By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My wife Vicki has a perfectly wonderful last name (Comeau) with strong French-Canadian and European roots that might even include some French royalty. Yet, like most American couples, we gave our three children my last name.
This “patrilineal tradition,” according to a recent New York Times article, arose as a nod to fathers as “the head of the household” and because use of a paternal surname was an expression of “legitimate birth” and of a child’s right of inheritance.
The custom has remained strong even as some of these considerations have faded.
The Times also reported that there is no national data on how many parents give children a surname not derived from the father. A 2023 Pew Research Center study, however, suggests such a practice would be uncommon, given that 80% of women in opposite sex marriages adopt their husband’s last name.
And so, our children—Erin Kathleen, Megan Mary, and Daniel Patrick—each got stuck with the last name of O’Brien. My wife has ensured they know about their fine maternal heritage, but among other fatherly duties, it has been my job to help them understand more about their surname.
This has not been easy. I grew up in the arid deserts and mountains of Latter-day Saint Northern Utah, far from my surname’s ancient home in Ireland.
The cultural distance was even greater, for we Utah O’Briens had no family nearby to tell us stories about our Celtic forebears. And, as explained in my 2021 memoir Monastery Mornings, I had a tenuous relationship with my own O’Brien father after my parents divorced.
One way I tried to teach (and learn) about the family name was to take the family to Ireland and Northern Ireland a few years ago, just after Father’s Day. It was more pilgrimage than vacation and so, of course, we paid due homage to the sacred sights of the auld sod.
We walked around Dublin, saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College, drank Guinness at the Hairy Lemon pub, strolled through the rocky ruins of St. Kevin’s monastery in Glendalough, and watched the manufacture of delicate crystal at the Waterford factory.
We kissed the Blarney Stone, stood on the dock in Cobh where the Titanic boarded its final passengers (including a few O’Briens) before its doomed 1912 Atlantic crossing, and rode a horse-drawn jaunty cart through a deep green forest near Killarney.
In our spare time, I even won a limerick writing contest.
Yet, Ireland also is the only place in the world where we could stay in our ancestral family castle and view spectacular sea cliffs from a stone tower that bears our paternal surname. So we did.
Our patrilineal heritage started with Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. Today, any O’Brien clan nobility claims reside in an Irish peerage known as the Barony of Inchiquin, granted in 1543 to Murrough O’Brien by King Henry VIII during Henry’s sixth and final marriage.
The clan ancestral home is at Dromoland castle, originally built in the 16th century but with the current structure dating to 1835. In 1962, the Earl of Inchiquin sold it off to an American businessman who converted the property to a grand five star hotel.
Some of The Beatles stayed at the castle in 1964, when John Lennon and George Harrison famously dueled with swords on the front lawn. We made it there almost a half century later.
The O’Brien coat of arms (three medieval lions in resplendent red and gold) was everywhere, pictured in either stone or stained glass, and including the clan motto: “The strong hand from above.” We scoured the castle’s artwork for familiar faces.
I found only one, bearing a slight resemblance to our son Danny. So much for making ancestral connections.
The Cliffs of Moher, an hour’s drive from the castle in County Clare, are another famous O’Brien place, and not just because the ashes of singer Dusty Springfield (originally Mary O’Brien) were scattered there.
The sandstone cliffs—formed over 300 million years ago —run for about nine miles along Ireland’s southwestern Atlantic coast and reach sheer heights of over 700 feet. We scaled those heights via O’Briens Tower, an old stone edifice a man named Cornelius O’Brien built almost 200 hundred years ago in 1835.
Cornelius O’Brien (1782–1857) was a local landowner and a member of the British Parliament. Our trip tour guide suggested he built the tower to seduce local women. My own research, however, indicates that O’Brien had redeeming qualities too.
During a time when the word “landlord” was a slur in certain circles, O’Brien was respected as a benevolent and fair businessman. He was a lawyer and an early enthusiastic supporter of Daniel O’Connell—called the great Liberator for his advocacy of Catholic rights within the English and Protestant ruled Irish homeland.
He built a local school and advocated for tenant rights. During the great Potato Famine in the middle 1800s, he waived rent payments and brought in food and wool to help his farmers. O’Brien urged his fellow landlords to be compassionate too, and to tell their tenants to spend money on bread instead of rent.
The locals admired O’Brien enough to erect a monument to him after he died. The tall limestone column honors O’Brien’s humanitarian work, but also his vision of the Cliffs as a boon to the local economy.
To attract visitors to the spectacular site, and to make the Cliffs safe and more accessible, O’Brien built stables, retaining walls, pathways, and an iron picnic table. He even hired a piper to entertain the tourists.
Unfortunately, those pipes stopped calling one night when the poor fellow got drunk and tumbled off the Cliffs. We fared a bit better.
We climbed the tower, sober and on a sunny day, and took in the stunning vistas. Afterwards, my wife Vicki took our preteen son Danny back down the stairs. I was about to join them when inspiration hit.
There was not much room on the circular tower top, but there was some, so I jumped on a small step I saw on one side. I asked my daughters to pose for the camera from the other side, with the Cliffs behind them.
It was a brilliant photographic decision. Later, I realized the photo is also metaphorical.
My three children—like the Cliffs themselves—will see both bright sunshine and dense fog, soothing calm and fierce storms, rough seas and placid waters. They will feel the euphoria of the tower top and the melancholy of the descent that must follow.
‘tis a mixed destiny from which no one escapes. Knowing this is both a blessing and a curse for any parent, but especially for an Irish Catholic man who has passed his name on to his children.
An old Irish proverb explains the curse: “You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your father was.” The Catholic Irish American scholar and former United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it more ominously, “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”
Thankfully, another Irish proverb lends comfort by describing the bounty and blessings of such fatherhood: “Bricks and mortar make a house, but the laughter of children makes a home.”
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this article on June 15, 2024.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
