how this work was brought to my desk. It’s being considered. It’s not my responsibility at the moment to do [00:20:00] anything, but it’s been considered and I can kind of explain what it is. But I suppose that in a way, depending on how it’s wielded, that can be a power in itself: a power of evasion. Toby: A power of maintaining your position of power by suggesting there’s elements of this process that are obscure to someone else that you have ownership of. I think also of the opening to ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, the short story where you’ve got this reference to a Joycean short story initially, but then the actual opening, through these layers of detachment, moves away from that sense of certainty about who the person might be that is relaying the story, how that person might be known to them, and then positions what happens in this kind of strange space. So it seems like a similar movement of: you work yourself into this almost fantasy [00:21:00] realm by progressively detaching the narrative voice from any identifiable person. I find that’s one of the many, fascinating parts about bureaucratic language is that in many cases it is about determining what a person is and what rights and responsibilities that person has. And it’s whether that person is an entity, like an organization or a company, or whether that person is indeed a person, a human person. Through bureaucratic language, this constant tussle of what is a person, what isn’t a person, is where power does, I think - I keep coming back to this question of power - power does exert itself because if that slippage, it becomes too extreme, then through bureaucratic language, of course - and this happens a lot - people, entities, nations even lose their personhood altogether. You know, it’s very easy to obscure it. I dunno if there’s also maybe some kind of commentary on that too [00:22:00]. Elliott: Yeah, definitely. I think so. And, you mentioned ‘John Duffy’s brother’. This is their kind of private law firm. But he walks into the office and expresses something of his inner life and – having thought a lot about Brian O’Nolan and bureaucracy – it’s almost as though, there’s a coded suggestion that it would be as odd to walk into the Custom House and, express yourself, your inner life or your actual beliefs. It would be as odd to do that as it would be for John Duffy’s brother to walk into the office and say that he is a train. It would be treated as: I guess that’s like sort of a joke or you’ve kind of gone a bit mad, we’ll play along with it for 20 minutes, but then can you just go back to being your kind of normal, in that case, I suppose, [00:23:00] yeah, there also is a safety for him in being able to reengage with that, framework, that is in that short story, when he becomes too afraid of what the stakes are of actually revealing himself. Toby: Yeah. I do agree with that analysis. It’s almost like the transformation into the train stands for some kind of explosive release of a persona that isn’t compatible with the working persona. That’s kind of what the meaning of the text is, I guess is a kind of queer text, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily a thing about sexuality per se, but about a kind of alterity, you know, within us that is repressed in the normative surrounding but we’re gonna move on because, there’s more I wanted to ask you about. I am interested in digging further into this connection between bureaucratic work and literary work at the level of poetics. And so in your introduction to the special issue [00:24:00] on O’Nolan and the civil service you edited, you used Kafka as an example, referring to another Kafka critic, Ben Kafka’s, theories on paperwork and bureaucracy in his book, The Demon of Writing. ‘Kafka presents the idea that the forever-unfinished status of paperwork makes it a symbol of the interminable sense of lacking which desire both requires and sustains. Kafka’s reading of bureaucracy as a function which at once produces and thwarts desire can be likened to O’Nolan’s poetics of dissatisfaction, which so often as in the writer of figures of The Third Policeman, At Swim-Two-Birds, and in a different way, Cruiskeen Lawn, sets out to explore the limitations just as much as the possibilities of authorship.’ So it’s a really, fantastic point, about, the link between poetics of dissatisfaction and bureaucracy as a function which at once produces and force, desire. This has kind of taken us in more of a psychoanalytic direction, I suppose, as a reading. But I wondered if you could, [00:25:00] give some more examples of what we might describe the bureaucratic poetics of O’Nolan in the way that that quote suggests. Elliott: Yeah, so I guess you touched on The Third Policeman already, but obviously, you know, this protagonist, in that case: murder doesn’t get him what he wants. But also he has a kind of highly conditional and self-thwarting, but at the same time, repetitious and recursive way of framing things and expressing himself. So it’s kind of the combination between, the action and expression not getting him to where he wants to get to, but also it being highly predictable, the direction he’s heading. And that’s why his punishment is to have that played back towards him. So this obsessive writer narrator’s own recursiveness is directed back towards him. It’s the horrifying predictability that is almost the most terrifying thing [00:26:00] where, you know, when he is, watching MacCruiskeen’s chests, which seem to be getting smaller and smaller beyond sense. So there’s that angle, but, there’s also a kind of, I suppose on one level it might be a bit less dark, but it also relates to this sense of dissatisfaction, short- circuited communication, which I think, comes through a lot in his writing as Myles in the Irish Times. And it also plays out in that column in a way, which often reflects aspects of his job. So I think we can see this in his, his columns about the ventriloquist service. Myles comes up with this plan of, selling kind of ventriloquist escort service. So if you think you are stupid, you hire a ventriloquist to accompany you to public places, they do all the talking, so you sound smart. But then as these columns run on, the ventriloquists, they sort of unionize, they demand for higher [00:27:00] pay. And then there’s this quite interesting column where Myles describes how the ventriloquists are entering the room at the same time as Myles his himself saying: ‘Well, gentlemen, I’m not surprised to see you. I recognize that the wages are too low and I’m gonna increase them by 50%. That’s the least I can do.’ And so as I say, there’s a sort of, self-thwarting, kind of short-circuited process of communication, here, which I think is also to do with his civil service work. We look at the fact that these columns, they definitely cluster in that sort of 1941 to 42 period. And from August 1941 to April, 1943, that’s when O Nolan was probably most likely writing speeches for Sean MacEntee. So he’s also kind of engaging with this writing whereby he writes [00:28:00] something and it’s not his own words. He’s kind of writing as the voice of someone else but also in a way where in his literary imagination, he imagines that process to turn writing into something that can trap the writer. It is interesting that you can see the plot structure of At Swim-Two-Birds in a microcosm as well in that article. But yeah, there are sort of darker implications and then everyday writing-practice implications of this idea of, writing as connected to paperwork, which in turn is connected to, a kind of lack of fulfilment. Toby: Yeah, I really like that comparison. I think it’s a really good explanation or an analysis of the appearance of the escort service. It’s interesting how it emerges in some ways, um, genetically in the columns from the sequence on WAAMA, you know, the [00:29:00] Writers, Artists and Musicians Association, which is this parodic version of Sean O Faolain’s organization of the same name, but actually the origins of the escort service belong to, I guess, the psychology of knowing that everything you write is being ventriloquized in some way and it’s been taken from you and as you said, it’s not becoming your own. And that sense of dissociation between what is being said and what is being thought or what is being meant that that environment must have created. So I do think it is a really interesting method of reading O’Nolan overall actually, of understanding that the performances of his texts, the absurdities of the jokes, they do represent a fealty to some kind of representation of experience, but felt it’s nearly always displaced. It’s just never simple [00:30:00] enough that it’s a direct connection. There’s a set of substitutions that happen, but there’s the atmosphere that’s in his head as a civil servant, as a creative writer, knowing what’s happening to his words that in the column is transmuted into the atmosphere of Dublin overall, where no one can quite believe anymore, whether anyone’s words are their own words. I love that. Elliott: Oh, well, yeah, you put it really well there, and I’m glad that you, were the one to mention how much he takes, the piss out of Sean Ó Faolain because there’s an Ó Faolain scholar when I was doing my PhD, he was at Trinity. He was like, why don’t you leave  Ó Faolain alone? I’m like, it’s not me. It’s ... Flann who is doing it. I’m just writing about it. But see, I’m trying to distance myself from that, you know? Toby: Yeah. That, that’s for another episode, I think, before we court more, controversy. Elliott: That’s a 10 part series. Toby: It’s a saga, it’s not a