From law to lore, the scholastic journey of Mayo man Dr. Michael M. O’Connor
Esteemed lawyer, lecturer, independent researcher and author talks about his life and times
Dr. Michael M. O'Connor practiced as a lawyer for almost 30 years in Ireland and internationally.
He was formerly a senior parter at one of Ireland's leading law firms, where he was head of the Projects, Energy and National Resources practice, which he founded in 1999.
Now an independent researcher and author, Michael has published several books on social history, crime and punishment, and women and the law.
He also finds time to administer a social and political history Facebook page with over 23,000 followers.
Here, Michael discusses his career pathway in conversation with Julie Doyle.
Q: Can you tell our readers a little about your background and where you grew up?
I grew up near the village of Belcarra in County Mayo, where I attended national school before moving on to St. Gerald’s De La Salle College in Castlebar.
My family has farmed land near Belcarra for generations. I am one of eight, and my father, now in his eighties, is still farming. As a child, I was not all that interested in sports, and time outside school and off the farm was spent in books and at Mayo County Library in Castlebar.
Q: Where did you attend college and why did you decide to study law?
I studied law at Trinity College Dublin. Why law and why Trinity? The latter is perhaps easier to answer. When viewed from rural Catholic Mayo in the late 1970s, Trinity was considered somewhat left of field.
When the big reveal occurred – my first choice for college, I was met with incredulity, with some asking me if I was aware that Catholics were not accepted.
I reminded them that this had changed in 1794 and that the Catholic Church had itself come to terms with Trinity in 1970.
Others suggested country people and people from the West, in particular, did not go to Trinity. All of this made Trinity even more appealing. My parents were very supportive of my choice.
I would have pursued history in an ideal world, but 1980s Mayo was far from an ideal world. Like the country, the county was in the grip of a grim recession.
There were no opportunities for school leavers, let alone graduates or idealists. As the time to make a final decision approached, a more pragmatic self emerged.
Over the course of a year or so, I first entertained and then wholeheartedly embraced the idea of studying law at Trinity. Over the next four years, I was entertained and enlightened in equal measure by Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese, Gerard Hogan, Brian Lenihan, Kader Asmal, and other luminaries. I had made the right decision.
Q: Where did you carry out your apprenticeship and what motivated you to pursure your chosen field of expertise?
In the summer of 1990, I left Ireland for a summer placement with a large City of London law firm.
At the time, I had accepted an offer of an apprenticeship in Dublin, which I had every intention of taking up. A few weeks later, I was offered a scholarship to study at Cambridge University, which I accepted.
The focus of my studies was Corporate Law. By the time I graduated a year later, I had an impossible choice of commencing a funded PhD at Cambridge or following everyone else to London.
Pragmatic me stepped in again and made the choice. I spent three years at Slaughter & May as an apprentice and junior solicitor, working predominantly on corporate and banking matters.
Q: After qualification, you also practiced in the Middle East with Clifford Chance International Project Group, considered at that time to be the world's largest law firm. How did those experiences impact your approach to practicing law?
My chosen field of expertise found me when Clifford Chance offered me a position in their International Projects Group in early 1995.
For the next five years, I worked across the Middle East on some of the region’s most significant and interesting energy and infrastructure projects.
It was an interesting and exciting time to be in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, many governments embraced privatisation and broader private sector participation in what were hitherto public monopolies such as energy generation, water supply, telecommunication services and transport.
New regulatory regimes were required to lay down the ground rules and entice foreign investors, banks and utilities into these markets. The legal work was groundbreaking, intellectually challenging, and invariably had to be done yesterday.
The clients included governments, foreign investors, banks, and contractors. Our team worked on the construction and financing of oil and gas projects, power plants, desalination plants, telecommunication satellites, aircraft procurement, and various other large-scale projects.
Practising law in the Middle East came with a requirement to question everything.
Contracting under English law at that time gave an illusion of certainty. But behind the scenes, much work was done on understanding and highlighting potential conflicts with Sharia Law, risks associated with sovereign immunity, and the enforceability of contracts and arbitration awards.
Laws could be changed overnight, and the requirement to translate contracts into Arabic always raised concerns that something would be lost in translation.
Law in the Middle East was practised at a veritable crossroads where clients arrived from all over the world on early morning flights and worked with few pauses until they departed, often on the same day. Much of my practice focused on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and the UAE.
Q: As the millennium approached, you returned to Dublin, joining Matheson Ormsby Practice (now Matheson LLP) in 1999. What prompted your decision to move?
The decision to return to Ireland did not come easily, but in the end, it was driven by a strong desire for our children to be raised and educated in Ireland.
Those who committed long-term to the Middle East invariably sent their children to England and elsewhere to be educated. We wanted our girls, one of whom had been born in Sharjah and the other in Dubai, to be raised in Ireland. Their sister was born in the Coombe after we returned home.
Q: Ireland has experienced a significant change in the internationalisation of the legal market, particularly within the past 10 years. How did the legal landscape in Dublin the late 1990s compare with your international experience?
Very favourably. The rapid economic growth of the late 1990s brought a requirement for specialist skills and experience.
Plans to address infrastructure deficits, privatisation proposals, and regulatory restructuring and market change mandated by European law all opened up opportunities for Irish lawyers to return to Ireland and do what they were doing elsewhere.
Q: You led the projects, construction and infrastructure department at a unique time in the growth of the Irish economy and its subsequent collapse in 2008 and later rejuvenation. From a historical viewpoint, taking lessons from the collapse, what vulnerabilities do you believe remain in the Irish growth model?
