O'Byrne, Cathal (1876–1957), antiquarian, writer, and entertainer, may have been the Charles Burns born on 1 June 1876 in Kilkeel, Co. Down, the son of James Burns, a farmer, and his wife Isabella (née Arnett). O'Byrne's biographer states that his parents came from Co. Wicklow, which would imply that their name had been anglicised from the form ‘O'Byrne’, which their son readopted; however, the same writer notes that ‘Burn’ is commonly found in Co. Down as a Gaelicisation of the local Irish name McBrin. It is even possible that the name may indicate Scottish ancestry (ironic given O'Byrne's subsequent denunciations of the ‘planter’ legacy). For most of his life O'Byrne, who never married, lived with his unmarried sister Teresa; he had other siblings, as he was survived by four nieces and two nephews.
O'Byrne's childhood was spent in the Balmoral district of south Belfast in a comfortable but slightly precarious middle-class catholic environment; although sparse in direct autobiographical references, his writings contain references to excursions around the Malone and Stranmillis areas, with particular reference to the Botanic Gardens. He was educated at St Malachy's College. After leaving school he managed a spirit grocery on the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast and was active in the Sexton Debating Society, named after Thomas Sexton (qv), then home rule MP for West Belfast, and led by Joseph Devlin (qv), who remained a lifelong friend despite their later political differences. He also studied music with Carl Hardebeck (qv), acquiring an extensive knowledge of Irish folk music and becoming an accomplished singer of Irish tunes in Hardebeck's arrangements.
O'Byrne subsequently joined the Belfast Gaelic League (he became a leading member, though he never mastered Irish) and moved into the literary and antiquarian circles around F. J. Bigger (qv), whose friendship became central to his career and self-definition; O'Byrne was a regular participant in Bigger's soirées and made friendships with many prominent political and cultural figures, among them Roger Casement (qv) and Alice Milligan (qv). Although O'Byrne is usually seen as a specifically northern writer, it should be emphasised that he drew extensively on a wider Irish tradition of defensively self-glorifying catholic-nationalist antiquarianism, including the works of W. H. Grattan Flood (qv) (whose assertion that ‘God save the king’, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ were misappropriated Irish tunes is repeated in As I roved out) and Archbishop John Healy (qv), a major source for O'Byrne's later pamphlet on St Patrick and for the descriptions of Ulster monasteries in As I roved out.
In 1900 O'Byrne published a collection of verses, A jug of punch (no copies are known to survive), and in 1905 collaborated with Cahir Healy (qv) on another collection, The lane of the thrushes, which applies Celtic revival imagery to rural Ulster. (One of O'Byrne's pieces in this collection, ‘Lullaby’, was set to music by Hamilton Harty (qv) and has been recorded several times.) He published another collection, The grey feet of the wind, in 1917; the manuscript of his unpublished ‘Collected poems’ (1951) is in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
In 1902 O'Byrne gave up the spirit grocery to work full time as a journalist, singer, and storyteller. He appeared at a wide variety of concerts, where he cut a striking figure in Gaelic dress with saffron kilt; he provided musical interludes at productions by the Ulster Literary Theatre, and his recitation of Eleanor Alexander’s (qv) humorous piece on the battle of Scarva inspired Harry Morrow's (qv) celebrated satirical play ‘Thompson in Tir-na-nOg’ (1912). In 1913 he founded and managed the Celtic Players, a theatre company which staged some plays of his own composition, including ‘The dream of Bredyeen Dara’, possibly a nativity story incorporating St Brigit (qv) of Kildare.
During the First World War O'Byrne achieved immense cross-community success with a weekly dialect column in the (unionist) paper Ireland's Saturday Night, describing the domestic activities of ‘Mrs Twigglety’ and her working-class friends. At the same time he had abandoned his earlier support for Devlin's home rule politics to embrace physical-force republicanism under the influence of Denis McCullough (qv). (O'Byrne was best man at McCullough's wedding and godfather to his daughter Una.) During Casement's imprisonment and trial O'Byrne carried on an intense correspondence with him, comforting him, urging him to convert to catholicism, and sending him religious icons; some commentators have detected homoerotic undertones in their exchanges, though this is a matter of opinion.
After the Easter rising O'Byrne was active in the reconstituted IRA, and in 1919–20 he smuggled arms from Belfast to Dublin. In August 1920 he emigrated to America, where he went on a six-month lecture tour to raise funds for victims of the Belfast pogroms. (He is alleged to have raised $100,000 and to have funded the construction of Amcomri Street in west Belfast.) He spent the next eight years in the USA as a speaker and entertainer, contributing to American catholic publications; he developed an abiding fondness for Chicago and considered taking out American citizenship. At one point he corresponded with the film star Rudolph Valentino, who admired his verses on Italian themes.
