Ó haodha, Mícheál (1918–98), writer and radio producer, was born in July 1918 in Killaloe, Co. Clare. He attended UCD and had his first full play in Irish, ‘Ordóg an Bháis’ produced to acclaim at the Abbey. This was followed by a pantomime in Irish, ‘Muireann agus an Prionsa’, staged in 1945. That year he started working in Radio Éireann (RÉ) as a programme assistant to John McDonagh, head of radio drama, and the following year became a full-time producer. He helped form the first resident RÉ repertory company of players, and in 1953 was appointed production director, a job he had been doing in acting capacity since the death of H. L. Morrow in 1951. He remained as a radio producer until his retirement in the mid 1980s, and was appointed head of drama in the late 1950s. In this capacity he advised Bill Kearney of the Listowel Drama Group to put on ‘Sive’, the first play by John B. Keane (qv), which had been turned down by the Abbey. He suggested some revisions, which were taken on by Keane; attended the premiere at the Clare drama festival in 1958; publicly acclaimed its surging irony and blustering style; and later arranged for the play's publication by Progress House.
In the late 1950s he represented RÉ on the jury of the prestigious Italia prize. Having learned what the jury required, he produced a few years later ‘The weaver's grave’, which he adapted from a short story by Seumas O'Kelly (qv). A comic, absurdist piece centred on the arguments of two old men over the proper site for a weaver's grave, it won the 1961 Prix Italia and in the following decade was broadcast over thirty times in twenty countries. The adaptation was produced as a stage play by the Abbey on 6 October 1969. Ó hAodha won for RTÉ the Prix Italia again in 1965 with Dan Treston's ‘Piano in the river’.
A bibliophile and avid collector of Irish memorabilia, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of plays and playwrights, which resulted in several books and articles including Theatre in Ireland (1974), monographs on Edward Martyn (qv) and Thomas Dermody (qv), and biographies of Micheál MacLiammóir (qv) and Siobhán McKenna (qv). An admirer of Padraic Fallon (qv), he produced ‘Diarmuid and Gráinne’ and ‘The vision of Mac Conglinne’ for Radio Éireann. In 1966 he was appointed to the first body of Abbey shareholders, and when Walter Macken (qv) resigned from the board that year, he took Macken's place as the board's government representative. Tomás Mac Anna, artistic director of the Abbey, remembered him as patient and sensible. The journalist David Hanly, who worked with him in RTÉ, found him moderate and tolerant, and noted that ‘though he was a founder member of Cumann Merriman, he fell short of the qualifications for real membership’ – he was not a carouser or bon viveur. One of Ó hAodha's last acts for RTÉ was to produce the acclaimed around-the-clock reading of Ulysses by over thirty actors for Bloomsday 1982.
He died 26 January 1998 in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, and was survived by his wife, Bríd, two sons, and a daughter.