Life
1892-1973; b. Dublin, ed. UCD; appointed special director of the Abbey
when co-opted as a funded National Theatre by Cosgrave’s Free State
Government, 1924; objected to The Plough and the Stars in view
of the presence of the prostitute Rosie in the pub with the Tricolour;
Prof. of Economics, UCD 1926-61; Labour Organisation (1921); An
Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (1923); Agricultural
Economics (1929); The Four Green Fields (Talbot
1936); The Phantom of Plenty (1948), and his best known work, The
Economic History of Ireland, 3 vols. (London/Dublin 1918-21); there
is a life by James Meehan (1980). DIW FDA OCEL
[ top ]
Criticism
Joseph Lee, Modernisation of Ireland, 1850-1918 (Dublin
1973), pp. 113, 117, 129, 350, 571
A. N. Jeffares, W B Yeats, A New Biography (Macmillan 1988), p.283.
David S. Johnson and Liam Kennedy in ‘Nationalist historiography and the decline of the Irish economy, George O’Brien revisited’, in Ireland’s Histories, Aspects of State, Society and Ideology, ed. Sean Hutton and Paul Stewart (1991), pp.11-35.
Liam Kennedy, ‘The Union of Ireland and Britain, 1801-1921’, in Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (IIS/QUB 1996).
[ top ]
Notes
Hyland Catalogue No. 214 lists An Essay on Medieval Economic Teaching
(1920); The Economic History of Ireland in [...] the Seventeenth Century
(1919)
In prefatory remarks, Gwynn writes, ‘In the later part of the work,
nothing has been of so much service for my purpose as Mr George O’Brien’s
three volumes on the Economic History of Ireland from the seventeenth
century to the great famine,’ and that Douglas Hyde’s Literary
History of Ireland, though a less definite influence in common with
works by JR Green, ‘has affected by whole outlook’. [History
of Ireland, Talbot 1923].
O’Brien professed The Plough and the Stars ‘excellent’, but insisted to alterations after discussion with the highly antagonistic M. J. Dolan, actor-manager of the Abbey. (See Anthony Butler, ‘The Abbey Daze’, in Sean McCann, ed., The World of Sean O’Casey, Four Square 1966, p.96.)
D. H. Akenson and J. F. Fallin, ‘The Irish Civil War and the Drafting of the Free State Constitution’, Éire-Ireland, 5, 2 (Summer 1970), pp.42-93; notes that O'Brien was called in as a consultant to the Irish Provisional Government during the drafting of the Free State Constitution.
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)