Social media first emerged in the mid nineteen-nineties, long after Brian O’Nolan’s lifetime, but in this note I want to analyse how his work might transfer to a contemporary social media landscape and what a modern Myles would look like. This is of personal relevance, as I am one of the few satirists working in Irish literature and have found that promoting my work on social media has been detrimental to it. The nature of social media pile-ons, censorious stances, misquotes, and quoting out of context make it difficult to write polemically. In this highly sensitive world, people can respond instantly and claim that they are offended, leading to an intolerance of satire, which by its very nature offends. Brian O’Nolan was a brilliant and fearless exponent of the genre. It is therefore extremely useful for satirists to imagine Myles’s journey through the rocky waters of social media.

I would argue strongly in favour of writers emulating Myles’s approach in spite of the discursive trends of social media. Myles has certainly influenced me as a writer. I wrote an essay for The Honest Ulsterman three years ago called ‘The Writer Naming Service’ in which I rechristened myself Ros Mhuire na Lagairini (translated as Rosemary of the Little Lagers).¹ In this article, I opened a brewery selling Writers Bitter and a low-price lager called Writers on the Brew.

While O’Nolan was unable to experience social media himself, his work has been celebrated by social media accounts such as the International Flann O’Brien Society on X and Bluesky, and the Flann O’Brien Appreciation Group ‘Is It About A Bicycle?’ on Facebook, although there appears to be a gap in the market when it comes to a platform devoted to disseminating his quotes. I am going to focus on Myles’s journalism, specifically the selection in The Best of Myles, because it is arguable that his column was the social media of its day in terms of the popularity and citability of his words, such as his signature exclamation, ‘begob.’ The examples I will consider from The Best of Myles reveal how his work is still relevant today.

First, it is worth questioning what Brian O’Nolan would be doing now if he lived in the twenty-first century. Although imagining his life can look like playful speculation, it is important for writers to see modern parallels. O’Nolan worked for eighteen years in the Irish Civil Service and, in a similar post nowadays, he would have plenty of time to write articles and tweets while working from home. The only difficulty for him would be to navigate our relentless email culture.

Once we move to employment in the writing field, however, we are immediately provided with a stark contrast regarding opportunities for writers: O’Nolan wrote an almost daily newspaper column for The Irish Times for more than 25 years, but it is uncertain whether he would have a regular column today in this precarious climate for journalists. One contemporary example is Paul Howard, whose fictional character Ross O’Carroll-Kelly satirises society through a weekly Irish Times column. A gentler Irish Times column of observational humour is Frank McNally’s ‘An Irishman’s Diary.’ It is conceivable that if O’Nolan managed to secure a job with The Irish Times, he might write comic reviews on TV or film like Patrick Freyne, but it is much more probable that he would prefer to address a myriad of subjects by staying freelance like most contemporary writers. O’Nolan, in fact, described himself as freelance due to the insecurity of his column-writing. On 31 March 1957 he wrote to a Mr Whelan, saying, ‘I have no income at present outside the precarious calling of freelance writer, and it’s more free than lance.’²

How would O’Nolan, under his nom de plume of Myles na gCopaleen, fare in the combative, toxic, and slippery world of social media? One drawback is that social-media platforms are not a good medium for satire. X and Bluesky have very short word counts, meaning that humour gets lost because of the lack of context. It should be pointed out that X and Bluesky are respectively right- and left-leaning in political terms: a 2025 Guardian article was titled, ‘How Elon Musk’s X became the global right’s supercharged front page’ while a corresponding Daily Telegraph title was ‘The left-wing social media site Bluesky that’s become a digital insane asylum.’³ Myles’s satire doesn’t fit neatly into either of those political boxes. Nevertheless, X seems a more natural home for him, as he was a truth-teller and would eschew the virtue-signalling that mars so-called progressive politics. We can deduce this from his more vitriolic and sarcastic pieces in Cruiskeen Lawn.

Myles’s mockery of jargon is still highly relevant. He is not so much a wordsmith as a word-dismantler. He cleverly interrogates phrases like ‘independent thinking’ and asks, pertinently, ‘what is dependent thinking?’⁴ Myles’s delightfully scattergun style would transfer easily to the fast, multi-focused gaze of social media. As well as satirising literary pretensions and works of literature, such as awful poems ‘made of rhubarb in the middle and the surround of bubonic marzipan’ (136), he lampoons innovation, lawyers, the Hollywood film industry, and the (alcohol) licensing laws, hilariously suggesting that pubs should open between two and five a.m. His Myles na gCopaleen Central Research Bureau advocated the invention of alcoholic ice cream to avoid punitive licensing laws. He was always ahead of his time – vodka jelly was invented in the 1950s.

