The Lives of Padraic O Conaire

PADRAIC O CONAIRE was an orphan from Galway who became a London civil servant, a socialist agitator, a common-law husband, and the writer of some of the most fearless fiction ever produced in the Irish language. By the time Padraic O Conaire died in 1928, aged forty-six, he had spent a lifetime hiding, embellishing and contradicting the story of his own existence.

Drawing on two decades of original archival research, Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh strips away a century of myth-making to reveal a figure stranger and more compelling than the beloved bohemian of classroom legend. His novel Deoraíocht made money itself the engine of its tragedy. His story Nóra Mharcais Bhig – the first in any language to trace an Irish woman's journey to England to deal with a crisis pregnancy – was radical in 1907 and remained controversial in school classrooms eighty years later. In Gaelic League halls and Sinn Féin meeting rooms, he argued that national independence without socialism was no independence at all. Then he left his family in London, came home in the lead-up to the 1916 Easter Rising, and it all got more complicated.

Ó Cathasaigh is a superb guide through the contradictions – the tenderness and the cruelty, the radical politics and the Free State propaganda, the man who was always a step ahead of whoever was trying to pin him down. This is biography that reads like the best kind of detective novel. For readers of Roy Foster's Vivid Faces and Fintan O'Toole's Judging Shaw – and for anyone who has ever studied Ó Conaire and suspected there was far more to the man than the statue on Eyre Square in Galway.

Literary biography | Irish language and culture |