Myles na gCopaleen

Remembering Myles: ‘…to be a person, completely unaware of nationalistic neuroses is a very fine ambition.’

Mick Fealty on April 2, 2016, 9:58 am | Readers 783

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the great Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen we’re taking a lead from a Scotsman (who unlike us, did not forget). With a bow and a tip of the hat to Alex Massie, here’s the boy at his best… ‘To be decently ashamed of where one was born is the civilised attitude […] rejecting parochial affiliations […] repudiate the national attachment’; proposed ‘statutary denationalisation’ so that ‘the man irretrievably born Irish …

…if University education were universally available and availed of, the country would collapse in one generation

John Ó Néill on March 31, 2011, 11:17 am | Readers 130

The words of Brian O’Nolan, variously Brian Ó Nualláin, Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na Gopaleen and, of course, Flann O’Brien. That O’Nolan was referencing his own dissolute student days at UCD only mildly distracts from the prophetic undertone of his words: I paid no attention whatsoever to books or study and regarded lectures as a joke which, in fact, they were if you discern anything funny in mawkish, obtuse mumblings on subjects any intelligent person could master single-handed in a …