Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn (1940-66) and Irish Politics

Resumo

Irish writer Brian O’Nolan, also known by his pseudonyms Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, has been lauded, alongside James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of the central figures of Irish modernism. His novels At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940, published posthumously in 1967) have consistently drawn scholarly attention due to their enigmatic and experimental narrative structures. For this reason, however, many of his other works have been neglected until recently. One such example is the newspaper column Cruiskeen Lawn, published as Myles na gCopaleen in the Irish Times on an almost daily basis from 1940 to 1966. Cruiskeen Lawn was a comic literary column devoted to offering a sharp and incisive portrait of mid-twentieth century Ireland. While dedicated scholarship on Cruiskeen Lawn has emerged in recent years, one of the aspects that most critics have failed to touch upon is the question of Irish politics. Brian O’Nolan was witness to tumultous changes to the social, cultural and political fabric of the country: from the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the economic expansion of the 1960s, including the period of The Emergency (1939-45) and the years of economic stagnation and swelling emigration (1945-54). As such, his Cruiskeen Lawn column became a site of contention and political commentary on all aspects of Irish politics, ranging from the role of the country in international affairs to local minutiae. Conscious of the historical significance of twenty-six years’ worth of political commentary by a renowned intellectual figure such as O’Nolan, this dissertation examines the total of 4,032 newspaper articles that compose Cruiskeen Lawn with a twofold aim: firstly, to understand Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn as a work of political commentary and to view the column as an accurate account of mid-twentieth-century Ireland; and secondly, to determine O’Nolan’s own political philosophy through a close reading of his opinions on the political events discussed throughout the dissertation.