series. We have to capture their closeness as well as distance between them, you know? They did collaborate in certain ways. But yet [00:31:00] there’s just something about Ó Faolain, I think, just not being… I think the critique is quite an insidious one. He’s just not, he’s just not savvy enough is he, he’s just not quite smart enough to keep up with Myles. I think that’s the latent critique: he’s being too direct about things, which is really interesting. And I think at some point we gotta turn back to those pieces that O’Nolan wrote for Ó Faolain’s magazine, The Bell. Right. You know, like: ‘Dance Halls’, you know, ‘The Trade in Dublin’ and so on, ‘Drink and time in Dublin’. We should look at those, but we don’t have time to do that now. We’re gonna carry on and, I wanted to ask you about what you thought about the politics of O’Nolan himself – so, previous guests in the podcast have described the O’Nolan family overall because, you know, the political involvements run wide and deeply, you know, in, in that family, As eccentric state builders, people who were interested in building up the Irish state, that felt a way to do it was to do so from the margins to do good work, but from the margins, you know, to attack it, which doesn’t seem like a crazy plan – [00:32:00] But I think you often see an anarchist tendency to challenge the state. The politics, if you read carefully and go past a lot of the layers of humour, seem to lean towards a reformist but pragmatic status, leaning slightly towards the economic left, I’d say. And of course Paul Fagan has, recently retrieved an article entitled ‘Cultural Affairs’ where he evaluates the cultural worth of the Irish economy for a magazine called The Statist. It’s a funny name. I imagine statism, it was pretty in vogue, in the 1940s and 50s. You know, whatever side of the Cold War you’re on. So that, that’s giving us a sense of, quite a kind of moderate politics that is traceable. But I’m wary of labeling him with any political label. What was your thoughts on, the state as a philosophical concept and is he a statist? Is he a liberal? Is he an anarchist? What do you think? Elliott: Well, I was really pleased when I saw that, had discovered this, new bit of writing. ‘cause it was sort of like the view that I felt that I might have been implicitly kind of pinning on [00:33:00] O’Nolan sometimes without him explicitly saying these things. Just because there is that kind of, pragmatism, like for example, when he, I mean when he’s, he’s sort of falling in line a bit with MacEntee in opposing - what he sees as copying - postwar welfare reform, but not on the grounds that … it is only ever on the grounds that it’s a big idea which has got quite far before the details have been worked out. It’s not opposing the ideal in itself. It’s opposing ideas like this when he spots that it might be, rhetoric, which hasn’t worked out how that kind of rhetoric turns into a practical plan. I’ve been doing a bit of work as you have with O’Nolan and the media and I think we [00:34:00] can see this argument that Fagan finds from this article in some of his writing, about the radio, for instance. In the article, ‘Cultural Affairs’ is this idea that cultural isolationism, it’s not sustainable when it’s being paired with the packaging of Irish culture for export. And then, you know, not opening Irish culture up to foreign influence or, strengthening it with subsidies. And I think he notes this in some of the rhetoric about the expansion of state radio in Ireland. So in one article, in 1947, he’s questioning Ireland’s scheme to send her voice to the ends of the earth. He’s saying: is it morally admissible? Is it – and he kind of frames it in militaristic terms, like saying it’s an aggression – is it a lawful aggression, this sort of this Holy War? And I think, in that and in quite a lot of his writing as Myles, you can see this sort of [00:35:00] media attuned ear that is actually a little bit ahead almost of the sort of historiography which would later come, which would say that the development of the Irish free state at the time is simply a kind of inward turn and a sort of ‘deforming provincialism’ Eve Patton summarizes that view with that phrase, whereas Myles and O’Nolan is noting that like there is that provincialism there, but there’s almost like a sort of corollary, which is that you sort of turn inward and then you have a wish to wield the kind of newly minted cultural capital from turning inward by sending it outwards, but without then doing the other side of opening up to global influence in terms of culture and in terms of the economy. It seems like whether or not he thought this was a great idea, you know, in the abstract it seems as though he’s feeling his way [00:36:00] forward towards what a kind of modernized, necessarily transnational and transactional, economy and mediated cultural landscape, Ireland was going to necessarily have to become. It seems like he’s tapped into the practicalities of what needs to necessarily happen or what can happen as opposed to the sort of earlier ideals of, I suppose, the sort of self-sustaining protectionism and isolationism. Toby: I think to try to summarize, which is a fantastic point by the way, or a set of points: Myles is … we can look backwards on these opinions and his stance and certain things in the wake of what finally happened and miss the point here by putting him on one side or the other. It’s not really about taking a side, it’s about understanding the complex nature of things about how big projects can tend to rebound upon themselves and produce the opposite of the intended results. His critique of the Irish plans for an Irish [00:37:00] welfare state centre on the potential kinks in that plan. For example, you could accidentally create a new tax authority centred on the church in Ireland, if you allow the church to run these welfare schemes, as one of his critiques. It’s a detail that hasn’t really been thought out and I think he’s able to understand that process of folding over, that process of complexity of how, systems emerge through patterns like s-curves, plans aren’t realized and there’s contradictions, and you have to be able to be savvy to those contradictions and paradoxes to make progress. So I love that reading. My very last question, for you, Elliot, before we finish up, is, just if you could give us a feel for what it’s like to work in the National Archives of Ireland that hold the archive of O’Nolan and the civil service. This is not an archival source that most people have access to. Most people listening to the podcast would’ve maybe looked at the Collected Letters, for example, but you’ve had experience of working in civil [00:38:00] service archives. Could you just tell us a little bit about that? Elliott: Yeah. Um, so I suppose that the, one of the main things I got out of that is that the role of the private secretary is, this node of transmission that, the signing of a name on a letter doesn’t give you direct access to the person who signs the name in a sense. And it later became the stamping of his name: it’ll often be a very brief letter from the minister to explain that he has read the letter that has been sent to him. There was a lot of reading of that sort of stuff. In getting a sense of the monotony of those tasks, it almost becomes even more, um strikingly clear when you do get access to O’Nolan in a different kind of mode. And like for example, when I then looked at the Cavan Fire the report into the tribunal, which he had to write up, like there are little moments there where you [00:39:00] can see that he hasn’t just sort of done the equivalent of signing his name. There’s a little bit of O’Nolan himself coming through. Like, there, there are, there’s this phrase that he uses – I don’t think he got from someone else – saying that the people in charge of, the person in charge of the orphanage, just says ‘she lost her head’ at the end of this quite measured description of the things that they tried to do and the things that they could have done better, and the way in which better training and more initiative will help future situations. And then there’s this phrase, ‘she lost her head’, which, if you go back to, different works he uses this in his fiction: characters saying ‘was she off her head’? And ‘Handsome Carver’s husband going mad, goes ‘off his head completely’. So it gave me a sense of the different modes of writing, some of which are, disconnected to the writer. And actually almost enact that process. The idea that the person who’s signed a piece of writing is not the person who takes [00:40:00] responsibility for the writing. And then the very rare occasions I’d get excited about these moments where it’s like, hang on, there’s something slightly different going on. He’s maybe not doing exactly what he’s meant to be doing. It is a sort of long process. And of course there’s also a lot of reading of a lot of stuff which have nothing to do with O’Nolan. Toby: Yeah, absolutely. It is like a chase for traces of identity, growing stronger or fainter or changing shape. It sounds really fascinating on a number of theoretical and personal levels. Well, Elliott, thanks so much for a very rich, podcast. It’s been really fascinating to hear more about how this work in the civil service informed the poetics of O’ Nolan in quite surprising ways. So yeah, it’s been a real privilege to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much. Elliott: Yeah, thanks very much for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radiomyles.substack.com (https://radiomyles.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   5 Nov 2025

