Myles na gCopaleen

Myles na gCopaleen was the pseudonym used for his journalism by Brian O'Nolan, who also wrote novels under the name Flann O'Brien. His short columns for the Irish Times, mostly in English but also in Irish, have a manic imaginativeness that still astonishes readers sixty years later.

You can get a flavor of his style from the introduction he wrote to the short-lived magazine "Blather" that he produced while still a student at Trinity College, Dublin in the 1930s:

'*Blather* is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or of any evidence of a desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. We are as proud as bantams and as vain as peacocks.

'"Blather doesn't care." A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

'*Blather* is not to be confused with Ireland's National Newspaper, still less with Ireland's Greatest Newspaper. *Blather* is not an organ of Independent opinion, nor is Ireland more to us than a Republic, Kingdom or Commonwealth. *Blather* is a publication of the Gutter, the King Rat of the Irish Press, the paper that will achieve entirely new levels in everything that is contemptible, despicable, and unspeakable in contemporary journalism... In regard to politics, all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making Ireland fit for the depraved readers of *Blather* to live in...

'We have probably said enough, perhaps too much. Anyhow, you have got a rough idea of the desperate class of men you are up against. Maybe you don't like us? A lot we care what you think.'

O'Nolan/O'Brien/na gCopaleen never received the honors his fans felt he was due. His death, hastened by drink, came in 1965. His columns have been published in a series of collections:

• The Best of Myles
• Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn
• Flann O'Brien At War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945
• Myles from Dublin