In an account of an 1810 walking tour through his home county of Tyrone, Dr John Gamble, lately of London, describes his first tree-obscured glimpses of the town of Strabane as realising ‘the visions of the poets’ through views that might call to mind the rolling hills of legendary ‘Arcadia’ or, somewhat more modestly, a ‘Venice in miniature’ set in the foothills of the Sperrins.¹ As with the imagined barracks of one of the town’s future famous authors, however, Dr Gamble found that Strabane resisted any easy review of its aesthetic dimensions, at least at first glance. The town, once one arrives in it, is not without its signs of wear, writes Gamble, with many houses in dire need of improvement – usual markers of ‘misery and neglect’ – although, he adds, this is curiously not evident in the residents. These, he writes, are primarily pious folk, generally in faithful obedience to Strabane’s ‘excellent’ police force, yet nonetheless steadfast patrons of the town’s boast-worthy two public houses. At this time, the town’s centre, marking the divide between its churches and its busy, mercantile riverbank, was dominated by a single, plainly built market-house, atop which sat what was locally known as the ‘lying clock of Strabane’ – a government-constructed instrument which, Gamble notes, ‘proclaimed the hour with more noise than veracity.’² It is at this very site, on the flat-ironed corner of modern-day Derry Road and Railway Street – a junction that still broadly divides the town’s uneasy halves – that Strabane Library and the internationally esteemed Alley Theatre now stand. With its history of balancing pub-going and piety while upholding a healthy distrust of governmental pronouncements, the warmth with which the Alley received the three-day gathering held here for the 8th International Flann O’Brien Conference (25–27 June 2025) handily marks it as a global stronghold of the Mylesian ethos and an ideal site for Flann’s homecoming.

Conference proceedings began with a bracing constitutional around Strabane’s key Mylesian sites. Early arrivals among the Flann clan were treated to a wonderful tour of the town, scripted by the nigh-omniscient Michael Kennedy, chairman of the Strabane Historical Society and O’Brien aficionado. Such was the success of this initial, exploratory Flann safari that rumour has it several competing walking tours have been operating in the town ever since, whose rivalry is said to be so violent that a new one-way system has been introduced to prevent the bands of Flannoraks from ever meeting and, presumably, exchanging blows.

Swift on the heels of the tour, attendees were treated to a hearty lunch and a warm welcome in Strabane’s Alley Theatre. Over the generous fare on offer, delegates witnessed the launch of Abhainn Burn River, a tri-lingual triumph of stories produced by students from schools in surrounding Donegal and Tyrone, inspired by the man from Strabane. With this central image of Strabane at the crossroads of three lapping rivers and three overlapping languages, the conference could make its jubilant – and thematically relevant – start.

Filing into the Alley’s impressively vertiginous central theatre space, Eoin McGloin opened the symposium with a discussion of O’Brien’s psychedelic debt to Aldous Huxley, tracing how the scattered visionaries across Flann’s five novels achieve their transcendental voyages through the unorthodox routes of lethargy and starvation. I gave my own paper on this panel, in which I discussed the forerunner of the science of self-help, Samuel Smiles, and his Irish, literary afterlives – even having the gall to suggest a few negative aspects to the genre’s modern expressions (while manifestly being neither a member of the 5am club nor even someone who bears the markings of a particularly exhaustive skin-care routine). Joseph LaBine concluded matters with a fascinating exploration of Brian O’Nolan and Niall Montgomery’s decidedly modern(ist) views on poetics, his discussion touching on the ‘Celtic Realism’ of O’Nolan’s MA thesis and its various debts to the imagisms of Pound and others in the 1910s. Across his paper, LaBine drew valuably on his ongoing and vital work in unearthing the literary and broader cultural contributions of Niall Montgomery to mid-century Ireland, particularly in Montgomery’s role as editor and frequent stand-in for Flann.

