BEING THE last-surviving brother of the late great Brian O’Nolan is a mixed blessing, I imagine. Among the downsides, strangers might be inclined to mistake you for the brother, the all-knowing polyglot genius who was a mainstay of O’Nolan’s famous column (written as Myles na Gopaleen), Cruiskeen Lawn. So many and varied were the talents attributed to this never-named character that no mere human could have lived up to them.
Which may help explain why Micheál Ó Nualláin has taken so long to publish his own first book. Not only did he wait until retirement from his day-job in the Department of Education. That happened back in 1993, in fact. But only now, 16 years later and two years short of his brother’s centenary, has he finally put together a debut collection of cartoons and illustrations spanning six decades.
So long has Brian O’Nolan been gone from us that it may come to a shock to some people that he still has a living, non-fictional, brother. This is partly because the former died too young: in 1966, when still only 54. But there was also a wide age gap between him and Micheál, the family’s youngest child. In fact, after Michael O’Nolan Snr’s death in 1937, Brian effectively replaced him as father figure: his Civil Service job and journalism almost the sole support of a family of 12.
As Anthony Cronin records, O’Nolan typed his early writings at the same dining room table around which the younger children did their school homework. Such was the “quite unnecessary violence” with which he hammered out the newspaper columns that a thick cloth eventually had to be placed under the typewriter, to absorb some of the noise and vibrations suffered by the students.
More than 20 years later, Micheál Ó Nualláin followed Brian into the Civil Service, as an art inspector for schools, while continuing to work as an actual artist in his spare time. And it was because of this double role that, in due course, he also had emulate another aspect of his brother’s career and get himself a pseudonym.
Responding to a 1971 news story in which a Christian Brothers school expelled three pupils for having long hair, Ó Nualláin drew a cartoon dramatising the event for The Irish Times. A bald Christian Brother was portrayed ordering the children home, as long-haired representations of Jesus and St Patrick looked on.
Unfortunately, he signed it in his own name. In the course of a subsequent carpeting by the department’s chief inspector, it was suggested he was “skating on thin ice”. Ó Nualláin responded that the ice the Brothers were skating on was even thinner. But he took the hint. Henceforth, and with retrospective effect, all his cartoons were by “Kilroy“: named after the prolific graffiti artist whose “Kilroy was here” signature became ubiquitous during the second World War.
Given the nature of the exercise, many of the cartoons reproduced in Ó Nualláin's book are dated: some more literally than others. On of his earliest commissions – for Dublin Opinion– was to mark the shock victory of Ronnie Delany in the 1956 Olympics.
The problem was that, in common with most people, Ó Nualláin had never seen Ireland’s new sporting hero before and couldn’t even find a photograph. He solved this, ingeniously, by portraying Delany as an athlete so fast that he had already run out of the picture.
Other cartoons would need even more explaining. The one on the cover, from 1971, has Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as a doctor, opening the door of his surgery to a roomful of pregnant women. It was inspired by Mary Robinson’s Family Planning Bill, although the identity of both Dr McQuaid and the joke might be lost on younger readers.
But then as Ó Nualláin says, the collection is in part a “social history” spanning an extraordinarily long period: from the first inter-party government, in 1948, to the present.
And in any case, the best things in the book are arguably not the cartoons, but a series of colour caricatures he once completed for his brother. Brian was about to write The Hard Life (under his other main pseudonym, Flann O’Brien) and suggested Micheál might illustrate it. But first the latter had to prove himself with 14 drawings inspired by Cruiskeen Lawn. The results earned his brother’s approval, although fate intervened to prevent them collaborating on the new novel.
The collection also includes a charmingly humorous map of Ireland commissioned in the 1950s as a mural by Phillips Electrical. Ó Nualláin spent two months on the the individual pictures, upon seeing which the company’s (Dutch-born) managing director, a Mr Meyers, paid a £100 advance: huge money at the time. No sooner had this happened than Ó Nualláin ran into serious practical difficulties translating the smaller pictures into one big mural.
The problem had him completely stumped, he admits. “Then Mr Meyers solved it all, as Dutchmen usually do. He died.” The new MD wasn’t interested in the project; nor did he want the money back. So the work was shelved for decades until Ó Nualláin’s retirement gave him time to finish it, whereupon he renamed his epic project in honour of his late brother: “The Flann O’Brien Map of Ireland”.
- fmcnally@irishtimes.com