O'Connor, Michael Patrick (1896–1967), doctor, writer, and broadcaster, was born 15 October 1896 in Loughrea, Co. Galway, the son of Thomas O'Connor, RIC sergeant, of Athenry Rd, Loughrea, and Mary O'Connor (née Scanlon). Reared a catholic, he received a secondary education locally. Seeking to escape the boredom of small-town life, he joined the British army; within weeks of enlistment, he found himself posted with the Royal Irish Regt. at Richmond barracks, Dublin, during the Easter 1916 rising. In his autobiography, The more fool I (1954), he recounts seeing Countess Markievicz (qv) standing in Citizen Army uniform in the barracks square. In the autumn of 1916 he was transferred to a cadet unit in Fermoy, Co. Cork, then served briefly with a home battalion of the Connaught Rangers in Kinsale. Sent to the front early in 1917, he saw active service in the trenches until he was gassed in March 1918.
After the armistice, he served in an exhumation unit in France and Belgium, re-interring the dead of all nationalities from battlefield graves to proper cemeteries. Aimless, restless, and disillusioned, after a spell of wandering, during which he briefly visited Canada, he studied medicine at UCD, qualifying in 1925. Believing that, as an ex-British-serviceman, he was out of favour in the new Irish state, and would be blackballed for dispensary appointments, he moved to England, where he worked on a short locum-tenency in Wiltshire before becoming a ship's surgeon on two voyages, the first to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Boston, and the second to Bombay. Applying to the colonial medical service for a position in Malaya, after completing a short course in the London School of Tropical Medicine, he joined the Malayan medical service, travelling out in 1927 with his wife and daughter. Becoming in time a permanent Malayan civil servant, he was stationed at various locations, including Kuala Lumpur and the Pangkor islands. During his first home leave, he attended a postgraduate course at Moorfields eye hospital, London (1931). His article on the epidemiology of typhus fever appeared in the Irish Journal of Medical Science (March 1936, 128–32).
Appointed principal medical officer and chief health officer in Sarawak on the island of Borneo in 1940, during the wartime occupation he was interned along with his wife as a prisoner of war by the Japanese (1941–5). During his internment he began writing short stories based on his experiences. On release in 1945 he returned to Ireland for a time, where his first novel, Dreamer awake (1946), was published in Dublin; an autobiographical Bildungsroman, it concludes with the protagonist, Aidan Pretty, jolted out of his romantic dream of the east when confronted with the harsh realities of life in the tropics. Some of the short stories collected in West and east (1948) were reprinted from the Irish Press and the Straits Times (Singapore). On returning to Malaya to complete his contract (1947), O'Connor was appointed director of medical services in Singapore. During his tenure, he broadcast his children's stories on Radio Singapore. Transferred to Alor Star, on formation of the federation of Malaya (1 February 1948) he became a member ex officio of the state council of Kedah. Amid the incipient communist insurgency, he retired from the service in November 1948.
Returning to Ireland, he worked for seventeen years as a broadcaster of children's stories for Radio Éireann. His second novel, Vile repose (1950), continues the story of Aidan Pretty in wartime Malaya and Borneo. He wrote two pamphlets published by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, The whole blessed day (1950) and Jonathan fiddlesticks (1950). His short stories for children include a collection in Irish, Seanchas na hÓige (1955). In collaboration with G. P. Willis he wrote two historical novels, It began in Singapore (1958) and Escape at dawn (1961), both of which give a unique perspective on the horrors of wartime internment in tropical prisons. O'Connor and his wife Catherine (‘Kit’), of Dover, England, had three daughters. He died suddenly 3 December 1967 at his home, Alor Star, 7 St Catherine's Pk., Glenageary, Co. Dublin, and was buried in Dean's Grange cemetery.