Sears, David (1900–51), newspaper proprietor, journalist, playwright, was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, son of William Sears (qv), proprietor of the Enniscorthy Echo, and his wife, Gretta (née Morris). He was educated at the Loreto convent and the CBS, both in Enniscorthy, and (from 1910) at St Enda's, Dublin. Throughout his life Sears expressed reverence for his teachers: he saw Patrick Pearse (qv) as having created almost ‘an ideal educational institution', and recalled Willie Pearse (qv) as ‘the most sublimely unselfish man I have ever met’ and an admirer of boyish idealism. He thought Thomas MacDonagh (qv) ‘the best educationist and worst schoolmaster’ he had ever known. Sears emphasised that Patrick Pearse never actively sought to recruit his pupils into the Volunteers, but regarded those who participated in the Easter rising as vindicating his life’s work as a teacher. By 1916, as a student at UCD, Sears was one of the ten members of the St Enda's University Union, which engaged in military preparations (including bomb manufacture).
Sears participated in the Easter rising as a member of the South Dublin Union garrison; after the surrender of the insurgents he was released because of his age. He left UCD without graduating, having decided to make a career in journalism. In 1918 he joined the staff of his father's newspaper, the Enniscorthy Echo. He subsequently served as an IRA battalion commander, participating in several arms raids, while working as the paper's Wexford town correspondent. In 1923 he joined the reporting staff of the Irish Independent (which had previously employed his uncle Richard), and he subsequently became well known as its art and drama critic and as a book reviewer. (He was also art critic of the Irish Sketch.) While the Irish Independent, like other Dublin papers for most of the century, treated artistic coverage as jobbing journalism rather than the work of a specialised correspondent, throughout his life Sears enjoyed genuine respect in Dublin's literary and artistic circles because of his love of theatre and his personal artistic credentials.
He wrote several plays, which were staged by the Gate Theatre and enjoyed contemporary acclaim: ‘Juggernaut’ (1929), which won the 1928 Tailteann prize, ‘The dead ride fast’ (1931), ‘Grania of the ships’ (1933), and ‘The forced marriage’ (1941). ‘Juggernaut’ depicts a middle-class south Dublin Redmondite family who are persuaded to hide a wounded IRA gunman and then to let him escape, although his survival means death for the daughter's British officer fiancé; it was the only one of Sears's plays to be published (Birr, 1952), and is the only one to have survived – the whereabouts of the other texts being uncertain. Sears's friends attributed the rejection of ‘Juggernaut’ by the Abbey to ‘the pique and prejudice of a prominent lady’, the lady concerned being, in all likelihood, Augusta Gregory (qv); its uncompromising and schematic insistence on the absolute necessity of crushing personal happiness under the ‘juggernaut’ of patriotism makes it chiefly of interest as a symptom of contemporary popular taste and a possible point of departure for The moon in the yellow river by Denis Johnston (qv). In 1924 Sears won the Tailteann literary prize for a volume of short stories, some of which had appeared in an earlier form in The Echo.
Sears was a parliamentary reporter on the Irish Independent and secretary of the Oireachtas Press Gallery; a founder member of the National Union of Journalists, he served as vice-chairman of the Dublin branch. After his father died in 1929 he became chairman of the board of directors of the Enniscorthy Echo, as well as its chief leader writer, and held these positions until his death. In October 1945 he was elected vice-president of the Irish branch of the writers' association PEN. He travelled extensively and regarded Paris as his second home, spending part of his annual holiday at Parisian art shows. In later years he suffered from ill health, possibly connected to what was described as his physical as well as intellectual imitation of G. K. Chesterton (namely, obesity).
David Sears died 1 September 1951 at Les Chamilles, Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, while paying one of his regular summer visits to France; he was buried in the local cemetery. He and his wife (née Manning) had no children. His career illustrates mid-century middlebrow tastes, the ramifications of St Enda's influence, and the relatively underdeveloped nature of a newspaper industry where one man undertook so many different functions.