Obituaries

Michael O’Brien obituary: Successful Irish publisher with radical streak who championed Irish writers

The O’Brien Press founder and artist was a ‘force of nature’ with a ‘beautiful mind and spirit’

Michael O’Brien: ‘We decided to create a new literature for Irish children that didn’t exist. The area was dominated by the British, to the extent that they were reinventing Irish culture with very corny Oirish things, while Irish writers, in order to get published, were becoming Anglophile.’ Photograph: Fergal Phillips

Sat Aug 13 2022 - 00:01

Born: 04/07/1941

Died: 31/07/2022

Michael O’Brien, who has died aged 81, was a successful Irish publisher. He founded the O’Brien Press, one of the first independent Irish imprints of the modern era, out of a determination that Irish authors should be published in their own country, by Irish publishers, operating to the highest international standards.

He was also an artist and a politically left-leaning activist with an abiding interest in built heritage. A bundle of energy and enthusiasm, he could be messianic in his determination to achieve his goals, building teams, and at times straining friendships but rarely to breaking point.

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His funeral this week was attended by President Michael D Higgins, who took the unusual step of addressing mourners at the end of the service. He told the congregation in Christ Church Presbyterian church in Rathgar, Dublin, that the publisher had a “beautiful mind and spirit”, that their friendship had been special and was founded on O’Brien’s “values and instincts”.

O’Brien was born in Dublin in July 1941, the second of seven children of Thomas and Anne O’Brien (née Sevitt). The family had an unusual back story, which O’Brien researched in his latter years and was due to feature in an autobiography, on which he was working at the time of his death.

His mother Anne O’Brien was of Crimean Jewish stock. Her father, Abraham Sjevitovsky, was born in Simferopol in the late 19th century.

He boarded a ship in Hamburg bound, he thought, for New York. Arriving in London’s East End, he fell in with the only people he could understand — other Yiddish speaking Jewish refugee migrants from Russia and eastern Europe.

He became a salesman for a garment shop and, about 1898, moved to Liverpool, working as a tailor. There, he met Liba (later anglicised to Elizabeth) Garmidar, a Jewish woman whose people also came from southern Ukraine.

The couple married in 1901 and in 1908, moved to Dublin where Abraham had a brother, Solomon, and slotted into the burgeoning Jewish community centred around the South Circular Road and Portobello.

Abraham Sjevitovsky still spoke Yiddish but gradually picked up English. Perhaps better to facilitate his family’s integration, he simplified their surname to Sevitt. Abraham Sevitt became a founding member of the Tailor’s Guild and lived on Martin Street, where Anne Sevitt grew up.

O’Brien’s father, Thomas O’Brien, was a left-wing trade unionist and a Catholic from Phibsboro. He and Anne met through the New Theatre Group, which he cofounded and which existed from 1937 to 1943 and had a magazine, Surge, for which he wrote.

Thomas was also a republican and a communist, and was one of 150 volunteers who left Ireland with Frank Ryan in 1938 to join the Connolly Unit of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

He and Anne had their first child, Sonya, when they were unmarried and because of the mixed faith of their families were ostracised and went to live in a wooden bungalow on Sidmonton Road in Bray, Co Wicklow. Six more children followed. The boys — Michael, Dermot and Brendan — were all given conventional Irish male names, while the girls — Ruth, Deborah and Miriam — were, like Sonya, given names more associated with the Jewish tradition.

The couple were activists and innovators. In 1948, they helped set up the People’s College, an adult education association that took its cue from James Larkin’s pronouncement in 1914 that the working class “had to be free, not only economically, but intellectually”. It offered general education in the humanities, politics and communication skills for trade unionists and their families.

Michael O’Brien grew up in St Teresa’s Road in Kimmage to where the family moved in 1951 when he was 10. He had attended St Andrew’s National School in Bray and continued into St Mary’s in Crumlin before going to Clogher Road technical college.

He went on to study at the National College of Art, later the NCAD, then located on Kildare Street.

He began his working life as an employee of Taylor Signs. A salesman, he was able to enhance his pitch to clients by drawing mock-ups showing what a shop front would be like if his suggested sign was bought.

Thomas O’Brien, meantime, had been something of a jack of all trades. He founded the printing firm of E & O’Brien (the E stood for Eleanor O’Brien, who was not a relation). It began life in Parliament Street in Dublin before moving to Clare Street, and was joined, when in his mid-20s, by Michael.

Tom started printing books of interest to the left and which were shunned by established publishers. Among the first, in 1974, was Peadar O’Donnell — Irish social rebel by Michael McInerney, a communist and then Political Correspondent of The Irish Times.

The move prompted father and son to set up the O’Brien Press in the same year — creating separate printing and publishing entities.

The next book was Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin by Éamonn MacThomáis. Written by MacThomáis while he was serving time in Mountjoy Jail, Michael O’Brien visited him weekly, bringing in pencils and paper, and exiting with the latest written material for the book. Some book sellers declined initially to stock the book, but it was wildly successful and established the O’Brien Press as a player.

Thomas O’Brien died suddenly in 1974 and son Dermot took over the printing business, while Michael ran the publishing.

Given his antecedents, it is not surprising that Michael O’Brien had a radical streak. He could be conversationally provocative and often deployed an impish sense of humour.

At times, he espoused republican nationalist views, but was progressive in all that he did. He abhorred discrimination of any kind and championed the cause of minorities, often giving them voice through publishing.

He was passionate about Ireland’s built heritage, the environment and culture — all aspects of his personality and outlook that were reflected in the more than 2,000 works published by the O’Brien Press since 1974.

Groundbreaking titles included Hands off Dublin by Deirdre Kelly; Dublin — the story of a city by Stephen Conlin and Peter Harbison; Viking Dublin Exposed — the Wood Quay Saga by John Bradley (ed), in which O’Brien played a leading role; Skellig, Island Outpost of Europe by Des Lavelle; Tinkers and Travellers by Sharon Gmelch; When Love Comes to Town by Tom Lennon; Fear of the Collar by Patrick Touher; and a host of children’s books, including Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna, Amelia by Siobhán Parkinson, Something Beginning with P by Seamus Cashman (ed) and The Story of Ireland by Brendan O’Brien.

While competitive within the industry, O’Brien championed publishing in general and collaborated with rival colleagues, among them Seamus Cashman of Wolfhound Press, John Spillane of Mercier Press, and Ann Tannahill from Blackstaff Press. He and Cashman founded Irish Book Handling, while O’Brien also set up iBbY Ireland, the local branch of the international organisation that promotes literature for young people, and the Irish Children’s Book Trust, which evolved into Children’s Books Ireland.

Described by his son Ivan, current MD of the company, as “always on a mission about something,” he was also “massively self-confident ... [and] he felt he could change reality through the sheer force of his will ... He was a force of nature, a bull in a china shop”.

Michael O’Brien married, firstly, Valerie Price, who he met at a dance in Newbridge. They had three children — Ivan, Eoin and Dara — but separated in 1991. Another son, Ferdia, followed from a separate relationship. In 2012, he married Svetlana Pironko, a literary agent of Russian and Kazakhstan extraction with, coincidently, a grandfather from Simferopol.

Outside of family, publishing and current affairs, O’Brien was a keen and accomplished sailor, a lover of music and a consumer of culture. He and Svetlana were inseparable, and were regular visitors to galleries and exhibitions in Paris, where they maintained an apartment.

She and Valerie survive him, as do his children and his grandchildren Alice, Killian, Art, Sally, Grace and Ruby, his sisters Sonya, Ruth and Miriam, and brothers Dermot and Brendan. He was predeceased by his sister Deborah.

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