“F___ the County Council”: Local Government and Biopolitical Allegory in Flann O’Brien.

Abstract

This article deals with Brian O'Nolan's role as a civil servant in the Irish Department of Local Government and Public Health. Here, references to local government and the ambiguity of the law in Cruiskeen Lawn and The Third Policeman are placed in their proper historical context. From an examination of the local government and local justice systems (from the pre-independence era to the Free State its successor administrations) a portrait emerges of O'Nolan as a writer of Irish biopolitics, who is concerned always with relationship between local and state forms of power. This essay situates the biopolitical themes of the author's writing within the context of recent scholarly writing about the law, sovereignty, and the body in O'Nolan, and gives examples of formative episodes in the incubation of his style of political allegory. From local issues of land redistribution to O'Nolan's role as secretary to the Tribunal of Inquiry of the Cavan Orphanage fire, a new image can be constructed of the author as a theorist of biopolitical life and what Giorgio Agamben terms the 'state of exception.'