Obituary: J. M. O'Neill

J. M. O'NEILL'S career as a playwright and novelist came comparatively late in a busy working life first as a bank employee, taking him from Ireland to England, then to Nigeria and Ghana, and finally as a publican in Islington, as the landlord of the Duke of Wellington, Balls Pond Road.

It was at the Duke of Wellington, at the Sugawn, the pioneering pub theatre he started in 1967, that we saw the production of his first play, God is Dead on Balls Pond Road. Apart from theatre, the pub hosted live Irish folk music most nights and was a popular gathering place for the Irish population of north London. The Sugawn Theatre also saw the world premiere of Hugh Leonard's Da, which later became a film, and there the actress Maureen Pryor directed a production of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, performed by an amateur cast.

O'Neill was at the Duke of Wellington in the late 1970s when the large brewers were demanding their tenants committed themselves to expensive leases, which he refused to sign as being totally unreasonable. In 1980 he was finally forced to leave the pub and, becoming homeless, was housed by the council in Hornsey. He returned to Ireland in 1990.

I first met Jerry O'Neill when I was an editor at MacGibbon & Kee, which had a strong Irish list, and for which reason he had submitted his first novel. It wasn't for us, I felt, and I suggested he find an agent. He worked his way down the list in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook until he arrived at A.P. Watt, who took him on and placed the novel with Heinemann. Open Cut was published in 1986 and was followed by Duffy is Dead (1988) and Canon Bang Bang (1989): all set in London and about the life of immigrant Irish labourers, and painting a rather bleak picture, though one rooted in the real world. Then came Commissar Connell (1992), set in West Africa, and drawing on his experience there.

I came to know him professionally again, so to speak, when I became joint author with Tony White of A Guide to London Pubs, first published in the late 1960s and updated until the final edition in the early 1980s.

He was born Jeremiah Michael O'Neill in Limerick in 1921, son of the city's postmaster, and it was in this place and period of Irish history that he set his last published novel, Bennett & Company, which appeared in November.

Jerry O'Neill's life was not an easy one, bringing up a family of five, while running a pub and writing away in the few spare hours available, a father and a landlord. On one occasion, when he refused to serve plain- clothes policemen after hours, he was threatened with prosecution for being in possession of an unlicensed firearm - a stage pistol, one of his props. That he died, knowing that his last novel, Rellighan, Undertaker, was to be published shortly (it is scheduled for October), is a tribute to his industry and forbearance. Bennett & Company had won the pounds 5,000 Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Prize, but he didn't live to collect the award.

Jeremiah Michael O'Neill, writer: born Limerick 27 September 1921; married 1950 Mary Murray (three sons, two daughters); died Limerick 21 May 1999.