In Cruiskeen Lawn, Myles mercilessly pokes fun at the literary community. For instance, he launches an attack on public funding for Irish writers in his ‘Waama, etc.’ articles. Currently in Ireland there is a variety of funding routes through the Arts Council, Aosdána, and the Basic Income for the Arts Scheme, but Myles imagines ‘improved rates for all literary work’ resulting in ‘a deluge of unpardonable “poetry”’ (16). While it is true that Myles received complaints through the letters pages in The Irish Times, the pushback on social media nowadays would be much more severe and have the poetry community up in arms at his insult. My own encounter with social media kickback occurred when I raised the ire of novelists through my Irish Times article positing that short story writers were ‘infinitely more creative than novelists.’⁵ Myles goes much further than I did by calling writers ‘an infestation of literary vermin’ (256) and asks ‘what vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met and who may resent being pestered with his “thoughts”? They don’t have to read what he writes you say. But they do’ (237). This is Myles’s attempt to delegitimise the complaints of ‘the passive print addicts’ who criticise his work, but luckily for him, these addicts are a much paler version of the internet troll.

Myles reveals corruption in the literary world in a way that few writers now would dare emulate. At one point, he jokes, ‘I bought a few minor novelists at five bob a skull and persuaded them to propose me for the presidency [of WAAMA]’ (15). It is as if he is foreshadowing the Irish arts organisation, Aosdána, which is full of ‘lazy, unproductive benefits scroungers’ who ‘give each other ridiculous honorifics,’ as The Irish Independent’s Ian O’Doherty wrote back in 2014.⁶

Given Myles’s outspokenness, the touchy social media communities of today would join forces against him. Another of my own experiences occurred after the publication in Books Ireland of my satirical short story ‘All About Erin,’ which sent up the competitiveness of writers.⁷ I posted the story on Facebook, prompting one writer to comment, ‘May be satire, but it also feels quite mean.’⁸ Myles would be subject to similar opinions during this #BeKind era. Satire is never kind and is always ‘mean’ because it exposes people’s stupidity. In social media circles, ‘punching down’ is particularly frowned upon, but while Myles predominantly takes aim at self-satisfied, middle-class cultured types, it can be argued that he occasionally punches down. For instance, he serially employs a dialogue between himself and the imaginary ‘Plain People of Ireland,’ which helps to counteract his own pomposity but also enables him to make fun of perceived parochial opinions and the vernacular. A typical example is when he excoriates the Plain People as ‘the ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws!’ (81).

Many of us find that amusing, but social-media followers might well object to his stock stereotypes. The problem for modern writers is that we are under immense scrutiny from strangers online who can respond to us heatedly on the spur of the moment. O’Nolan had a freer rein to run amok because he had a series of pseudonyms to hide behind. Having said that, writers of his day had to police their language more than we do in the 2020s because of state censorship under the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929. In O’Nolan’s case, though, he actually tried to get his own books banned in order to seem bold and daring. He introduced, for example, a character with the provocative name of Father Fahrt in his novel, The Hard Life, but the Censorship of Publications Board failed to reward him with a ban.

If O’Nolan was writing today, he might protect himself against doxxing by setting up an anonymous satirical site like Waterford Whispers News or The Ulster Fry, but these publications tend to consist of parody news stories whereas Myles wrote more observational riffs. He might also be tempted to run a spoof X account like that of the fictional Irish Border, @BorderIrish, which launched on 7 February 2018. @BorderIrish satirised the Brexit terminology of the time, declaring itself as ‘seamless and frictional already, thanks. Bit scared of physical infrastructure.’ Myles, however, might feel constrained by X’s low word count. His talent in writing is to extend and develop his absurd notions further than any other writer would – far too long for the five-minute attention span of the twenty-first century. I could, however, visualise him writing a mockumentary like Cunk on Britain. Perhaps he would title it Flann on Our Land.

In this social-media landscape, it would take an almost suicidal bravery to lacerate the Abbey Theatre for its snobbery as Myles did. One benefit his WAAMA League offers is the Escort Service, which was first mentioned in Cruiskeen Lawn on 12 December 1941 and became a reoccurring feature. A particularly riotous instalment on the Escort Service concerns the hiring of ventriloquists to engage in intellectual conversations during live theatre (24). His lack of patience for the Celtic Twilight is delectably irreverent – he dismisses the playwright Synge as ‘the comic ghoul’ and designates his work ‘a counterfeit bauble’ (234). As Myles was prepared to take on Synge, he would no doubt be brave enough to attack a modern playwright like Martin McDonagh whose stage Oirishness also renders him an updated version of ‘some bought-and-paid for’ Paddy (234).

