“F___ the County Council”: Local Government and Biopolitical Allegory in Flann O’Brien.

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between Brian O’Nolan’s writing and his career as a civil servant in the Irish Department of Local Government and Public Health. O’Nolan’s references to local government and the ambiguity of the law in Cruiskeen Lawn and The Third Policeman are placed in their proper historical context. By examining the contradictions of the Irish local government and local justice systems (from the pre-independence era to the Free State and successive administrations) a portrait emerges of O’Nolan as a writer of Irish biopolitics, who is concerned with the paradoxical relationship between national government and local organs of power. Biopolitical themes of legal and bureaucratic aporia are situated in the context of recent scholarly writing about the law, sovereignty, and the body in O’Nolan. The article also gives examples of historical episodes that were likely formative influences on his narrative style of political critique. From local issues such as land appropriation, to O’Nolan’s role as secretary to the tribunal of inquiry into a fire at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan, a new image can be constructed of the author as a critic of Irish justice and a theorist of biopolitical concerns.