   11. Katherine Ebury: Flann O’Brien, death and the law

   Katherine and Toby dissect death in 'Two in One' before exploring Irish executions, reading Achille Mbembe's necropolitics and turning to Flann, the energy humanities, and the geological turn. Transcript Toby: Hello and welcome to another episode of Radio Myles, the podcast which hopes to entertain, intrigue, and maybe change your perspective on the figure known variously as Flann O’Brien Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na gCopaleen, George Knowall, and many other names. This episode is made of a support of Birkbeck College, university of London, and today I am joined by Katherine Ebury. Katherine is a senior lecturer in modern literature with an established international reputation as a literary historian and scholar of modernism. She has written a lot including two well reviewed monographs and led to collection many peer reviewed articles and book. Chapters, including on Flann O’Brien and science, [00:01:00] writing in the Problems of Authority (https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/9781782052302/flann-obrien/) collection, and on Flann O’Brien in the Death Penalty in the Gallows Humour (https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/9781782054214/flann-obrien/) collection. She was an editor of Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman (https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/9781782050018/flann-obrien-and-the-nonhuman/), the most recent collection of essays about Flann O’Brien. She was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for her research project: “Literature, psychoanalysis and a death penalty, 1900 to 1950”, which was a basis for her recent monograph in the area of law and literature, modern literature and the death penalty, 1890 to 1950. She has mentored several postdoctoral researchers funded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust who have gone on to successful roles elsewhere. We are going to try to focus on today’s topic, which is Flann O’Brien and the law. Welcome, Katherine. Katherine: Thank you Toby. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be on the podcast. I’m a fan and it’s really good timing for me ‘cause I’m working on a chapter on Flann O’Brien and the law for the new Cambridge Companion for Catherine Flynn. She commissioned it from me, so is wonderful to be here talking to you about this topic. [00:02:00] Thank you for the generous introduction. Toby: And before we go on just in case there are any listeners who are totally new to Flann O’Brien, AKA Myles na gCopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan, I do wonder at this point if there are any listeners that are totally new because presumably they’ve listened to an episode, but just in case and it’s also interesting to find this out from the different guests: would it be possible for you to give us a, thumbnail sketch of this writer and his major work? What’s the brief image of him that appears in your head? Katherine: Well, thanks Toby. Yeah, I do like the conceit that you have on the podcast of getting everyone to introduce Flann. I hope you won’t stop no matter how long the podcast goes on for, because everyone does have a different take. I think about an Irish mid-century writer who’s amazingly funny and perishingly sad. He’s the author of at least three great novels. The others we could fight about At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht and The Third Policeman, as well as [00:03:00] these brilliantly flawed novels again, that we could fight about, as I was saying, The Dalkey Archive and The Hard Life. And recently, we’ve been discovering more short stories and plays and teleplays. I think I’m fondest of the Myles na gCopaleen persona, but at the same time, I’m conscious of all the columns. I’ve not read, you know, the limits of my expertise. Like with the students’ fearing that there’s jokes they’re not getting. I know that there are lots of people who are much better versed on Cruiskeen Lawn than I am, particularly ‘cause I’m only a novice Irish speaker. God knows where I am in Duolingo. But I do love that persona. I find it very fun. In recent years, I’ve devoured Flann’s letters wonderfully edited by Maebh Long, but I found that I learned less about the man than I expected from that exercise. He was a civil servant and a drinker. He has a crumpled, hard boiled look in photographs. Thinking of crime fiction, I think of him as a, a George Smiley or a Sam Spade [00:04:00] type. He’s a radical experimenter and he’s also conservative, as you’ve explored recently in your own book on him in the avant-garde, which I was recently reading. You were kind enough to give me a copy and I’ve properly read it and reviewed it. You can read it in (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/972604)Modernism/modernity (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/972604) fairly soon. Flann O’Brien’s eyes are really kind. But what’s he up to? I’ve planned out what I would say, but I also feel that he can’t be defined, you know, he’s much more mysterious to me as a person than most of the other authors I’ve worked on. I’ll keep reading and writing about him despite this, because of this. I think despite this the sort of pursuit of Flann O’Brien as a person is certainly never ending. I think you’ll have found the same. Toby: Yes, absolutely. The real person behind the figure almost disappears into a kind of void, into a kind of negative space, which is really [00:05:00] interesting. Thank you for mentioning my book by the way, So thank you for reading that and indeed for your review. I would say that, I also had the same impression from, Maebh Long’s, brilliant, collected letters. It’s such a useful resource and we learned so much. One of the biggest impressions I came away from that collection with was. The idea that letters of themselves performative, they’re transactional, they’re shaped by who they’re intended by the intended audience and what that audience’s reaction might be. The letters are often irascible, funny, sometimes simply businesslike, but they don’t seem to reveal much of what Myles na gCopaleen as a person was like. This is strange because you hear very different things. He certainly comes across as being very irascible and keen to get into scraps with his friends and colleagues. Yet on a personal level, we know [00:06:00] indirectly from the family members, that. He seemed to be quite a kind person. He mentioned kind eyes, you know, he seemed to be quite a trustworthy and reliable person at the same time. It is interesting that, letters are, like a surface, you can cut into a figure, and reveal something but they don’t necessarily give us any real insight. He’s not bearing his soul by any means. Katherine: I would agree with you. I do believe that version of him is a kind figure who mostly had it together, despite a lot of evidence, comparing him with George Smiley or Sam Spade, a gentle spy or a hard boiled detective. These people are kind and patient of other people’s mistakes, even when they are unfeeling themselves, you know? There, there’s something in that idea, of a certain kind of mid-century masculinity that I pursue in Flann and in Brian, in Myles. I do think crime fiction is a good place to go for someone so mysterious the [00:07:00] kinds of secrets those detectives, those spies are keeping, you know, plan and Brian is keeping his Toby: Absolutely, there’s an interesting, idea to investigate the stories that are hidden or the kind of hidden, crimes, he’s committed. This idea of truths being buried, comes across just everywhere in a way that, family relationships are depicted the way that family histories are depicted, things are so easily forgotten. Such as, in The Third Policeman where there’s a very eerie depiction of, the sort of loss of the family. This kind of inability to communicate with the family. And yet you also get the sense as you do in crime fiction, but whatever’s been buried is sort of echoing, right? It kind of repeats in different ways, in different symbolic ways throughout the text. Is that something you’re working on, at the moment. Katherine: The fascination of fun and Brian as a figure. No, it just animates what I’m doing. I’m trying to write something quite businesslike, for the Cambridge [00:08:00] Companion, student friendly, it would be something that doesn’t necessarily teach students or new scholars in the field about my bafflement. But for me, writing about the law, there’ll be some space for contradiction, certainly, in Flannn his attitude to crime and punishment. But, I keep my pursuit of the kind of character that he would be to one side. I have read a couple of novels. There’s one called The Blood Dimmed Tide (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Dimmed-Tide-W-Yeats/dp/1843444658), I think it’s about Yeats. I would be interested to read, such a novel about Flann if someone would care to write one for me. Toby: The other question that I ask, all the guests is how you in particular came across Flann because I would say your reputation is a much more wide ranging than that. So you published a frequency on Joyce, you’ve written on Finnegans Wake, you published on Beckett, Dorothy Sayers. So you really have a quite global perspective. And of course there is gonna be a Cambridge Companion about Flann O’Brien [00:09:00] now, which is a fantastic, achievement, for his reputation. But that’s not always been the case, you know, outside of Ireland. It’s really been quite a niche writer for many decades. how did you first come across Flann O’Brien? Katherine: Credit where credit is due. I found Flann through friends and it’s friendship and collegiality that keeps me in the field of Flann O’Brien studies, particularly as you’re saying. I’m a magpie, a picker up of many things, perhaps sometimes more things than my beak can carry. I’m a cultural historian. I write these, certainly the modern literature and the death penalty was a sort of cultural history of the death penalty through modernism. So that means you get a lot of authors. My formal studies taught me this particular cannon of modernism, Joyce, Beckett, Bowen, and I came to many other authors who are important to me today, sayers or Rebecca West through my voracious reading. I first heard about Flann O’Brien through a friend from my masters. I did my masters at the [00:10:00] University of York with Adam Winstanley, who maybe you met at some point. Toby: Yeah. Katherine: He suddenly came into our MA seminar, wanted to talk about fun o’ Brian. Just very passionate, he had discovered something. Why are we not reading him? He said He’s better than Joyce. I wasn’t sure about that. I was mad keen on Joyce at the time. But I don’t know. Intrigued enough. Provoked enough to follow up. And began reading Flann. From there, Adam also pursued a PhD and became a pioneering Flann critic but I think he’s left higher