Oliver St John Gogarty

Clongowes 1896-1897 I Oliver St John Gogarty

Oliver St John Gogarty (1878-1957), surgeon, politician and man of letters, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1896-7. He graduated in medicine from TCD in 1904, where he won prizes for poetry, excelled in sport (especially swimming and cycling), and earned a reputation for rumbustious living and bawdy wit. Throughout his life he was a renowned conversationalist. After a spell in Oxford, where he came second in the Newdigate poetry prize, he studied ear, nose and throat surgery in Vienna and was appointed to a consultancy post in the Meath Hospital. He proved a capable surgeon with a reputation for dexterity and speed. He frequently remitted the fees of poorer patients. He became a friend of Arthur Griffith, spoke at the founding meeting of Sinn Féin in 1905 and was a regular contributor to its early publications. During the Troubles, he accommodated the Sinn Féin headquarters files in his house and sheltered IRA men ‘on the run’, including Michael Collins. In 1922-36 he was an active senator and a passionate supporter of the Free State government. His country home at Renvyle in Connemara was burned in reprisal, and in 1923 he escaped republican kidnappers only by swimming across the Liffey. He later rebuilt Renvyle and converted it into a hotel. As a politician, he campaigned strongly for slum clearance in Dublin. In 1901 he became a friend of James Joyce, and they shared the Martello Tower in Sandycove for a brief period in 1904, but soon differed. Joyce later depicted Gogarty in unflattering terms as ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ in the opening scene of Ulysses. He was also a close associate of WB Yeats, who included seventeen of his poems in his Oxford book of English verse (1936). Apart from poetry, he wrote plays for the Abbey Theatre, novels – one of which was banned – and a study of St Patrick. His reminiscences of the halcyon days of his youth As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) embroiled him in a costly libel action, which he lost. In 1939 he settled in America, where he continued to pursue a literary career.