Born: 23 January 1925, Ireland
Died: 1 January 1986
Country most active: United Kingdom, Ireland
Also known as: Eibhlín Ní Bhriain
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Carmel Doyle. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
O’Brien, Eileen Mary (Ní Bhriain, Eibhlín ) (1925–86), journalist, was born 23 January 1925 at 37 Lower Leeson St., Dublin, only child of Liam O’Brien (Ó Briain) of 15 Lower Sherrard St., Dublin, nationalist and professor of romance languages at UCG, and Helen O’Brien (née Lawlor) of Dublin, a suffragette. Educated at Taylor’s Hill convent, Galway, she entered UCG at age 16 to study Irish, French, and Latin. On leaving university, she began her career as a journalist, working for the Connaught Tribune. She was an official oireachtas reporter for a time before going to England, where she worked for the Yorkshire Post. In the early 1950s she joined the Irish News Agency, and served as a reporter in Dublin, Belfast, and London. She later became northern editor of the Irish Press, in which position she reported on the mid-1950s IRA border campaign. In 1958 she wrote a series of perceptive articles in Irish on Northern Ireland for Comhar magazine (xvii, nos. 9–11 (Meán Fómhar–Samhain 1958)); entitled ‘An Tuaisceart’ (‘The North’), the articles presented a political and humane analysis of the northern conflicts based on her time as a reporter in Belfast. She edited Comhar for a short time in 1959, then joined Gael Linn as public and press relations officer, her chief responsibility being promotion of the use of Irish; she was also responsible for the weekly cinema newsreel ‘Amharc Éireann’ (‘Landscapes of Ireland’). In 1965 she joined the Irish Times as a reporter, and contributed to the weekly ‘Irishwoman’s diary’ column using the pseudonym ‘Candida’. She achieved widespread acclaim for writing ‘A social sort of column’, in which she drew attention to the poor and oppressed in Irish society. She was the first of several female journalists, including Elgy Gillespie, Maeve Binchy, and Nell McCafferty, whose recruitment by the Irish Times, not as writers on fashion and cookery, but on politics and social affairs, initiated a revolution in Irish newspapers. O’Brien started ‘Tuarascáil’, a weekly news feature in Irish, with Donal Foley, and later became the newspaper’s Irish editor. She was an active member of the National Union of Journalists. She died on 1 January 1986 at Baggot St. hospital; her body was donated to medical research.