Colm Ó Briain
Born: November 23rd, 1943
Died: July 30th, 2020
The death of Colm Ó Briain marks the end of an extraordinary career featuring many unique contributions to Irish arts, culture and public policy. With a social and artistic flair aided by his own unique vision and energy, as well as gift for assembling and inspiring talented collaborators, Ó Briain was involved in a remarkable range of enterprises and initiatives.
A Dubliner, born in Holles Street, he was a member of a large and talented family which was particularly interested in drama and music, and in which the children, including Colm, were all brought up as Irish speakers. His father, Peter, started his career in Baxendales hardware emporium, and eventually owned his own business. His mother, Brid Ward, was a teacher who had to resign on marriage: her mother had been a personal friend of Eamon de Valera.
He received his post-primary education at Belvedere College. Contemporaries still recall his performance as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (John Bowman played Mr Worthing) and his exceptional talent was singled out for praise in The Belvederian by Cyril Cusack.
He qualified as a barrister at King’s Inns, as well as receiving his BCL and LLB at University College Dublin. His academic career was punctuated by his passion for drama and performance, but he never practised at the Bar. The legal profession’s loss was others’ gain, as he embarked almost seamlessly on a range of artistic, journalistic and administrative activities marked by inventiveness and a willingness to take risks, as well as by a profoundly democratic sensibility.
A sign of all of this was the foundation in 1966 of Project 67, the precursor of the Project Arts Centre. This was initiated by a meeting in the Gate Theatre when Ó Briain, benefiting from his legal knowledge, arranged that a number of banned writers, including Edna O’Brien (whose work had been seized by the Customs), could read from their works on stage without any legal hindrance.
Gifts
His abiding characteristic was a willingness – and an ability – to push the boundaries of what was possible in the arts, widening the definition of that field most decisively at a time, as his friend and colleague Ciaran Benson put it, “when older categories of ‘fine art’ were being jostled by newer ones seeking recognition”. These gifts were allied to a combination of idealism and integrity which – occasionally at the cost of some personal unpopularity – remained a hallmark of his professional life.
His time in RTÉ featured distinctive contributions to a wide range of programming, including Brogeen Follows the Magic Children (the author Patricia Lynch was a friend of his parents), a relaxed, wonderfully illuminating interview with the academician Sean Keating, and a wide range of journalistically challenging current affairs programmes. The most controversial of the latter was a studio discussion following a London meeting between then taoiseach Jack Lynch and British prime minister Edward Heath, when a number of Irish politicians refused to share the same part of the studio with Sinn Féin representatives, an arrangement which some critics wrongly assumed had been designed by RTÉ to exalt the Sinn Féin interviewees.
In 1975, at the age of 31, he was appointed as the first full-time director of the Arts Council. He not only broadened the council’s remit to include many younger artists in hitherto unfavoured areas (painting had up to then ruled the roost) but, just a year later, demonstrated his creative iconoclasm in a lunchtime lecture on “performance art” in the National Gallery. For this he donned a motor-cycle helmet and visor, a pair of flippers and shorts and used a television camera to show his face to the audience. As Brian P Kennedy pointed out in his later book on the Arts Council, Ó Briain’s point was that events had to have more than mere impact as happenings if they were to be regarded as art. His creative implementation of the original concept of Aosdána is seen by many as the crowning achievement of his Arts Council career.
Later, as director of the National College of Art and Design, he was unsuccessful in a plan to move that College from its inner-city base to a potentially exciting new existence on the UCD campus in Belfield, because those who then had the power to frustrate that initiative simply prevented it. Equally, his two-year tenure as general secretary of the Labour Party, to which he always remained loyal, was marked by a reformist zeal which proved unsettling, and ultimately therefore unacceptable, to power brokers of a different stripe.
Productive period
Successes and frustrations like these apart, he had an extraordinarily productive period as special adviser to Michael D Higgins as Minister for Arts and Culture, which gave him a key role in the drafting and passage of a number of important pieces of legislation. These included the country’s first ever plan for the arts, incentives for the film industry, and the creation of Dúchas, as well as legislation for cultural institutions and legacy gifts to the nation.
Some of those who served as civil servants in that department still remember, with awe, the pugnacity and determination with which he and his minister challenged – and frequently defeated – the mandarins in the Department of Finance who jealously guarded the national purse-strings.
In later years he used his talents and energies in many different ways – never as a mere journeyman, but as an initiator, a creator, and an inspiration to many. He could pop up, it seemed, almost anywhere – University College, Dublin, where he lectured on Arts Management, and the Irish Times Book Awards, which he sometimes chaired, were among many other organisations to benefit from his generosity with his time and talents.
He is survived by his wife Muireann (nee McHugh), and their two daughters Aisling and Seona – their other daughter Neasa died in infancy – and by his siblings Piaras, Art, Garry, Mairin and Bairbre. He left his body to UCD for medical research.