Many of the vulnerabilities in the Irish growth model come hand in hand with the advantages of the Irish model.
Ireland is a small, open economy that depends heavily on continued foreign direct investment and exports.
In a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable, Ireland is at risk of suffering a reversal of fortunes where there is a reduction of external demand for Irish products in key export sectors.
We are already seeing evidence of this. Maintaining Ireland’s favourable tax and regulatory status, competitiveness and prudent management of public finances are essential.
Cyber security should be a priority, as should energy security and the security of cross-border energy infrastructure, such as gas pipelines and electrical interconnectors.
Q: You are at the forefront of the specialisation in energy law in Ireland. In yoru opinion, what have been the key drivers in its development?
The key drivers were European Union energy policy and a succession of EU legislative packages.
The Irish Government, like other European governments, was forced to rethink and restructure the domestic energy market to bring it into line with European Union requirements.
Specialisation was required by clients operating in a market that grew ever more complex as it underwent continuous change.
The establishment of a new independent regulator and the arrival of competition in the form of new market entrants also significantly increased the demand for specialist legal services and support.
Q: You returned to Trinity College to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy, which was awarded in 2018. What was the greatest challenge for you in returning to study?
Full-time study would have been impossible, so I undertook it on a part-time basis. The research subject (Ireland’s 2020 Energy Targets) was at the heart of my work.
I also lectured at Trinity College Dublin on sustainable energy, which worked well.
Q: You are now retired from practice and focusing on interests outside the law.
In 2020 you published "Anatomy of a County Gaol,' an in-depth study of imprisonment, capital punishment and transportation in County Mayo from the late 16th century to the early 20th century.
It provided a fascinating insight into crime and punishment in the period and the degradation of women, children and the mentally ill through our history.
Why were the prison in Mayo considered to be the worst in Ireland during some of that time?
There was a combination of factors at play. Prisons in Mayo were small and poorly constructed. There was an unwillingness on the part of the Mayo Grand Jury to spend county money on any form of social infrastructure.
It is difficult to imagine today, but there were four County Prisons in Castlebar, two of which operated in parallel between 1813 and 1835. Management was left to untrained, unchecked and corrupt governors.
Though regulation improved considerably as the nineteenth century unfolded, oversight was left to a poorly staffed and under-resourced independent inspectorate. Independent oversight and intervention were also strongly resisted by those who held power locally.
Q: In 2021, you published 'Caribbean Slave Owners & Other Lesser Known Histories of County Mayo', examining among other things the connection between landowning families in Mayo and the historical slavery in the British Caribbean. Were you surprised at the extent of the Irish connection and what are some of the legacy issues that remain?
Not surprised at all. Hundreds of individuals from Ireland enslaved thousands of Black Africans and their descendants in the British Caribbean and elsewhere over a lengthy period before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
The act remains on the Irish Statute Book. Legacies take many forms. Physical legacies, including landmark properties like Westport House in County Mayo, are the most obvious.
But there are also political, cultural, commercial, and historical legacies.
The legal profession, including Irish lawyers, played a very prominent role in historical slavery.
Acknowledging and accepting this history is essential and something we here in Ireland should not continue to ignore or seek to lay at the doorstep of others.
Q: Congratulations on the successful launch of your recent book 'Criminal Conversations with My Wife - Women and the Laws of Men, County Mayo Case Studies 1800-1919'. Firstly, can you explain what is a criminal conversation?
When a man had an adulterous affair with a married woman, her husband was entitled to sue her lover for compensation. If he was successful, the compensation was based on the wife’s value to the husband.
Valuable wives attracted a higher level of compensation. The aggrieved husband bid up her value with eulogies about her virtue and beauty. The defendant, mindful of the cost of the outcome on his pocket, painted her as a harlot.
Criminal conversation was essentially an action for trespass; the husband was entitled to compensation for trespass on his property, his wife. The cause of action was abolished by the Family Law Act 1981. There were several high-profile Mayo Criminal Conversation cases.
Q: Your book provides a much-needed historical insight into the history of the lives and experiences of women who encountered the law and the legal system in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It outlines the prevailing efforts to control and subjugate women in Irish law. Following your research, why do you believe such a position prevailed for so long?
Ireland has a long history of patriarchy. Our legislature, our universities, the Christian churches, and, crucially, the law have all acted as advocates for and defenders of male privilege for centuries. The making of laws and the administration of justice in Ireland was the preserve of a narrow class of privileged men until relatively recently.
Women were forced to fight at every step to gain some of the ground occupied by men for centuries. Women still face significant challenges when they encounter the law, especially in areas such as domestic violence, rape and sexual violence.
Q: What next?
Next is a three-year university-based research project beginning this year to examine in detail Irish and Anglo-Irish slaveholders in the British Caribbean and the Indian Ocean in the century before the abolition of slavery in 1834.
I will be focussing in particular on the issue of the erasure of the identity and ethnicity of the enslaved and the legacies of Irish and Anglo-Irish slaveholders.
Over the past two years, I have worked with people across the Caribbean on issues such as reparations. I am also working on identifying Irish slaveholders and their enslaved populations and assisting descendants of enslaved persons in reconstructing biographies of their ancestors and family trees.
* For more information on the works of Dr. Michael M. O'Connor, see https://www.drmichaeloconnor.com or https://www.mayobooks.ie.
(Julie Doyle is a solicitor with Westlex Solicitors. She was a member of the committee of DSBA Parchment, where this article was first published).