As a student, Oliver Gogarty was an excellent cricket and football player and above all a superb swimmer. He supported a so-called Secure House during the Irish War of Independence for freedom activists and fighters as well as for escaped or released convicts. Besides his writing he was a physician, sportsman, pilot and politician, and from 1922-36 served as a senator in the Irish Parliament. His work Ode to the Tailteann Games won the bronze medal at the 1924 Olympic Games in the literature category of the Art Competitions. He wrote his poem at the request of the Irish government on the occasion of the revival of the Tailteann Games, a kind of Irish Olympic Games, which took place in 1924 celebrating Irish independence. In the setting of Louis O’Brien, the work was performed at the opening of the Games in Dublin. Later, however, Gogarty himself is said to have described his poem as trash.
Later in life Gogarty served as the inspiration for the Roman character Buck Mulligan in the novel Ulysses, by his colleague James Joyce (1882-1941). Gogarty immigrated to New York in September 1939, where he died, aged 79.
Ireland