Following a coffee break, discussion resumed with society president Maebh Long delivering an enthralling talk on O’Nolan’s shifting editorial sensibilities and how they corresponded with periods of sickness and health during his tenure at the Irish Times. The paper also carried forward the conference’s ongoing exploration of the artistic collaboration between O’Nolan and Montgomery as co-editors of countless editions of the Cruiskeen Lawn. José Lanters picked up this context of O’Brien’s time at the Times, offering a compelling reading of its editor between 1934 and 1954, R.M. Smyllie, as the literary inspiration for the first of O’Brien’s three Policemen, Sergeant Pluck. As if that were not work enough, Lanters went on to make a convincing case for a candidate for the second of O’Brien’s constabulary – the infinitesimally inventive MacCruiskeen – as none other than quantum physicist and Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies patron Erwin Schrödinger. Joe Brooker rounded off the panel with an incisive and productive response – with notes made live and in situ(!) – to the two preceding papers, sparking a fascinating back-and-forth on the proportion of solely O’Brien-authored Cruiskeen Lawn articles and whether The Third Policeman truly remained unchanged between its initial composition in 1939 and its publication nearly twenty years later.

The day’s final panel concerned O’Brien between technology and media, with three engagingly distinct papers on this theme. Maebh Murphy examined the gramophone-armed Dublin gentleman of An Béal Bocht, interpreting his coercive extraction of the Corkadoragha Gaeilge as uncannily akin to the contemporaneous use of these technologies by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. For O’Brien, Murphy argued, phonographic recordings bore the stamp of an absolute scientific objectivity and could therefore function as potent ideological instruments. Harun Šiljak, in his paper, considered how the otherworlds of The Third Policeman and the dystopic role-playing game Disco Elysium both stage the collapse of an all-too-easy empiricism. Šiljak urged us to consider how thematic overlaps between the novel and game – from the temporal dilations of Elysium’s ‘Pale’ to those of O’Brien’s ‘Parish’ – gesture toward broader, ‘weird fiction’ suspicions that history is neither linear nor dialectically inevitable. In her closing examination, Catherine Flynn undertook vital and original interpretive work on O’Brien’s 1960s RTE teleplay O’Dea’s Your Man, illuminating an often-overlooked corner of the Dubliner’s oeuvre. Flynn read the episode’s central, bickering pair, Jimmy and Ignatius, as a pointedly queer coupling and quasi-parents to the new Irish nation.

After another round of refreshments, the auditorium quickly refilled for Emily Ridge’s opening keynote of the conference. Ridge presented a fascinating, personally informed reflection on the insidious effects of government-imposed linguistic standardisation across Ireland. Coining what she calls the ‘cigire complex,’ Ridge contended that the westbound Dublin inspectors who came to oversee the fairs of An Béal Bocht’s Corkadoragha were to be found again in the non-fictional Connemara of the 1980s, pressuring a new generation of westerners to conform to a rigid discursive standard set from without. As Myles would later explore in his long run of bulletins from the proceedings of the Cruiskeen Court, Ridge’s paper brought to light how measures intended to assert Ireland’s newfound independence often ended up reproducing the very control structures of colonial power they sought to shake off.

The symposium’s first day concluded with a grand civic reception of Mylesian scope, where delegates were welcomed with addresses from Derry City and Strabane Mayor Ruairí McHugh, the Strabane Historical Society’s Michael Kennedy, and a succession of local bands and music collectives, ranging from a brass ensemble to traditional groups. The evening’s seemingly bottomless parade of prestige and regional talent left attendees in eager anticipation for the days ahead, while certain, select members of the delegation had already begun to nurse worries about the believability of their conference report.

The conference’s second morning opened with a panel advancing the growing scholarly cross-pollination between O’Brien and Huxley studies, with three papers approaching the topic from distinct angles. LaBine retook his position at the lectern with a study of O’Brien and Huxley’s twin fates as newspaper men, unearthing some reliably obscure archival material for the job. The paper opened some fascinating avenues of inquiry into how either author’s journalistic chops shaped their particular strand of modernist experimenting. Šiljak continued the panel’s trend of familiar faces by delivering his second paper of the symposium on the contrasting ways Huxley and O’Nolan generate eeriness. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Mark Fisher, he argued that while Huxley cultivates a gradual, scientifically inflected eeriness, O’Nolan’s strange atmospheres envelop the reader from page one. The panel’s final Huxley/O’Brien cocktail was a comparative study of Huxley’s Point Counter Point and O’Brien’s novels, written by Bryan Counter and delivered by Tobias Harris. Counter identified a series of persuasive correspondences between the two writers’ aesthetic methods, emphasising their shared commitment to polyphony and to the embedding of questions that remain deliberately unsettled, set against competing modern impulses towards complete systematisation.

