O'Sullivan, Thomas Francis (1874–1950), journalist, historian, and GAA administrator, was born 16 December 1874 at Glin, Co. Limerick, although the family moved at an early age to Listowel, Co. Kerry. He studied at St Michael's CBS in that town. While still a student, he attended court sittings with Denis C. O'Donoghue, a legendary newspaperman, poet, and shopkeeper from the area, and began to dabble in journalism. He soon became newspaper representative for The Kerryman in Listowel and held that position until 1907, when he moved to work for the Freeman's Journal in Dublin. He held a number of different positions on that paper, including a spell as parliamentary correspondent in London from 1916 until the paper's demise in 1924. During those years he was elected as chairman of the press gallery in the house of commons. He covered the Anglo–Irish treaty negotiations through the later months of 1921 and was later one of the people deported from Britain to Ireland by the British government, an act for which he was eventually compensated. He opposed the treaty, and in 1926 he edited a collection of articles entitled Outraged, plundered, partitioned. Ireland: the curse and tragedy of the ‘treaty’. He worked as a freelance for a range of newspapers in Dublin through the 1920s, and in 1931 he joined the Irish Press. Before leaving it in 1937 he had served on its editorial staff, and in the years between his retirement and 1950 he worked occasionally for other newspapers in Dublin.
Most of his spare time was spent in the National Library in Dublin, where he researched his various history and travel books. His love of his home county was exemplified by Romantic hidden Kerry (1931). It was, however, his deep interest in republican history that consumed his historical work. He gave many orations on the ‘Manchester martyrs’ and published such works as The Young Irelanders (1944), as well as editing and introducing Fenian memories (1945) by Mark Ryan (qv). His enduring contribution to historical research remains his Story of the GAA (1916), the first history ever published of the association. He was well placed to write it, having served as secretary to the Kerry county board between 1900 and 1906. He was also a member of the GAA's Munster and central councils, and he played a major part in the association's revitalisation, especially in Kerry, in the aftermath of the dislocation occasioned by the upheavals of the 1890s which almost saw the GAA disband. A major proponent of the rules introduced by the GAA in 1902–3 which banned its members from playing ‘foreign games’ and excluded British servicemen from membership, he was always anxious to emphasise the GAA's political role and vehemently opposed any suggestion that it was merely a sporting organisation. This view deeply colours his book. He never married and died 14 November 1950 in a Dublin nursing home. When he had left The Kerryman to work in Dublin, he was replaced as its Listowel correspondent by his brother John A. O'Sullivan (1872–1928); John A. was in turn succeeded by his own daughter, May Kathleen, who remained in the position until the 1970s.