Keeping up with the Joneses—I mean the O’Briens—in Ireland

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

As a near-lifelong resident of Utah, I never lived in a place where my last name was common. As a result, whenever I was doing any keeping up, it was with the Joneses or the Smiths. Things were quite different during our 2011 pilgrimage to Ireland to celebrate my 50^th birthday.

I noticed the changed circumstances when we first arrived in the Emerald Isle and our children asked me, “How come our name is everywhere?” I looked up from my what-we-will-do-next-on-our-trip agenda and realized they were right; the family name did pop up quite often.

We first saw it on a chain of eateries—O’Brien’s Irish Sandwich Cafe. O’Brien’s is a franchise founded in Dublin in 1988 by Brody Sweeney (see O’Brien’s handcrafted sandwiches and coffee). The Irish businessman called his restaurant “O’Brien’s” because that was the most common name he saw in the phone book. He thought an easily-recognizable Irish surname would help him with branding and expansion.

After we left Dublin, we drove to Waterford. Of course, we toured the lovely glass factory there. We also passed by the family home of Thomas Francis Meagher, hero of Timothy Egan’s 2016 book The Immortal Irishman. Meagher was an exiled Irish rebel, an American civil war hero, and eventually the territorial governor of Montana. His closest comrade in life, revolution, and exile? An O’Brien, of course, specifically William Smith O’Brien, an Irish nationalist member of the British parliament whose statue stands on O’Connell Street in Dublin.

Later, we got settled in our Cork hotel, and then toured the nearby Cobh Museum on the southern coast of Ireland. Cobh (known then as Queenstown) was the last stop for the Titanic before its fateful maiden journey in April 1912. After examining the museum’s memorial to the victims of the tragedy, one of the kids asked me, “Did you know there were O’Briens on the Titanic?”

I did not know, but I looked into it. I found out that two O’Briens (neither direct relatives) died on the Titanic. One victim was newlywed Thomas O’Brien. His fellow steerage passenger and pregnant wife Hannah survived in a lifeboat and, as a young widow, gave birth to their daughter in the United States. A relative who discovered their sad love story in family records wrote a novel about it (see: Martina Devlin-Ship of Dreams ).

As the famous ship was sinking, another victim, Denis (aka Timothy) O’Brien, gave his brand new overcoat and a note to someone else in a lifeboat. She passed it on to Denis’s brother—named Michael O’Brien—in New York City (see: The Titanic Coat: One Family’s Legend). Duly inspired, I made up my own fictional account of both Thomas and Denis O’Brien, called it “The Titanic O’Briens,” and posted it serial style on Facebook during the 2012 centennial of the ship’s disaster.

About the only O’Brien heritage sight we missed in the Cork/Cobh area (we chose to kiss the Blarney stone instead) is Bunratty castle. Built in about 1425, Bunratty was another seat of the O’Brien family’s power beginning sometime in the 1500s. The castle and an adjoining folk park now are run as tourist attractions, featuring a medieval banquet.

From Cork and Cobh, we traveled to visit the Cliffs of Moher and discovered that the best lookout point there is called O’Brien’s Tower. The tower was built in 1835 by a local lawyer, landlord, and member of parliament named Cornelius O’Brien. Some say he constructed it as a public service, to provide an even better view for tourists at the cliff side. 

The view from up there is spectacular. One of my favorite family photos shows my two O’Brien daughters on top of the tower with the famous cliffs behind them. After we took the photo, our tour guide told us that Cornelius O’Brien actually built the tower to impress the women he was courting, making him a bit of a scoundrel. Perhaps he redeemed his reputation—just a little—during the Great Hunger (aka Potato Famine), when he waived the rent imposed on his starving tenants to ease their burdens—just a little.

From the Cliffs of Moher we were off to Limerick. You cannot swing a tipsy leprechaun around in Limerick without hitting an O’Brien. We stayed at Dromoland Castle, the ancestral O’Brien manor. For centuries, the site has been home to the Barony (and Baron) of Inchiquin, a royal title created in 1543 by King Henry VIII for Murrough O’Brien, Prince of Thomond. Murrough, like all O’Briens, descended from the great high king of Ireland Brian Boru. 

The current O’Brien baron lives in a house just up the hill from the castle. His name is Conor Myles John O’Brien. Conor’s uncle and predecessor in peerage sold the present castle structure—built in the 1800s—to a business group who turned it into the upscale hotel, filled with stone or glass renditions of the family coat of arms. We offered to stop by Conor’s house for tea, but my rather distant cousin declined due to “another engagement.”

During our Dromoland castle visit, regal portraits of all sorts of other O’Brien nobility stared down at us from the stone hallways. When we left Dromoland, our taxi driver mentioned that he too had O’Brien relatives. I asked him how some members of the clan got to be so distinguished. The driver said, “They took the soup.” 

I looked the phrase up later. It refers to Catholics who renounced their religion during the Great Hunger in the mid-1800s to get soup from Protestant kitchens. The family title of nobility predates the Great Hunger, but the taxi driver’s basic point is true. The original O’Brien baron did have to renounce his religion to get a title from King Henry VIII. After all, Henry was going through a rather unpleasant divorce from the Catholic church at the time.

Henry is not the only O’Brien family connection to British royalty. Queen Elizabeth II’s maternal eighth great grandmother from the 17th century was named Mary O’Brien. This distinguished history may help explain the clan motto—Lamh laidir an Uachtar, meaning “the strong hand from above.” By some estimates, there are 750,000 O’Briens in the world today. With so few of them in Utah, it was interesting to encounter so many of them in Ireland. 

Yet, it was nice to come home to Salt Lake City too. The Utah O’Briens did not travel on the Titanic. We are neither royals nor rebels. We make good sandwiches, but never sell them to anyone. And my wife Vicki would not let me impress other women by building a tower in the backyard of our own little castle. There is not much to keep up with.

I guess you could call us the undistinguished O’Briens, undistinguished, that is, in all ways but one. Not many people in Utah start their surname with an “O” and an apostrophe. At least we have that going for us.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.