Irish journalist, drama critic, and historian — columnist for the Irish Times since 1988 and the New York Review of Books regular, widely regarded as the most consequential public intellectual working in Ireland today. O'Toole grew up in working-class Crumlin in Dublin, trained first as a theatre critic (his book on Tom Murphy remains a landmark of Irish theatre criticism), and spread steadily into cultural journalism, political commentary, and the long-form historical essay.
His intellectual method is recognizable across four decades: take a particular Irish occasion — a political scandal, a literary anniversary, a referendum, a trial — and read it as a symptom of larger forces that other commentators are too comfortable to name. The result has been a running cultural history of Ireland's transformation from a Catholic-nationalist republic of the 1950s through the Celtic Tiger boom and bust to the unrecognizable, largely secular, cosmopolitan society of today. Ship of Fools (2009) was his Celtic Tiger post-mortem. We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (2021) fused memoir and history into a book that may become the standard account of the country's late-20th-century transformation.
O'Toole has also written sharply about Britain and America. Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) is the best short book on Brexit — a diagnosis of English national mythology under the strain of lost empire. His New York Review essays on Trump and American decline have read, to American observers, like a useful view from a country whose own recent history is full of the warnings they have been slow to hear.