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Flann O'Brien: Gallows Humour is the first study to offer a sustained focus on biopolitical themes in the work of Brian O’Nolan. With this collection, editors Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan show how wider vistas are now clearly open for research into the post-Revival politics of the Irish writer, but also how a more refined lens on the historical and political environment that nurtured (or, indeed, stoked the ire of) O’Nolan’s wit can provide tantalising new avenues for investigation. It is in this dual movement—of expanding scope and concentrated focus—that the critical merit of Gallows Humour lies, as it affords future scholars a wealth of novel methodologies and a multitude of exciting critical directions.

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.