The second keynote saw Tobias Harris examine O’Brien’s uniquely geological modernism, charting the intersections of land and language across his varied body of work. Harris invoked Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, as Giles Deleuze imagines him, to lay the conceptual groundwork for O’Brien’s account of the relationship between Ireland’s eon-spanning geological transformations and the local shiftings of parish and patter, arguing that each stratum echoes and influences its vertical neighbours. Harris’s talk excavated a series of fascinating regional connections in the Cruiskeen Lawn columns to Strabane and its surrounding topography, ranging from the shifting allegiances of pre-plantation Tyrone to its ancient, fire-god-patronising stone circles. As its title promised, the talk opened up new ground in O’Brien studies by interrogating the implications of the Dubliner’s distinctive ecolinguistics, provoking questions about the extent to which he understood Irish history and culture as geologically prefigured in its loughs and glens.

The afternoon’s action opened with two O’Brien-inspired short films directed by the brothers David and Eamon O’Kane: the first, ‘Babble,’ a quasi-colloquy between O’Nolan, Kafka, and Borges (surely members of a literary genre in dire need of a name); the second, ‘Re-enactment,’ a historical imagining of James II’s 1689 visit to Cavanacor, interspersed with passages from an O’Brien short story. This double bill served as an excellent appetiser to the opening paper of the day’s second panel, devoted to Strabane and Donegal, delivered by Marianne O’Kane Boal and concerned with creative refashionings of O’Nolan’s Strabane. O’Kane Boal examined a series of fascinating synchronicities between her family’s experiences and the O’Nolan canon, while analysing a number of now readily recognisable O’Brien-inspired works of art, including those that adorn several recent edited collections such as Flann O’Brien: Acting Out (2022) and Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour (2020). Séamus Mac Annaidh’s paper unearthed a range of compelling candidates for a Northern, pseudonymous predecessor to Myles na gCopaleen. After surveying the careers of serial hoaxers such as Myles O’Reilly and Barney McLone, Mac Annaidh suggested that O’Brien’s alter ego was essentially unique in acquiring a life of its own, to the point of generating tensions with O’Brien’s other identities. The panel closed with Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s diligent examination of the genealogy of At Swim’s malevolent author-God, Dermot Trellis, focusing in particular on the dubious claim that his name derives from its auditory similarity to the ‘trestle’ writing table that O’Brien ostensibly built for himself from the remnants of a wind-beaten garden ‘trellis.’ Ó Méalóid concluded that the story should be doubted on two grounds: an overestimation of O’Brien’s skills as a carpenter, and the strictures of the Law of the Conservation of Mass when comparing the respective sizes of desk and trellis.

Thursday’s third panel – ‘At Swim (in Transit)’ – explored questions of locomotion and language in O’Brien’s first novel. James Bacon’s paper examined Dublin’s trams as uniquely metafictional vehicles: apparently free in their cross-city glide, yet in reality constrained by concealed wires. Bacon also shed light on the ‘Ranch’ area of Inchicore, so labelled in early twentieth-century maps, suggesting it as a possible inspiration for O’Brien’s cow-punching Dubliners. In his paper, Chih-hsien Hsieh delineated the problems he identified in the original Simplified Chinese translation of At Swim, arguing that the text flattens much of O’Brien’s satire – rendering Finn’s bizarre bird-sound recitation, for instance, as a simple list of avian species native to China. Hsieh argued that his projected Taiwanese translation would seek to correct these shortcomings, which present At Swim as ‘merely an English novel’ rather than one steeped in Hiberno-English. Jeaic Mag Fhinn closed the discussion with an overview of the peculiar challenges involved in rendering At Swim-Two-Birds as Gaeilge, not least the question of whether one should attempt to emulate O’Brien’s own celebrated stylings in the Irish language. Mag Fhinn exhibited some of his own herculean efforts to translate O’Brien’s often bewilderingly verbose prose, a task marked by a strange tension between fidelity and the need to match the obscurity of the original’s reading experience. The spirit of freeform multilingualism, in fact, remained a constant across the conference’s three days, with conversation in Irish spilling from post-panel Q&As into the wood-stove-warmed rooms of Strabane’s excellent Farmers Home bar.