education now because UK academia is so punishing at the moment. But if he is listening now, all the same, still keen on Flann: “Hello, thank you Adam, for teaching me about Flann.” Joyce to me is still foundational. He’s the writer I go to first when I check a new idea, but when I read Flann, I saw what Adam meant, although I dunno if we were seeing the same Flann [00:11:00] because he has these many faces. But I didn’t start writing about Flann O’Brien for quite a while. To make that leap I needed another set of friends. And this time it was Paul Fagan and Ruben Borg fellow Joyce Critics who set up the International O’Brien Society. Although academia is meant to be quite solitary my way of working, I tend to need quite a lot of support and infrastructure, encouragement and invitations, more than some people. I’ll often write something because somebody asked me to. And I’m so glad to have been asked. And would I have done it without the invitation? I’m not sure. I loved what Paul and Ruben had made and they asked me to write something for their Problems with Authority volume about Flann and science. And then I kept working on Flann. That was on Flann and the Nonhuman with Paul Fagan and John Greeny. And I’m interested in keeping working with Flann and making him more central to my next book, hopefully. Toby: Yeah. I know what you [00:12:00] mean about being drawn into something through a network of, collaboration. Because when you have to put it in the context of the other pressures you’re under embarking on a new project is quite daunting. it only really happens when someone says you have to do this, or you should do this. And you agree and you feel beholden to that person. So, it is a productive way to work ‘cause it keeps you pursuing. The next thing, I think, Adam and Catherine Ahearn produced a really useful document of the extant books that we had in Myles na gCopaleen’s personal library which is held at the Burns Library in Boston College. That was a really, really fantastic resource because it helped us see, you said it’s so hard to pin Flann O’Brien down and the library that we have in addition to all the other stuff he was reading, shows he was a very expansive thinker, much more of a polymath than we might imagine. And I know that we’ve recently seen work published by Paul Fagan, for example, on his interest in economics (https://parishreview.openlibhums.org/article/id/23756/) in quite a detailed [00:13:00] way. we really do get this impression that Flann O’Brien is a bit of labrinth. I don’t think he’s really just a magpie looking for stuff in daily newspaper and reading reviews. I think if the accounts of a family or anything to go by, he would’ve read quite a lot. He was probably reading quite voraciously of many different genres. we want to focus on Flann O’Brien and the law. another feature of a podcast Is to read from one of your favorite passages to kick off, that discussion. So I believe you’ve prepared something for us today. if you wanted to give us a bit of context about what you’re gonna read and then share it we’ll be able to start looking at this topic of the law and the death penalty through that reading. Katherine: Thank you, Toby. Yeah, I do. It’s great to have a chunky passage in front of us, and I did appreciate, being asked to choose a favorite passage. is it really my favorite passage? I mean, it certainly is. A favorite passage that will get us talking about fun obrien and the death [00:14:00] penalty. I really do like the story that I’ve chosen which is ‘Two in One’, one of the later short stories, can easily be read by our podcast audience. I chose the passage from the very end of that story. The story is about a murder. But how much is it about a murder, I’ve been wrestling with, I’ve been trying to write about this for Catherine Flynn. How interested is Flann in murder or crime more broadly or breaking the law and how much of those things are as Jennika Baines has argued, an occasion, for fantastical things to happen. So in two, in one the murderer, the narrator of the story named Murphy. And he is a taxidermist. He kills his employer Kelly, in a fit of rage. The employer seems to be a bit of a bully, but we’d have to investigate further how reliable this narrator would be. And murder is never justified. Let’s put that out there Toby: We’re not endorsing murder even for [00:15:00] comic purposes. Katherine: Specifically not murder of employees or by employees of employers. Um, in case anyone at work is listening. So we are not endorsing that. Anyway, so he murders his employer and that’s the occasion for the story, but the occasion goes elsewhere. The narrator is thinking about how he might get away with the crime ‘cause it was unpremeditated, so he has very little chance and very little time to cover up the crime. he decides to use his taxidermy skills to preserve the body of Kelly, his employer, so that he can dress up as Kelly and seem to be alive. Unfortunately for the narrator, the suit fantastically can’t be removed. Very unfortunate to impulsively murder, but also, how can’t the suit be removed? It’s mysterious on that point because it fused with his body to the extent that you couldn’t even cut it [00:16:00] off with all the skills of a taxidermist. Eventually he’s caught because the police are looking for Murphy. They think that Kelly, the employer, has murdered Murphy, the employee. We know otherwise the narrator knows otherwise. But how could that help him? It can’t. And would they believe him? I’ve chosen the passage from the very end of the story in which the police catch him. This narrator, we realise that by the end of the story is speaking to us from near the scaffold. he will be executed soon. “There followed more days of terrible tension. My own landlady called me one day inquiring about me of Kelly. I told her I had been on the point of calling on her to find out where I was. She was disturbed about my disappearance. It was so unlike me and said she thought she should inform the police. I thought it wise not to try to dissuade her. My disappearance would eventually come to [00:17:00] be accepted, I thought. My Kellyness, so to speak, was permanent. It was horrible, but it was a choice of that with a scaffold. I kept drinking a lot. One night after many drinks, I went to the club for a game of snooker. This club was in fact, one of the causes of Kelly’s business towards me. I had joined it without having been aware that Kelly was a member. His resentment was boundless. He thought I was watching him and taking note of the attentions he paid the lady members. On this occasion, I nearly made a catastrophic mistake. It is a simple fact that I’m a very good snooker player, easily the best in that club. As I was standing, watching another game in progress, awaiting my turn for the table, I suddenly realized that Kelly did not play snooker at all. For some moments, a cold sweat stood out on Kelly’s brow at the narrowness of this escape. I went to the bar. There, a garulous lady who thinks her unsolicited conversation is fair exchange for a drink, began talking [00:18:00] to me. She marked the long absences of my nice Mr. Murphy. She said he was missed a lot in the snooker room. I was hot and embarrassed and soon went home to Kelly’s place. A real sense of danger was to me my next portion in this adventure. One afternoon, two very casual strangers strolled into the workshop saying they would like a little chat with me. Cigarettes were produced. Yes, indeed. They were plain clothes men making a few routine inquiries. This man Murphy had been reported missing by several people. Any idea where he was? None at all. When had I last seen him? Did he seem upset or disturbed? No, but he was an impetuous type. I had frequently reprimanded him for bad work. On similar other occasions, he had threatened to leave and seek work in England. Had I been away for a few days myself? Yes. Down in Cork for a few days on business? Yes. Some people thinking of starting a natural museum down there, [00:19:00] technical school people, that sort of thing. Then it happened. The two detectives came back accompanied by two other men in uniform. They showed me a search warrant. It was purely a formality. It had to be done in the case of all missing persons. They’d already searched Murphy’s digs and found nothing of interest. They were very sorry for upsetting the place during my working hours. A few days later, the casual gentlemen called and put me under arrest for the willful murder of Murphy. They proved the charge in due course with all sorts of painfully amassed evidence, including the remains of human bones in the furnace. I was sentenced to be hanged, even if I could now prove that Murphy still lived by shedding the accursed skin, what help would that be? Where, they would ask, is Kelly? This is my strange and tragic story, and I end it with the thought that if Kelly and I must each be either murderer or murdered, it is perhaps better to accept my present fate as philosophically as [00:20:00] I can and be cherished in the public mind as the victim of this murderous monster Kelly. He was a murderer anyway.” Toby: It is such a fascinating passage and quite brilliantly chosen because there’s lots of funny elements in that story. This final passage epitomizes all of it and draws it together. And it’s this strange combination of this sort of very practical issue in that he is almost condemned to be executed for his own murder because he’s, made this rather silly decision to wear the taxidermied skin of the person he murdered. Almost like drawn to it by his practical skill as a taxidermist, which is a fantastic and quite ridiculous joke. But at the same time it is quite a philosophical element and almost debate that’s brought up because it comes to this question of: living in [00:21:00] the context of a society where the death penalty is a default penalty for a murderer and, you know, the gallows is a destination you can end up in pretty easily. made a choice. The situation between Murphy and Kelly, between himself, Murphy and Kelly, was such that someone had to die in the end. Both of them had to die. His choice is then to decide which side he’s going to be, you know, so he gets to be cherished in the public mind as a victim of this murderous monster Kelly by murdering Kelly. So this very strange reversal, and it’s something that’s really struck me about the death penalty is the sense of doubling or mirroring that happens because you can’t help but understand that the person who’s being executed is in turn being murdered. It’s just one that’s sanctioned by the state, right? Katherine: Yes, that’s right. If we were to see it in the narrator’s way, that sense that he was a murderer anyway, it sounds to us as [00:22:00] readers like completely wild. But I suppose, speaking from that position of someone who feels that they’ve been goaded to their crime, that they’ve been bullied into it – for