A key feature of O'Brien's personal situation was his status as an Irish government civil servant, who, as a result of his father's relatively early death in July 1937, was for a decade obliged to partially support his mother and ten siblings, including an elder brother who was then an unsuccessful writer (there would have been some pension for his mother and minor siblings resulting from his father’s service); however, other siblings enjoyed considerable professional success - one, Kevin (also known as Caoimhín Ó Nualláin), was the Professor of Ancient Classics at University College, Dublin, yet another, Micheál Ó Nualláin was a noted artist, another, Ciaran O Nuallain was also a writer, novelist, publisher and journalist. 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.