[defrost]

Cheers for the link and the notes.

FWiW he was a prolific writer all his life, as a pre computer civil servent he would have written at length all through many of his days at work .. the rules of the day demanded he be circumspect in regard to public opinion:

  Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy.

  The Irish civil service has been, since the Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical.
  Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views.

  As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis.

  This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flann_O'Brien

He had an extended family to support after all.