him, Kelly’s behaviour has caused Kelly’s death, but also caused his death: Murphy. So if we were to, we would take, to take a sort of unionized perspective um, on this, he’s not, Kelly isn’t necessarily a murderous monster, but a bully creating a toxic work environment. There are consequences for that in the form of these two deaths, That’s not necessarily, how I see it. in the story, there really is no premeditation of the crime, It is an opportunistic crime, Toby, isn’t it? His employer Kelly putting on his bicycle clips, bent down, looking away, and there’s a tool right there and he hits him with it. But he’s not plotted to take revenge on his employer. It is not like the murder of Mathers in The Third Policeman. He’s a victim of [00:23:00] circumstance in that he’s capable of committing murder. And he’s put in a situation where he’s likely to commit it. I wanted to get out there before you respond to me, you know? He doesn’t just hit him once and called the ambulance which is a more natural thing perhaps, but he hits him and then hits him again multiple times. Toby: And with that passage, I was wondering about this idea of transfer of properties between different, human and non-human objects. It’s a bit like if you were to badly injure an animal at a time when ordinary people would be more involved in killing animals than they are now . You would maybe, keep killing it to try to put it out of his misery, not being willing to care for it. And certainly, no one would’ve grown up in a time where that was a bit more widespread than it is now like, killing kittens and so on. But he is a taxidermist working with dead animals, and he does murder Kelly in a fit of rage, he does murder him like an animal. And he does treat [00:24:00] him like an animal afterwards by removing his skin. Katherine: Yeah. And then the major conflicts between the two men are, are about taxidermy. there’s not a subplot about sort of money or. women really, although that is sort of alluded to is the problem with the snooker club.. The main conflicts that the narrator describes are about the practice of taxidermy. So, if you took a kind of animal studies approach, you would think about how the violence of the taxidermy trade has brutalized both men, the narrator who actually kills to a greater extent than the victim of course. But, if you were to take that animal studies perspective, you would see the effect of that everyday violence causing a much more extreme form of violence. Toby: Yeah. And, and of course this is an area that you’ve edited and, and thought about, um, quite extensively as well in terms of environments, animals and machines, it’s a really productive area to explore: the non-human is such an important part of [00:25:00] his work. the other part of a passage that I wanted to comment on was the choice of words, when Murphy says, he thought it was not to dissuade the landlady to call the police about Murphy. Because he could make this transition: “my disappearance would eventually come to be accepted. I thought my Kellyness, so to speak, was permanent. It was horrible, but it was a choice of that or the scaffold.” His Kellyness gives him a kind of promotion, in a working sense because Kelly is his boss. But I wanted to draw upon what this taxidermy of the dead m an is suggesting about human characteristics and the way we’re perceived Kelly is constituted by his mannerisms. And hence, nearly catastrophic mistake of like, playing snooker too well is a compromise in Kellys. But that’s quite an interesting idea, [00:26:00] isn’t it? That there is no integral identity to a person, it’s simply a sort of adjectival identity, which can be traded and absorbed, by other people. Katherine: Yeah, because the police detectives seem quite efficient. they’ve worked it out. They’ve got the physical evidence, but the mystery of who’s died is completely beyond them. they haven’t worked out that further secret. The bones in the furnace don’t belong to the person they think they do. They haven’t caught the criminal they think they have. that sense of intrinsic identity, like internal self, that’s not something we can investigate in terms of clues and evidence, at least in the world of this story, which is more fantastical. He has stood very deliberately performing his Kellyness, though the skin can’t be taken off. But, you know, he’s constantly, like, I went home to Kelly’s home. Um, he still feels like [00:27:00] Murphy even though he’s inside that’s a choice that O’Nolan has made. He still thinks he’s Murphy despite this fantastical encasement in another body. Toby: Yeah. one of the names is, is, um, ‘The Dead Spit of Kelly’, which is like a later version. And the other is, ‘Two in One’, a powerful reading of the opposition between one and another, duality and the possibility of anything being singular. Philosophically the story echoes that. thinking about your focus on the law and the death penalty, it’s a very good point the casual gentleman. It is interesting, they’re described repeatedly as casual gentleman as well, suggesting they kind of go about, that seems like a bit of a crime fiction trope, a kind of gothic trope about never being sure exactly who’s investigating you. It also for me, evokes Kafka’s stories in which often figures of authority appear very casual and very casual settings. In fact, [00:28:00] at the end of the trial the two people that take Joseph K to be executed are described as actors, as opposed to people who are really doing this job. So there’s this interesting piece about arbitrariness and the need to punish someone for a murder, but not the need to prove that this is the person that did it. The evidence against Kelly for a fictitious murder of Murphy by Kelly was the sort of powerful circumstance, isn’t it? It’s like, well, Kelly’s still here. Murphy isn’t. It must be Kelly. You have, elsewhere written about, the connection between the execution of a potential murderer named McCabe, the Malahide Murderer. In connection to Beckett’s story, Dante and the Lobster, as you write about McCabe he was potentially really the victim of circumstance in the sense of he, he was a gardener. He reported the death by fire and potentially [00:29:00] by poisoning of an entire family. When he was executed it was celebrated proof of a deterrent power. of capital punishment. I think Flann O’Brien absolutely hits the nail on the head in this respect. There’s always a sense that an execution is symbolic. At some point whether the crime was committed becomes detached from that actual act by the state to execute. Because it’s always defended on the integrity of the state. if you were to really do it on the basis of the guilt of the person, you would endlessly get lost in this idea because it can always be debated. There’s always a form of defense, there’s never exactly the smoking gun we need. do you think that Brian O’Nolan in his thoughts about the death penalty is, is kind of tapping into that ultimately arbitrary nature of execution? as you’ve written Irish history is riddled with this complete arbitrator of when people are chosen to be executed when they’re not. It’s often very political, you know, it’s not really about whether anyone did anything. there’s another underlying sense in which [00:30:00] many people of a certain generation, many men involved in revolutionary violence in particular, had done stuff. It was probably worthy of execution, but you couldn’t execute all of them ‘cause then he wouldn’t have had any government. Katherine: Oh yeah. Thanks, Toby. the complexity of law in Ireland is something that people are trying to work with at the moment. I was writing about Adam Hanna and Eugene McNulty’s book Law and Literature: the Irish case, and they, in their introduction, but also in the chapters are trying to think about how law and literature might look differently in Ireland because of the colonial context. The sense that law was being imposed in Ireland, in a form that it wouldn’t otherwise have taken, as well as the traditional role of the artist, the writer, the poet to speak more for the community and for their sense of what justice might be. I think it’s tricky in Flann O’Brien, that he is thinking about all these complexities and the uniqueness of the Irish case. Definitely. But then when we start to [00:31:00] apply it, we wonder! Golden age crime fiction, when they write first person sort of confessional narratives by murderers, they are supporting the death penalty in one sense. You know, however much the person is humanized, however much their psychology is explored. Confession is the queen of proofs that this person is doing exactly what they say they’re doing. The finite solution for a criminal who confesses in a death penalty culture is for them to be executed. And so when you write these first person, ‘I definitely killed him’. What do readers do with that? They may read it with a sense of opposition to the death penalty. He definitely killed him, but he shouldn’t be executed. But these fictions are constructed to sort of do away with that doubt to a certain extent. And then you fold it over and you’re like this man is mad [00:32:00] potentially. Like, is, he Murphy? So there’s this first person confession that seems to be: this person killed this person. We can argue about what should be done about that. But then when you introduce literature skills and a sense of an unreliable narrator, and we start to worry at the idea of confession, that is truly destabilizing. You know, you’ve written in your book about the ways in which Flann is both radical and conservative. His way of writing the end of ‘Two in One’ could be either in terms of the death penalty, is he supporting it? This person confesses, they are guilty, they are deserving of the death penalty. Or the opposite? Toby: Yeah, and it’s interesting, this sense of in Golden Age crime fiction, the necessity of the confession as a first person witness to the crime, which [00:33:00] then justifies the execution or the punishment and moves the story along. But then also the sense that confession may well be the product of an unusual psychological state, or simply, an unreliable narrator, which is one means by which an unusual psychological state can be t ransmitted into a text. So we suddenly start to realize we can’t really rely on a narrator. I’m thinking of, ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, where there is this fantastical story, which arguably involves a sort of double substitution, a double self murdering in the sense of the figure of John Duffy’s brother. Um, both, turns turn, seems to turn into a train and then turns back into a frightened man again. At the beginning of that story, it obviously refers to a Joycean short story as its main context, but it kind of distances itself again and again from the subject it kind of says, well, you know, we, we don’t even know who this brother was. [00:34:00] It’s not even Sure who any real details