After a brief sojourn, the day’s final packed panel began with Rosemary Jenkins, who proposed to settle the long-debated question of whether Flann, had he been alive today, would have been more partial to Facebook or Twitter. Jenkins argued that a modern, oat-milk matcha-swilling O’Brien would in fact have been highly vulnerable to cancellation, since his indiscriminate tear-downs unsettle the contemporary paradigm of humour as strictly a matter of punching up or down. Myles Schaller took up this thread by theorising the particular contours of a Mylesian theory of trolling, including an account of their own experience submitting pseudo-abstracts to this very society. Schaller conceptualised this variety of trolling as a potentially liberatory practice, in which the disavowal of a fixed, singular subject opens the field to relativistic play. The panel’s third speaker, Robin Hull, delivered a bracing paper on the strange continuities between Huxley’s novelistic method – the ‘Novel of Ideas’ – and O’Brien’s own literary outings. In particular, Hull highlighted the two quasi-modernists’ shared conviction that the physical world is, at first encounter, inscrutable, and thus requires the artist’s intervention to be tamed and shaped into intelligible form. Closing out the panel with the conference’s most audience-participatory paper, Ellen Ferguson devoted much of her time to surveying attendees’ first encounters with the man from Strabane. The diversity of responses from delegates served to reinforce the symposium’s premise: O’Brien not merely as an academic conundrum, but as a familiar and approachable staple of Irish classrooms and parental bookshelves.

The evening’s goings-on unfolded as a lively omnibus of Flann-centred book launches and exhibition openings. First came Tobias Harris’s debut monograph, Flann O’Brien and the European Avant-Garde, 1934–45, shortlisted for a Flann O’Brien Society award, its cover featuring an expressionist pub-goer quaffing a pint of plain – a composition of Micheál Ó Nualláin’s that was also on display in the Alley Theatre’s upstairs gallery. Joseph LaBine’s first collection of Niall Montgomery’s poetry, Terminal 1: Arrivals, followed, sustaining the conference’s week-long momentum and casting fresh light on this oft-forgotten figure. Surrounding these esteemed launches was the striking and varied work of the O’Kane family, offering a range of artistic responses to the work of Brian O’Nolan. These, paired with a number of other portraits by the Brother, Micheál Ó Nualláin, made for a space not only ideal for photographs in the pages of the Derry Journal and beyond, but also, perhaps, the greatest concentration of images of Flann per square metre conceivable – and not a single Robert Farren to be seen.³

The conference’s final day opened with a panel devoted to remapping the ‘Estranged Spaces’ across O’Nolan’s work. Liam Campbell and Paddy Fitzgerald from the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies provided the week’s first and only two-hander with an exploration of the figure of the Migrant in O’Brien’s work. With its consideration of the importance of place in the construction of identity, the pair’s talk wove a number of the conference’s thematic touchstones into a lucid whole. Mikelyn Rochford read The Third Policeman and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Graveyard Clay as unique reworkings of the Irish otherworld tradition. Rather than standing in opposition to Ireland’s mid-century realisms, Rochford argued that these novels repurpose inherited afterlife conventions as especially well-suited to confronting modern problems. Alana Gillespie’s paper kept the panel’s two feet firmly in the grave with her discussion of moments of haunting in O’Brien. O’Brien’s peculiar uncanny is intimately connected with memory, Gillespie argued, in which the past undergoes a kind of defamiliarisation and thus effects a break with the subject.