‘Buchhandlung’ is a searingly funny series of articles charting a professional book handler who sets up personal libraries for the ill-educated rich, then sullies the books and enters fake autographs to denote that the books have been read. The articles are satirical, but the concept of fake autographs is no more ridiculous than the fake blurbs composed by writers in the twenty-first century to promote their fellow writers’ books. I have used glowing blurbs myself to promote my work, knowing full well that the writers who blurbed me hadn’t even bothered to read my book.

And what of O’Nolan’s behaviour? Public figures are supposed to be responsible role models in contemporary society; publishers expect their writers, therefore, to be professional in the 2020s to sell books. As drinking alcohol has fallen out of social fashion due to the current focus on health and longevity, authors tend to be abstemious, but Myles would run riot poking fun at these ‘performative’ aspects of literary culture. O’Nolan was open about being a big drinker (a euphemism for being an alcoholic), as were many of his contemporaries such as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. It is probable that the contemporary version of O’Nolan would still be hard-drinking to repudiate the prevailing trends, selecting a pint of plain over the fad of the oatmeal latte. In a similar vein, Myles would delight in comparing the legalities and finer points of smoking fags and pipes to that of the bland vape.

It is hard to find an equivalent Irish writer on the contemporary scene. One writer who fuses a whimsical, dialect-infused language with some surreal elements is Kevin Barry, but his writing isn’t comparable to that of Myles as he lacks that element of virtuoso performance and linguistic swagger. Like Myles, Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift used flippant comments to the greatest effect, but flippancy is undervalued in our society. My peer writers are tediously serious these days without realising that you don’t have to project seriousness in order to be serious or be taken seriously. Myles uses flippancy to mask his own serious intentions.

My sense is that Myles’s voice is too erudite for modern audiences, but we can assume he would adapt. As discussed, he already has the requisite social media snappiness and quotability. Notably, his articles on censorship satirise people like myself who protest cancel culture: ‘There is a funny idea abroad (by which I mean, of course, Ireland) that if you scream loudly against censorship you are therefore a litherary man and an intellectual’ (255). The cleverest satire can be appreciated even by those of us who are its subject.

He would happily wade into X wars – in his column he attacks writers such as Christopher Hillis for writing that hardly anyone reads Irish. In internet parlance, Myles ‘owns’ him. At one point, he makes a total mockery of the theatre director Micheál Mac Liammóir and his adaptation at the Gaiety of ‘The Packed Ewer of Doreen Gray’ (38). This isn’t to say that he consistently attacks the same targets, but when he finds an opportunity to lampoon, he will use it. For instance, he defends Patrick Kavanagh’s critical pronouncements on modern art, but cheekily manages to imply that Kavanagh isn’t a great writer by adding, ‘there is no major personality in Irish letters today’ (256). Simultaneously, Myles is all too aware of human sensitivity in his own time, asking, ‘Do I take that rather Irish thing, O’Fence, too easily?’ (361) On X and Bluesky, many users take offence and Myles would presumably relish these bruising encounters, unless they consumed too much of his writing time.

Myles was such a master of ridicule it must surely have deterred peer writers from firing back at him because if they did, they ran the risk of having more columns devoted to them. The case is similar with social media – on the rare occasions I’m ridiculed myself, I think twice about replying to writers who are brilliantly acidic and have a large cohort of followers, lest I receive an even stronger tongue-lashing. Unlike social media, however, which is a democratised form, Myles derived power from being one of the rare few to be showcased in the biggest and most influential paper in Ireland. O’Nolan was fortunate to live in the heyday of the broadsheet, but if he was alive now, he would definitely command less respect.

There are copious examples of his barbed comments. He happily trolls Seán Ó Faoláin by stating there is nothing much of interest in his literary magazine, The Bell. And he derives further fun from loftily introducing in a tongue-and-cheek manner ‘the colossus of the modern world’ (394), George Bernard Shaw, then undercutting it with ‘many’s the fiver he borrowed off me in the vegetarian restaurant’ (395). As Myles states himself, ‘I have more brains in me little finger than your man has in the whole of his beard’ (395).