about him Attack the possibility that a short story could be realistic So there’s something here about, the necessity of the fiction of true guilt or true crime. I would connect that historically to the necessity of executions for foundational, movements of the free state. If you think of the Easter rising and the narrative of blood sacrifice, is it really an execution? Which is completely unfair when the goal of the exercise has been to bring about that in order to cause the outrage. There’s both an honesty and a dishonesty in it. By transposing that back into this slightly bizarre scenario of Murphy accepting that one of them had to die, then he’d rather be commemorated as a victim of the cruel person called Kelly by becoming that person, Kelly himself, it [00:35:00] does seem like this really interesting engagement with the continued use of the death penalty by the Treaty side in particular, after the Civil War as a kind of unpleasant necessity, you know, because they couldn’t, disavow one of the very practices that had helped to bring the state into being, they had to continue it. So there’s a sense of we’re compelled around certain patterns, but we’re not able to come down, morally on either side. Katherine: Yeah, absolutely. And, a stark example of that we’ve been talking about recently is the Irish state continuing to hire the executioner who was used to kill Roger Casement in 1916. Why should that be? It is not even so much the principle of the death penalty that’s at stake, that it’s so practical and yet so nonsensical to keep paying the man who killed one of your nationalist heroes for, fairly petty work that other people could do. Toby: And so in your essay for the Gallows Humour collection you write that Flann [00:36:00] and I quote, ‘empties out the legal subject, the individual living human, who is a target of a death penalty through a quote, life in death logic that anticipates the writing of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on capital punishment. Myles column is clear that for the death penalty to be humanized, the human would have to be dehumanized as of the bicycle horse and dead man at The Third Policeman, all of human executed, And yet the column’s fantastic solution or rationalization does hold the dream that this could happen.’ Um, so in um, Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe writes of how martyrdom and sacrifice as a response to occupation involves what he describes as a new semiosis of killing. He writes, the besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is through sacrifice to bring eternal life into being the body duplicates itself and in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of seeds and occupation. Flann [00:37:00] O’Brien seems to focus on this idea of death as a physical and semiotic transformation. he signals this in my interpretation by the state of, in-betweenness a status. Between life and death and also between object and human. You wanted to discuss with how does a theorist like him help us to better understand this, political context we’ve been talking about, of death and the legal subject in Flann? Katherine: Thanks, Toby. I really like Mbembe’s work. I used Derrida’s work quite a lot, but I’m drawn to the work of Mbembe in various ways. I used him most directly in my chapter on race and the death penalty But I still think that his concept of necropolitics which he’s designed to build on weaknesses that he finds in the term biopolitics. I think it’s a really useful term, especially in the Irish context. So necropolitics most simply refers to a politics of death. And then biopolitics most simply [00:38:00] refers to a politics of life In a colonial context, the colonial oppressor is not really thinking about managing the lives, the health, the population growth of the people being ruled over, rather, the colonial oppressor is dealing out death in particular ways. In the bit that you lifted out for us, I think that’s present in the sense that the only response to colonialism is more politics of death. in order to escape from a colonizer and to establish a national myth, there must be these kind of sacrificial deaths that we’re talking about in relation to the Easter Rising. The state’s exercise of necropolitics is not just about the death penalty, but rather how. The lives of colonized people are restructured towards death once the colonizer gains control through reduced access to law, resources, healthcare, and homes. Certain groups will have more or less exposure to the risk of death but biopolitics [00:39:00] might only apply in relation to the colonizer. To be fair to Foucault, whose work Mbembe is responding to and adding a new concept, Foucault mentions in his history of sexuality that he feels a similar book could have been written on the death penalty. So his instinct might have next been towards a necropolitics or politics of death. We can only imagine what that book could have been. Perhaps most of all because of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which involved its own kind of necropolitics. There’s a horrible kind of irony there. Applying all this Flann. I’m wondering as you wonder how fantastical fun experimental versus how gothic/ghastly/conservative, the politics of texts like ‘Two in One’ or The Third Policeman might be. Flann suggests the death penalty is unjustifiable if it’s horrific, and if people suffer within capital punishment, but also shows us [00:40:00] scenes in which the death penalty is grotesque or even fun. In terms of Mbembe’s necropolitics concept, we can wonder if Flann is describing, exploring and thus critiquing a politics of death or if he is describing, exploring, and thus embracing a politics of death. I do wonder about that. In my monograph, I’ve imagined how opposition to the death penalty or defense for it was deeply felt and even personal for lots of modernist authors. There are some limit cases where the supposed author’s real feelings about capital punishment are not really revealed even through close reading or historical analysis. I think there’s a lot of mystery and this aspect of his politics is mysterious. And this discussion reminds me that in Britain at least, but I also think it was the case in Ireland, the abolition of the death penalty occurred in operation to a pure politics unconnected with people power. MPs defied public [00:41:00] opinion on the issue, the people of Britain at least still wanted a law and sovereignty expressed by the death penalty, but the lawmaking power of Parliament removed that power from the people. What kind of necropolitics occurs when the true politician stands between the criminal and the death dealing public? When we think of Ireland in colonial and post-colonial contexts, Mbembe’s work on necropolitics looks different again, and Flann’s position could become clearer in these terms. For example, in an essay for a Estudie Irlandese from 2017, Daniella Petkovic uses Mbembe’s work as a way to analyze the depiction of the great famine - An Gorta Mór – relation to necro-power. They do this more broadly and also in relation to Joseph O’Connor’s 2002 novel Star of the Sea. I’d really like to see Irish studies scholars do more work with Mbembe in their own context and treat it as a new tool that we could be using. Toby: Yeah, [00:42:00] and you bringing this up certainly inspires me to apply Mbembe’s, idea on necropolitics more widely. I mean, really applicable to the irish context. And also to many contexts as well. as soon as, you enter any kind of colonial context, you find that, a political discourse starts to be more defined by numbers of deaths or the extent that life can be lived that kind of status between death and life, which always seems to hold the potential for death to happen. you can see in the contemporary, world what’s happening in Gaza as a kind of necropolitics in which we understand this conflict, not through the possibility of life for the participants, but through the possibility of death: we’re constantly, hearing of the numbers of Palestinians that have died, the numbers that might die, the impossibility of their survival and the need to embrace death in order to survive and likewise on the other side, the justifications [00:43:00] are linked with the attack on Israel and the number of deaths there, and then a diminishing number of hostages. But it’s a bit like we also saw during the Coronavirus pandemic where we had this daily death toll, you know, so we weren’t really describing life anymore. We were describing death. And, this competition, this idea of death is what really defines political power I think is something that is not gone anywhere Ireland is a really interesting case of that long colonial history in which death seems to be so important. In Ireland it’s linguistic as well because accompanying the death of people, you also have a death of languages. You also have a death of culture. In O’Nolan’s unpublished essay written around 1947, the ‘Pathology of Revivalism’, he discusses this idea of implications of a dark night experienced by Irish speakers during the Penal Laws where they were, you know, as well as during the plantation. they’ve been sort of isolated [00:44:00] in areas far to the west with poor quality agricultural land. Mbembe would describe this as a death world. it was a death world in many ways because many Irish speakers died during the famine, but many more immigrated and kind of died in a different way where, you know, the links to local culture was lost. And the immigration experience was like death in many ways because many people died in the crossing and families could expect never to see relatives again once they emigrated because of the expense of the journey. In terms of, thinking about Mbembe and, and the kind of, um, the positivity element of this: the attempt to crush Irish as a written tongue, fortified it as a spoken tongue, created an oral culture around Irish that wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been isolated in an attempt to destroy it. This seems to connect to, Mbembe’s force on sacrifice and death and a link between death and gaining freedom where there’s no other option. And it just seems like this [00:45:00] idea of a death world really does apply to a number of O’Nolan’s texts and notably The Third Policeman, right, which you’ve already been discussing, and that is quite literally a death world where everyone in it is apparently dead, right? Katherine: Thank you Toby, that was a powerful intervention. Thank you. I mean, both on the subject of COVID and also in relation to Gaza certainly. And Mbembe’s concept looks really important in the present day. I think I would agree with everything that you’ve said there about sort of the way that death is weaponized not just through that literal exercise of the death penalty or killing in war time, but also through a sense of whose life has more value and who has more access to resources, another