Friday’s second, streamlined panel saw Brian Lambkin and Brian Ó Conchubhair impressively ground O’Brien in two novel Irish contexts. Lambkin’s paper read At Swim within the eighth- and ninth-century ‘Culdee’ tradition – the distinctively Celtic blend of saint and sage – finding its stand-ins in the novel both in the figure of Saint Moling and, variously, in the student narrator himself. The latter, Lambkin argued, particularly embodied this tradition through his (spare-time) habit of composing in the dark, traditionally the space of bardic inspiration. Ó Conchubhair, fresh from winning the Society’s ‘Best best-length work’ award, offered an account of O’Brien’s ‘other’ family, the Gormleys. In a paper replete with biographical discoveries, Ó Conchubhair suggested the intriguing possibility that R. M. Smyllie, when he first granted the youthful O’Nolan his regular column in The Irish Times at the Palace Bar, may not have been dealing with a stranger, but rather the nephew of Gormley, the well-regarded journalist.

In the week’s final keynote address, Michael Pierse offered a compelling comparative analysis of the shared suspicions held by Brendan Behan and O’Brien towards the newly independent Irish state, particularly with regard to strands of cultural revivalism and the cynical romanticisation of certain vanguard classes as prototypical citizenry. Pierse focused in particular on the case of Lizzie O’Neill, whose 1925 murder and the subsequent acquittal of those responsible served as an emblematic instance of the new state’s readiness to reproduce colonial cultures of cruelty towards society’s most marginalised – a charge repeatedly levelled by both writers under discussion. Drawing on a range of post-colonial critics, Pierse argued that both Dubliners located the possibility of true independence not in a false recovery of the past, but in the conscious remaking of the Irish subject in pursuit of new forms of being.

The conference’s final panel returned attention to a number of often-forgotten O’Brien writings to be found in magazines and journals. Tess Finnegan Burchmore considered O’Brien’s variously pseudonymous contributions to the nonplus magazine, particularly those attributed to a certain ‘Father Prout.’ Burchmore identified in Prout’s pronouncements the form – familiar from Myles’s Cruiskeen Lawn – of the found manuscript topos, which she linked to Derridean conceptions of the archive in which a text is preserved even as it is allowed to remain permanently ephemeral. Elliot Mills delivered the conference’s final paper, offering a consideration of O’Brien’s navigation of the pragmatics of publishing and its networks of necessary compromise. Mills focused in particular on O’Brien’s contributions to Seán Ó Faoláin’s The Bell, arguing that O’Brien was compelled to reproduce the expectations of a certain mode of social commentary even as he appeared to lampoon them.

At the conference’s closing dinner in Strabane’s Oysters restaurant, sincere thanks and gifts were exchanged among the organising committee and keynote speakers, with particular gratitude expressed to Louise Boyce and the staff of the magnificent Alley Theatre, without whom Flann’s homecoming would have been but a shadow of its eventual triumph. On my own homecoming drive to Belfast that evening, returning to what I hoped was a sound-asleep two-year-old, I reflected on the conference’s aim to reground Flann in the landscapes of his childhood: on how the week’s papers had prompted a reconsideration of origins and points of connection, and of the image of a dark-hatted, ambitious young writer nervously heading into the Palace Bar with the hope that his Strabane roots might already have smoothed his path.

For those who would like to hear some of the sounds of the conference, ‘The Society in Strabane’ by Maebh Murphy is a special edition of Tobias W. Harris’s podcast, Radio Myles, which presents an engaging compilation of voices, atmospheres and ceol from the event. You can find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, Youtube and Substack.

Notes

1. John Gamble, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, in Dublin, and the North of Ireland, in 1810 (Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1826), 282. [^{^}]
2. Gamble, Sketches of History, 283. [^{^}]
3. Farren, a poet and friend of O’Nolan, has become the subject of an ongoing case of false identity: his image is frequently – and falsely – used to top articles about O’Brien and, perhaps most scandalously, to front the edition of his collected novels. For further discussion of this phenomenon, see Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s article ‘Robert “Pen-face” Farren: the Man Who Wasn’t’ at https://slovobooks.blogspot.com/2020/08/robert-pen-face-farren-man-who-wasnt.html. [^{^}]

References