Brian Fallon

Brian Fallon (born 3 May 1933 in Cootehill, County Cavan; died 3 September 2026 in Dublin, aged 93) was one of Ireland's defining newspaper art critics and a long-serving literary editor of The Irish Times. Second son of the poet and playwright Padraic Fallon and Dorothea ("Don") Maher, he grew up in a household where writers and painters were ordinary visitors. The family moved to Sutton when he was about three and then to a farm outside Wexford town when he was about six. He attended St Peter's College, Wexford, began as a star pupil in Latin and Greek, then lost interest through boredom, left school at 17, and spent roughly two years farming and reading before journalism claimed him.

Through his father's friendship with editor R. M. Smyllie, Fallon joined The Irish Times at 19 as a night news sub-editor, a Catholic from rural Ireland entering a still-Protestant newsroom. He enrolled in classics at Trinity College Dublin by day while sub-editing by night, then left after two years without failing exams because, he said, his Greek was not up to it and he was not a natural student. Newspapers suited his eclectic, self-directed hunger for knowledge far better. Early Dublin years included living with grandparents on Baggot Street amid the Baggotonia world of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan. Night shifts also brought him together with fellow journalist Marion FitzGerald; they married, raised seven children (Aonghus, Catriona, Rory, Fionnuala, Emer, Oisin and Donal), and lived for decades in a Wicklow house filled with ceramics, art and books. He never learned to drive and took the bus to work reading all the way, his son Rory later recalled.

Over a long Irish Times career he served as features editor, literary editor for 11 years (1977-1988), founder of the Weekend supplement, and chief critic for 35 years, stepping back from the art-critic role in 1998. He believed culture need not be rarefied: everything could be interesting through the right lens. His reviews were open, conversational and fair. Artists later credited early notices with launching careers. Books followed and reinforced the criticism: Edward McGuire (1991); Irish Art 1830-1990 (Appletree, 1994); Gandon monographs on Charles Tyrrell, Martin Gale and Sean McSweeney; Imogen Stuart, Sculptor (Four Courts, 2002); work on Patrick Swift, Tony O'Malley and Nancy Wynne-Jones (his sculptor brother Conor's wife); and the cultural history An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960 (Gill and Macmillan, 1998), which argued that mid-century Ireland was creative and contested rather than a monochrome wasteland. He also edited his father's poetry and prose, including Collected Poems (1990, introduction by Seamus Heaney) and A Poet's Journal (2005).

Eileen Battersby's 1998 profile called him a self-made critic of daunting range and unusual fairness. Fallon himself feared for literacy more than for literature, loved the essay form, wanted a serious arts journal, preferred painters to writers, and named Tony O'Malley, Sean McSweeney, Basil Blackshaw, Brian Maguire and Charles Tyrrell among the finest Irish artists of his reviewing years. He was shy in person, awe-inspiring to strangers, never vicious in print. Gemma Tipton's 2026 tribute stressed that same balance and the gratitude of artists whose first shows he noticed. He died in Dublin on 3 September 2026, survived by four sons and three daughters. His wife Marion had died in 2021. A specific medical cause of death was not made public in the sources checked. (This Brian Fallon is not the Gaslight Anthem singer of the same name.)