The Genius of Myles na Gopaleen

 As Frank McNally says, the sovereignty of Myles na Gopaleen should not be subjugated by the imperialism of Mr Flann O’Brien. The latter fellow had his moments but the first mentioned was really the man of rare genius. There he is on the left there, in the Palace Bar, some time during the Emergency. Those were cold times, as you may discern, for Ireland. As they are again.

For more than a quarter of a century he produced a daily column for the Irish Times. In many of those years his column was the only entertaining thing found in that self-consciously noble blatt. By turns satirical, whimsical, loopy, angry, absurd, laced with puns and parody and above all funny, much of The Cruiskeen Lawn still tickles 70 years after it first sidled into print. It was so popular, in fact, that the column enjoyed a posthumous life as for several years following the author’s death in 1966 (the drink, of course) the paper simply republished epistles that had first greeted Dubliners years before.