Life
1809-1885, b. Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary; ordained [?Maynooth]; worked
in Nova Scotia; joined All Hallows Missionary College, Dublin; PP of Newcastle
West, Co. Limerick; and Dean of Limerick, 1859 [var. 1865]; contrib. to
The Nation as ‘Fr Baptist’; fnd. Catholic Young Men’s
Society, 1849, to provide ground for mutual support of Catholic laymen
in advancement of their religious interests; in politics a Home Ruler
and in religion an anti-liberal ultramontanist in the mould of Pius IX;
contrib. the Nation, pseud. ‘Baptist’, and The Irish
Catholic Magazine; his novels incl. Jack Hazlitt, AM,
serialised in first issues of The Irish Monthly, 1873-74; set in
Shannon and America, the story of a child of a mixed marriage - who degenerates
morally in consequence of ‘a fine liberal education’; The
D’Altons of Crag (1882), a novel of land-troubles prior to 1848
in which a servant is framed for a murder perpetrated by a member of the
gentry on a wealthy kinsman, much concerned with Irish people and their
priests; and Ailey Moore (1856), in which Gerald Moore, a Catholic
of good family, is charged with the murder of the landlord Skerin, though
actually perpetrated by Snapper, the land-agent whom Gerald’s sister
has rebuffed; wrote religious works. PI IF DIW DIH MKA SUTH OCIL
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Works
Ailey Moore, A Tale of the Times, Showing How the Evictions,
Murder And Such-like Pastimes Are Managed and Justice Administered in
Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy 1856; 3rd edn. 1867); Jack Hazlitt
AM, A Hibernian-American Story (1875) The D’Altons of Crag
(Duffy 1882).
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Criticism
Michael I. Egan, Life of Dean O’Brien, Founder of the Catholic
Young Men’s Society (Gill 1949), 132p.
Edward Manley, ‘Richard Baptist O’Brien, Dean of Limerick (1809-85)’ [M.A. thesis] (NUI Maynooth 1991).
James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), Part I: ‘Upper Middle-Class Fiction 1873-1890’, pp.54-58.
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Notes
Belfast Public Library holds R. B. O’Brien, Ailey Moore (1856)
‘"Why do you not forget the past?", say Englishmen over
and over again to us. We answer, because you have never allowed us. By
centuries of misrule you have kept alive its bitter memories. It is impossible
not to feel that there hangs over the country something like the shadow
of the curse of past wrongs.’ (The Irish Land Question, 1881,
p.5; cited in Chris Morash, ‘Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition:
Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’, in Morash, ed., Literature
and the Supernatural, Lilliput 1996, pp.95-118; p.112.)
‘The Communists threaten Pars. The republicans hold Spain. The jews and Freemasons hold Austria. Fidelity to conscience is in Switzerland forfeiture of right. Germany whips and robs the expatriates conscinece. Victor Emmanuel has made Rome the grave of conscience and locked the prison door upon the only power on earth that can restore and give healthy activity!’ (Jack Hazlitt, The Irish Monthly, 1, 1874, p.98; cited in James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, Conn: Greenwood Press 1997, p.57.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)