Flann O’Brien conference in Prague is the largest yet

When Brian O’Nolan died, almost 50 years ago, his writing career was dismissed by one influential critic as a “ruin”.

But if it remains a ruin, half a century later, it continues to attract enormous interest from archaeologists.

The latest International Flann O'Brien Conference - named after the best known of his multiple pseudonyms - is being held in Prague and is the largest yet, attracting 65 academics from at least a dozen countries including Brazil, Singapore and China.

And after similar events in Vienna (2011) and Rome (2013), there's still no sign of them running out of things to talk about.

The Prague event runs for an unprecedented four days. At this rate, O’Nolan’s ruin is in danger of World Heritage Site status.

Further proof of his enduring appeal was the now-traditional ceremony yesterday when, welcoming guests to this conference, the co-founders of the International Flann O’Brien Society named the city to host the next one.

There had been rumours of a late bid by Qatar, a country that most observers believed to be far too hot, and sober, for engaging in high-class literary criticism.

So there was general relief when Paul Fagan, the Sepp Blatter of the society, announced that the 2017 event would be going to Salzburg.

The irony of O’Nolan’s increasingly global cult is that he rarely left home himself.

He is thought to have made a single overseas trip: to Germany in the early 1930s.

Apart from that, he confined himself to Ireland, and indeed to Dublin.

Civil service

A career civil servant by day, he was unlikely ever to opt for literary exile in London or Paris.

But his fate was sealed by the death of his father when O’Nolan was in his mid-20s.

Thereafter he assumed responsibility for a family of 12, and accepted the burden without complaint for the rest of his life.

He double-jobbed for much of that life, writing The Irish Times’s Cruiskeen Lawn column as Myles na gCopaleen for 26 years, with varying frequency.

Along with alcoholism, the column was blamed for his lack of literary activity between 1943 and 1960.

But the collected Cruiskeen Lawn is now generally treated as a free-wheeling literary masterpiece in itself.

It's the subject of many of this week's papers, including tomorrow's keynote address by Catherine Flynn of the University of California.

After yesterday's opening session, those attending were last night entertained at a reception in the Irish Embassy, hosted by Ambassador Charles Sheehan. Other events during the week include a "Flann-flavoured whiskey tasting".

The conference will end on Saturday with a farewell dinner at which awards will be presented for the best recent works of Flann or Myles-related criticism.

According to the organisers, there has been an “explosion” of such work in recent years. This was not a pun, although it could be.

To remind participants not to take themselves too seriously, the awards are named after a fictional protagonist of O’Brien’s The Hard Life, Fr Kurt Fahrt SJ.