Nowadays, would he have the temerity to criticise the literary hierarchy’s favourite goddess, Sally Rooney? Judging by the social media pile-on that greets her mildest critics, it is questionable. The Irish Times ran an article on Swiss critic Martin Ebel’s divisive description of Rooney as ‘a startled deer with sensuous lips’ in 2019.⁹ Being compared to a startled deer is not that harsh, but online discourse raged at Ebel. Academic Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado later branded his words as ‘coded misogyny’ when she posted her Dublin Review of Books article on Twitter.¹⁰

Myles’s example with Shaw encourages me to adapt his words to lampoon Rooney’s overhyped career and write, ‘I have more brains in me little finger than your woman has in the whole of her brown bob,’ but it would be far too controversial to post on social media. No one puts their head above the parapet in Irish literature – yet shouldn’t we be able to challenge the consensus as Myles did? It was the Scottish writer James Kelman who said of contemporary Irish writers, ‘They get cushy jobs in London or New York in all the usual organs because they never challenge a single damn thing.’¹¹ While most Irish writers are silent on social issues, Rooney has at least written articles protesting genocide in Gaza. O’Nolan, by contrast, was an avid and challenging questioner on many subjects and didn’t require a job in London or NYC to be influential during his lifetime.

To conclude, it would be refreshing if contemporary writers engaged in more playfulness instead of always trying to be worthy, inoffensive, and socially conscious due to the fear of attracting a negative reaction on social media. The fact that so many writers have flags of countries they politically support on their X and Bluesky accounts shows a worrying kind of group conformity which is antithetical to great writing. It is impossible to think of a modern Irish writer who delights in off-the-wall wordplay and absurdity to such a degree as Myles. Myles, at his wittiest, talks of ‘whitemailers’ (388) instead of blackmailers, how his wife ‘keeps her hands in a hand-bag’ (359), and how Keats had a poet called Tess who used to say ‘Toujours la Polly Tess’ (91). His genius was far too freewheeling and rampaging for the confines of social media, but he would have had the resilience to confront its dark side.

Notes

1. Rosemary Jenkinson, ‘The Writer Naming Service,’ The Honest Ulsterman, September 2024, https://www.humag.co/features/the-writer-naming-service#:~:text=A%20Writer%20Naming%20Service.,writing%20success%20as%20Anne%20Enright. [^{^}]
2. O’Nolan to Whelan in Flann O’Brien, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), 221. [^{^}]
3. Oliver J. Conroy, ‘How Elon Musk’s X became the global right’s supercharged front page,’ Guardian, 4 January 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/04/elon-musk-x-trump-far-right; 9 July 2025; Asgard, Zak, ‘The left-wing social media site Bluesky that’s become a digital insane asylum,’ Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2025, https://www.co.uk/news/2025/07/09/left-wing-social-media-site-bluesky-insane/. [^{^}]
4. Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O’Brien), The Best of Myles (Flamingo, 1993), 169. All further references from The Best of Myles will be provided in brackets in the text. [^{^}]
5. Rosemary Jenkinson, ‘Short-story writers are infinitely more creative than novelists,’ 15 June 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/short-story-writers-are-infinitely-more-creative-than-novelists-1.3908472. [^{^}]
6. Ian O’Doherty, ‘Aosdána – the gift that keeps on taking,’ Irish Independent, 2 May 2014. [^{^}]
7. Rosemary Jenkinson, ‘All About Erin,’ Books Ireland, April 2025, https://booksirelandmagazine.com/all-about-erin-a-short-story-by-rosemary-jenkinson/. [^{^}]
8. 26 March 2025. [^{^}]
9. Sian Cain, ‘Sally Rooney’s “sensuous lips”: Book reviewer puts the ick into critic,’ Irish Times, 13 August 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/sally-rooney-s-sensuous-lips-book-reviewer-puts-the-ick-into-critic-1.3984828. [^{^}]
10. Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado, ‘Likeability,’ Dublin Review of Books, November 2020, https://drb.ie/likeability/. @drdawnmiranda, 17/08/2020: Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado on X: “My piece on Irish women writers and ‘likeability’ is in today’s @dubreviewbooks – it is a case study of recent examples of coded misogyny in literary criticism targeting Sally Rooney, Anne Enright, Edna O’Brien & Anna Burns. Read it here: https://t.co/Q6Fx5XaFwQ https://t.co/EAqBqqG78U”/X [^{^}]
11. Éamon Sweeney, ‘James Kelman: ‘Irish writers get cushy jobs because they never challenge a single damn thing. Irish Times, 17 March 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/james-kelman-irish-writers-get-cushy-jobs-because-they-never-challenge-a-single-damn-thing-1.3425295. [^{^}]

References