example of the kinds of things you were talking about in the contemporary world might include the migrant crisis as well. You were talking about the aftermath of the famine and huge amounts of emigration that occurred in Ireland. And [00:46:00] that sense that people are willing to risk death in order to escape the situations they’re in as well as the sort of rhetorical treatment of them in public discourse when they do die: it’s another really important use of Mbembe. I think we also, yeah, you were talking about the idea of the death world applying to The Third Policeman. But because you brought up the sort of Irish language question we might think of An Béal Bocht, in relation to all this, in the sense that death is everywhere in that text and people’s lives are structured by death. There are lots of examples that we might give, the narrator briefly has a wife and child and they’re very soon lost in ways that he doesn’t understand. Toby: Yeah. Absolutely. and this is, a feature that. Continues to be interesting into the 1950s: the idea of Ireland is a place where people disappear. There was some kind of moral panic around [00:47:00] the idea that the Irish race might be disappearing. This is almost like a racialized version of that link between, necropolitics and, the history of the Irish state and the colonial struggle. There was a book published in 1953 called The Vanishing Irish. And it was a moral panic about the fact that the 1956 census three years after that book was published, bore out, the fact that in the past since the last census, rather than the population growing 60,000 Irish people had disappeared. But at the same time, in his columns, Myles comments on the fact that the border with the United Kingdom is quite fluid, so it means that it’s not that obvious to measure how many Irish people there are. But yet there is this big concern: they seem to be diminishing and that in turn is linked to emigration and, that the Irish people might be absorbed, into other ethnic groups. I do think there’s something here about the imposing nature of death [00:48:00] preordained, predestined fate in general characters are only living a certain time before a sense of inevitable death, does definitely connect to what we’ve been talking about, which is that psychological impact of a necropolitics, a colonial necropolitics where the control of death and the suspension of people in a state near to death is the mechanism of power. And it seems to be really reflected in O’Nolan’s work. Katherine: Yeah, definitely, thank you, Toby. I was thinking as you were speaking about other examples but I guess the ways of controlling the environment and contemporary examples where necropolitics are useful and where there would be some sense of having an impact on that, the sense of the climate in Corcha Dorcha in An Béal Bocht being such a difficult place, that if you’re out there for two minutes, you might die of exposure. Toby: Yes. Katherine: And yet that landscape will have been made by [00:49:00] colonialism as well. There’s not enough trees, there’s not enough firewood, it’s really stormy because there’s not enough trees. You know, that kind of thinking about how death worlds might be structured environmentally as well. Toby: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s finish on that question of energy, politics and environment. Robert Kiely has his brilliant essay on this topic where he suggests that, O’Nolan with his peat-eating trains and, the internalization of a colonial gaze in The Poor Mouth creates a satire that can be described as world ecological insofar as it highlights how the Irish environment and energy regime is reorganized by systems of power. In Strabane recently, I did suggest that we take a bit of a geological turn where we look to the soil and the strata beneath it for a wider angle on questions of language and linguistics and culture that seem to happen above the surface, but are deeply influenced by what is happening beneath and, [00:50:00] you know, In that paper I mentioned owner explicitly comments on the idea that the Irish have peat resources, the British have more coal resources, and that the British have, chopped down most of their forests, and then in turn chopped down the Irish forests and how this characterizes the land. Your projects now are focused on this idea of, energy sources and how sustainable they are and the idea of, extraction and to bring that back t o Mbembe. Mbembe describes necropolitics is integrally about the intentional use and shaping of geography to control populations, to border populations into smaller and smaller areas. And in the Irish example, very much to push Irish speakers and Catholic Irish people during the Plantation away from areas that were productive agriculturally and towards more difficult places, which in turn shapes national character because it changes the kind of people that you need to be. So there’s [00:51:00] double determination, you know, looping backwards and forwards between culture and politics and geography. And, I do think it’s really interesting ‘cause how do you disentangle energy sources and energy resources from that very necropolitical move? Because if you build an infrastructure that relies on high intensity energy sources and push your colonized enemy, into areas that are just not amenable to that, you push them off that land dynamic, don’t you, where nature and geography is implicated in forms of, oppression and resistance? And that’s obviously a, major lens on the debate about the environment and energy sources today that forgone The peoples resisting the conquest of pristine environments, in search of new, natural resources - they didn’t go to those environments voluntarily. They had to go there because they were pushed off more productive agricultural land by the colonizers themselves. Katherine: Oh yeah. Thanks Toby. You’re right that I’m hoping my next big project will be about the energy [00:52:00] humanities. And I think ideas of extractivism would be really interesting to think about in relation to the topic of this podcast, the law in Flann, and especially in relation to Ireland and Flann. Robert Kiely’s piece is really field changing if we keep building on it as you’ve been recently with your work on a geological turn in Flann: the concept of extractivism makes us consider how we can really own nature, who owns it. it draws attention to how natural resources are literally exploited rather than metaphorically exploited. We often say, we’re exploiting our natural resources in a more neutral way. But extractivism highlights, the actual exploitation of people and landscapes that things like large scale mining, whether that’s of peat or coal, would involve in legal terms. Nation states control territory, and individuals’ own land: even if on a philosophical or artistic level we might not fully accept that [00:53:00] land can be owned in this way, Toby: Mm-hmm. Katherine: Applying this to Flann: from his MA thesis on nature writing and Irish language poetry, he will have been thinking about how the Irish landscape was shaped by colonialism. As you’ve been touching on the effect of violence, felling native trees led to fuel poverty. The plantation led to people being pushed into hostile areas. Stealing bicycles is a big plot in The Third Policeman, but stealing cattle, would be a big plot historically. When Ireland gained legal independence, it tried to invest in energy independence through peat-fuelled power stations. Harvesting of peat for energy was only fully phased out in 2024, even though Irish environmentalists, authors and artists have been arguing for the preservation of peatlands for a really long time. Some aspects of this might explain Flann’s deep interest in fantastical energy sources. So, you know, omnium in The Third Policeman in The Dalkey Archive. Omnium is [00:54:00] deeply connected with certain kinds of extreme crime in both texts, including murder and atomic weaponry. And yet omnium is also offered as a kind of wish fulfillment for all the problems experienced by the characters in these texts. Within environmental energy and energy humanities, people talk about energy angst and energy euphoria. Energy angst means being made to think about, feel conscious of the energy sources you’re using. And energy euphoria means you’ve been able to repress and enjoy the energy you’re consuming. In Flann energy angst and energy euphoria might look a little bit different when they’re placed into a legal context, but we need to question further historic understandings of the ownership of land as authors like Flann often do in the Irish context. Toby: I think what we’re pointing to here to come back to some of the themes we began with about objects [00:55:00] and animals and the work you’ve done is that, Myles is definitely very valuable if we want to expand our frame of reference to what goes into character fate and human culture and activity, you know, beyond that level of human interactions with each other and through to our connection to the environment and, to the land and how our own bodily energies are rooted in the sources of energy. And we’ve been talking a lot about, necropolitics and death and inevitability of death, but I think on a more positive point, there’s also something really interesting, you mentioned omnium right, but there’s also something interesting about the potential for possibilities, that might see things turn out in a different way. We do have the ability to change our relationship to energy and to the environment around us. Katherine: Yeah, thank you Toby. A more open version of the energy humanities would be called energy futures, you know, but that is a particular kind of scholarship. But also in the texts and [00:56:00] works and history that energy future scholars might imagine: they would be trying to work their way out of the troubles we’ve been having today in describing just how we find necropolitics to be everywhere. Toby: Mm-hmm. And maybe that’s some kind of title for a panel or paper of like, necropolitics and energy futures, just to like directly counter pose, those two seemingly contrary areas. Katherine, it’s been, fantastic to, have you on the podcast. Thank you, for your contribution and for all the brilliant work you’ve done in this area. And yeah, really looking forward to, potentially what you do next. Katherine: Well, thank you Toby, for having me. I really enjoyed reading your book over the summer and I’d be interested, are you gonna be working on the geological turn in the future? Toby: I hope so. I think so. It seems like there’s more places to take it. Certainly. There’s a lot of geology in Finnegans Wake, for example, so potentially I might be doing that. Thanks so much for joining me, Katherine. [00:57:00] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radiomyles.substack.com (https://radiomyles.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   15 Oct 2025