O'Byrne returned to Belfast in September 1928 with the intention of opening a bookshop in Dublin, but this had to be abandoned after the loss of his savings in the Wall Street crash of October 1929. He settled into respectable semi-poverty in Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and remained a presence on the fringes of Belfast literary life (itself greatly diminished in scope and confidence after the political upheavals of 1914–23). In 1930 he founded the Cathal O'Byrne Comedy Company, which performed plays of his own composition, notably the slight comedies ‘The returned swank’ and ‘The burden’ (drawing on ‘The drone', by Samuel Waddell (qv)). In 1932 O'Byrne sang at a concert in the Dublin Mansion House held to mark the Eucharistic Congress. He wrote extensively for catholic publications in Ireland and elsewhere (in particular for the Capuchin Annual, Irish Monthly, and Irish Rosary) and published several pamphlets with the Catholic Truth Society (CTS). The sensibility displayed in these writings has much in common with that of Brian O'Higgins (qv) (also a stage performer at Gaelic League concerts), Aodh de Blácam (qv) (another Irish Monthly commentator and CTS pamphleteer, though John Hewitt (qv) noted that de Blacam's propagandistic works did not acquire the characteristics of a personal idiom as O'Byrne's did), Daniel Corkery (qv) (though the latter's excavations and yearnings are more introverted and intellectually sophisticated than O'Byrne's), and Gearoid Ó Cuinneagáin (qv), that other south Belfast catholic-nationalist polemicist marked by the 1920–22 pogroms.
O'Byrne also published The Gaelic source of the Brontë genius (1932), which outlines the Co. Down background of the Brontës and claims that they inherited a storytelling tradition through their father; Pilgrim in Italy (1930), dominated by descriptions of Rome, which conveys a sense that catholicism gave access to a European civilisation older and grander than Britain; and the story collection From far green hills (1935), which retells gospel episodes in the style of an Irish storyteller with elements of Wildean orientalist exoticism. (Richard Kirkland argues that the collection is anti-Semitic, an accusation which must be accepted with qualifications: some of the early stories contain romanticised descriptions of rural Jewish life and customs, reflecting an idealised view of Old Testament Jews; the savage and degraded Jerusalem mob in the story ‘The Cyrenian's day’ may be seen both as modern Jews and, implicitly, as Belfast loyalists, a reflection of O'Byrne's professed anti-urbanism.) Pilgrim in Italy was published by the Three Candles Press of Colm Ó Lochlainn (qv) (an old friend through the Bigger circle), as was O'Byrne's last story collection, The ashes on the hearth (1948), a series of slight reveries in which the narrator, wandering the back streets of Dublin, relives such resonant moments as the last days of James Clarence Mangan (qv).
O'Byrne is best remembered, however, for As I roved out (1946), a collection of 128 articles on Belfast history originally published from the late 1930s in the Belfast Irish News. It displays considerable knowledge of Belfast history, drawn from lifelong reading and from conversations with Bigger, and can be seen as at once the summation of and a lament for the northern branch of the Irish revival associated with such figures as Bigger and Alice Milligan. The pieces, moving out from central Belfast to surrounding rural districts (stretching as far as Rosapenna, Co. Donegal) are held together by the storyteller surveying the landscape (or such memorabilia as the advertisements in old newspapers). Surveys of Belfast by journalistic flâneurs were not unprecedented – as in the Belfast Telegraph series ‘In Belfast by the sea’ (1923–4) by Frank Frankfort Moore (qv); however, whereas Moore celebrates – albeit with a certain mockery of Belfast philistinism by contrast with literary London – the achievements of late Victorian Belfast and the traders and professionals of its main streets, O'Byrne dismisses the mercantile and unionist establishment of Belfast as hopelessly materialistic and oppressive, casting himself and, by implication, his catholic/nationalist readers as internal exiles forced into the side streets of history, treasuring a martyred religious faith and gazing back wistfully to the bright and fleeting hope represented by the United Irishmen (treated as honorary catholics) and the cultural revival. The book is punctuated by expressions of anger against the whole heritage of the Ulster plantation. The economic success of the planters is attributed solely to their plunder of the natives; the textile industry is discussed solely in terms of exploitation and starvation wages; shipbuilding is dismissed with a remark (based on the romanticised economic histories of Gaelic Ireland by Alice Stopford Green (qv)) that ships were built in Ulster long before the planters arrived; and the history of Belfast is summed up in the confrontation (obsessively rehearsed by O'Byrne) between the Belfast merchant, ancestor of the unionist ‘establishment’, and would-be slave-trader Waddell Cunningham (qv) and the United Irishman and self-declared ‘Irish slave’ William Putnam McCabe (qv).
There are numerous contemptuous references to the sabbatarianism and respectable dullness of late Victorian Belfast, contrasted with the lively artistic activities of the volunteer period (and, by implication, with both the revival activities of O'Byrne's youth and the colourful emotionalism of catholic devotionalism). The book was reprinted three times in O'Byrne's lifetime and was seen by nationalists as an underground classic (it was virtually self-published and O'Byrne sold copies from his home). Its image of Belfast layered with fragmentary and hidden memories has been drawn on by authors as diverse as Ciaran Carson and Gerry Adams, and in the early twenty-first century O'Byrne was commemorated as one of the city's significant writers; a plaque was placed on his Cavendish Street house in 2004. It is ironic that his reputation should rest on his memorialisation of Belfast, for he denounced it as ‘interminable miles of mean streets . . . one of the ugliest cities in the world’ (Kirkland, 13).
O'Byrne was believed by some (though not all) of his acquaintances to be homosexual; this view is supported by references to the descriptions of male beauty (based on Gaelic saga models) which recur in his writings and by the expressions of longing which permeate his work (which might also reflect a wider sense of loneliness or cultural displacement). His last years (1954–7) were spent in the Nazareth nursing home in Ormeau Road, Belfast, where he died 1 August 1957, a month after suffering a stroke. His funeral was crowded and his gravestone describes him (echoing the ‘Regina coeli’ prayer and the psalm which opens the Tridentine mass) as ‘singer, poet and writer who brought joy into the lives of others’ (Kirkland, 207).