Fintan O'Toole (born 16 February 1958) is an Irish journalist, literary editor, and drama critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988.[1] O'Toole was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001 and is Advising Editor and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator.
In 2011, O'Toole was named by The Observer as one of "Britain's top 300 intellectuals", despite not being British nor living in the United Kingdom.[2] In 2012 and 2013, O'Toole was a visiting lecturer in Irish letters at Princeton University and contributed to the Fund for Irish Studies Series.[3][4]
Early life and education
O'Toole was born in Dublin in a working-class family.[1] He was educated at Scoil Íosagáin and Coláiste Chaoimhín in Crumlin (both run by the Christian Brothers) and at University College Dublin (UCD). He graduated from the university in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy.[5][6]
Career
Soon after graduation, O'Toole became drama critic of In Dublin magazine in 1980. He joined the Sunday Tribune on its relaunch by Vincent Browne in 1983, and worked as its drama critic, literary editor, arts editor, and feature writer. From 1986 to 1987 he edited Magill magazine.
O'Toole joined The Irish Times as a columnist in 1988 and his columns have appeared twice-weekly ever since. He took a sabbatical in 1990–1991 to work as literary adviser to the Abbey Theatre. In 1994 he was one of the presenters for the last season of BBC TV'sThe Late Show. From 1997 to 2001 he was drama critic of the Daily News in New York. In 2011, he was appointed as literary editor of The Irish Times. He also has published articles regularly in the New York Review of Books, and The Guardian.[7][non-primary source needed]
In 2017, O'Toole was commissioned by Faber and Faber to write the official biography of Seamus Heaney. O'Toole said of the process that his "one terror is that [Heaney's] favourite communication mode was the fax, and faxes fade."[8]
In 2018, he was awarded the UCD Alumni Award in Arts & Humanities.[6]
Views
O'Toole has criticised what he sees as negative attitudes toward immigration in Ireland, the state of Ireland's public services, growing inequality during Ireland's economic boom,[9][non-primary source needed] the Iraq War, and the U.S. military's use of Shannon Airport, among many other issues. In 2006, he spent six months reporting for The Irish Times in China.[10]
O'Toole's former editor, Geraldine Kennedy, was paid more than the editor of the UK's top non-tabloid newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation about nine times that of The Irish Times. Later, O'Toole told a rival Irish paper, the Sunday Independent:
We as a paper are not shy of preaching about corporate pay and fat cats but with this, there is a sense of excess. Some of the sums mentioned are disturbing. This is not an attack on Ms Kennedy, it is an attack on the executive level of pay. There is double-standard of seeking more job cuts while paying these vast salaries.[11]
In June 2012, O'Toole compared the Irish Constitutional Convention to the American Citizens Union, a reformist political organisation that the New York City political machine Tammany Hall did not bother to suppress so long as it did not threaten its hegemony.[12]
In August 2019, after the selection of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, O'Toole proposed to get Parliament to back an alternative Cabinet who would push back the October deadline for Brexit to allow a trade deal to be negotiated. The proposal required seven Sinn Féin MPs in northern Irish border constituencies to resign in favour of a pact between the four largest anti-Brexit parties in Ireland, thereby triggering by-elections at a certain date in mid-September. O’Toole believed they would result in a more hardline anti-Brexit parliamentary faction that would make a stronger case for a no-confidence vote in Johnson.[13][non-primary source needed] The proposal was sharply criticised by Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who claimed the existing anti-Brexit factions in Parliament were strong enough without the party making too many policy concessions.[14][non-primary source needed]
A 26 June 2018 column in The Irish Times by O'Toole examined how the Donald Trump administration's policies and public-facing communications about immigration and asylum-seekers from Mexico might be deliberately calculated to bring elements of fascism to the U.S.[15][non-primary source needed] An April 2020 column in The Irish Times asserted that Trump's destruction of the public image and reputation of the United States culminated with his bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis,[16][non-primary source needed] and that subsequently pity was the only appropriate feeling for the American people, the majority of whom had not voted for him.
In a 2024 New York Review of Books essay, O'Toole rejects the common interpretation of William Shakespeare's tragedies in terms of protagonists' flaws leading to their own destruction. "So what does Shakespeare teach us?" he asks, and replies: "Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. . . . We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated."[17]
Selected publications
Books
The Politics of Magic: the Work and Times of Tom Murphy. 1987.
A Mass for Jesse James: A Journey Through 1980s Ireland, 1990
Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland, 1994
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef, 1994
Fintan O'Toole, "Eldest Statesmen", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 1 (18 January 2024), pp. 17–19. "Biden's signature achievements as president [are] securing large-scale investment in infrastructure and in the transition to a carbon-free economy... [But t]here has been a relentless decline in absolute [economic] mobility from one generation to the next..." (p. 18.) "With the promised bridge to a new generation as yet unbuilt, time is not on Biden's side, or on the side of American democracy." (p. 19.)
Awards
1993 AT Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism
1994 Justice Award of the Incorporated Law Society
2000 Millennium Social Inclusion Award
2012 TV3 Tonight Show Journalist of the Year
2013 Irish Book Awards (Best Irish Published Book of the Year), A History of Ireland in 100 Objects[18]