   10. The Society in Strabane

   In this guest edition of Radio Myles, Maebh Murphy presents a compilation of voices and atmospheres, scholarly ideas and craic agus ceol from the 8th International Flann O'Brien conference in Strabane. Credits: Recording, editing, mixing and transcription by Maebh Murphy (Cheasty) Additional mixing and mastering by David Murphy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radiomyles.substack.com (https://radiomyles.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   6 May 2025

   Oisín Ó Nualláin: Eccentric state builders

   In this episode of Radio Myles Toby welcomes Oisín, the nephew of the celebrated Irish writer Brian Ó Nualláin, also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. Oisín shares personal reflections and anecdotes about his father, Micheál Ó Nualláin and his uncle, Brian, detailing family dynamics and the intellectual and creative environment he grew up in. We learn about Brian Ó Nualláin's role as a craftsman and paternal figure and the importance of the history and environment of Counties Tyrone and Armagh, now in Northern Ireland, for the family's mindset. Oisín also reflects on his father's extensive inventions and contributions to education, art, and politics in Ireland and concludes with a discussion of concept of the entire family's role as 'ex-centros' or 'eccentric state builders' who felt a duty to contribute to the Irish state's strength and development by attacking the centre from the periphery.

6. 

   12 Dec 2024

   Paul Fagan: Under the skin of Flann O'Brien

   Paul and Toby explore human and nonhuman worlds in An Béal Bocht, the politics of Flann O'Brien's comedy, the history of the International Flann O'Brien Society and Paul's interest in hoaxes.

7. 

   17 Nov 2024

   Frank McNally: Myles and the Irish Times

   Toby interviews Frank McNally, writer of An Irish Diary for the Irish Times, about Brian O’Nolan as a journalistic influence, and as a man.

8. 

   9 Jun 2023

   Julieta Abella: When Jorge Luis Borges encountered Flann O'Brien

   In this episode Toby speaks to Julieta Abella, an Argentinian scholar working on Irish modernism who can explain the seemingly strange transatlantic connection between Flann O’Brien and Jorge Luis Borges, and much more besides.

9. 

   26 May 2023

   Maebh Long, part 2: Technology and the voice of Flann O'Brien

   In part 2 of this interview, Maebh and Toby talk about beginnings, originality, hustle and technology in Brian O'Nolan's life and work. Sensationally, Maebh shares a newly unearthed recording of the voice of Brian O’Nolan – it's only the second time we have been able to posthumously hear his voice.

10. 

    12 May 2023

    Maebh Long, part 1: Flann O’Brien, the anti-institutional institution

    Renowned O’Nolan scholar Maebh Long shares an unpublished draft of the famous manifesto in At Swim-Two-Birds, delves into the nature of his collaborations, shares what it's like to collect an edition of letters ... and reaches a surprising conclusion about the legacy of Flann O’Brien.

11. 

    22 Apr 2023

    Einat Adar: Flann O’Brien on mind, matter and everything

    How do we understand The Third Policeman’s atomic theory? Toby and Einat find out via Descartes, the anti-materialism of Leibniz & Berkeley and 20th century physics.

12. 

    15 Apr 2023

    Vincent Francone: Why writers should read Flann O'Brien

    Toby and a Chicago writer discuss how Flann inspires him. They explore the soft lunacy of books, the uses of bureaucratic jargon and the life of moonlighting writers.

13. 

    1 Apr 2023

    Joseph Brooker: Introducing Brian, Flann and Myles

    Toby asks a leading expert: who was Flann O’Brien? The answer involves pseudonyms, rarely heard first-hand accounts and a legendary editor of the Irish Times.

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Contact Radio Myles: the Flann O'Brien Podcast

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