When Charles Haughey became taoiseach in 1979, one of his priorities was to repair the fraught relationship between the Irish state and its artists. He appointed the poet and critic Anthony Cronin, who has died aged 92, to be his artistic adviser. Cronin had, over the previous five years, written a trenchant column in the Irish Times on the theme of the relationship between the artist and the world. He also had produced a brilliant memoir, Dead as Doornails (1976), about the lives of six artists, including Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien, all of them friends of his, who had died of drink.
Cronin was, for more than half a century, Ireland’s most prominent man of letters. Although he was called to the bar, he never practised. A true bohemian, he moved easily and effortlessly between Dublin and London and Spain. In the 1950s, he was editor of the influential journal the Bell in Dublin and was later the literary editor of Time and Tide in London. He wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and was one of the first to recognise the importance of Samuel Beckett as a writer of prose.
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