That Sunday it was announced that Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson had appointed O’Brien to succeed Rev Dermot Dunne, who retires as dean of Christ Church Cathedral at the end of August.
At 54, O’Brien worked at the Health Service Executive (HSE) for almost three decades and has served just three years as a Church of Ireland rector. It is not the usual track record for someone in one of the most senior clerical positions in Dublin.
“What was the archbishop thinking in making the appointment?” is, usually, the second question in such conversations.
Looking closely at O’Brien’s history, the answer is soon as implicit as that in comedian Caroline Aherne’s question to magician’s wife Debbie McGee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
Christ Church is in Dublin’s south inner city. Among O’Brien’s roles at the HSE was as co-ordinator for the Dublin northeast drugs taskforce in the early 2000s, when the area was beset by drug abuse. He went on to become the HSE’s addiction services manager for the Dublin north city and county area when it had probably the highest prevalence of drug abuse in the country.
Leading about 400 staff and six drug taskforces, O’Brien “just loved working with drug addicts and trying to make lives better”, he told The Irish Times. “It was investing in communities, investing in supports, building up new programmes.”
He studied for a master’s degree in social work at Trinity College Dublin and the St Francis Hospice in Raheny, specialising in palliative care. “It was very positive. I know that sounds weird, but people knew they were at the end of life ... they were content with where they were at, and there was a great sense of calm and a great sense of peace, and I actually thought there’s lots I can learn from this.”
His thesis was “on grief and loss in addiction. We often think about loss being the physical loss of an individual but then, what we realised with addiction, was that there is a loss when a parent loses their child to addiction. They’re not going to be, you know, a schoolteacher, they’re not going to get married; perhaps they’re not going to have wonderful grandchildren.”
And “you realise there were other forms of grief that we’re recognising now with Alzheimer’s and dementia, that the person is there but they’re not, so you’re not allowed to grieve because society doesn’t understand it and they say ‘what are you doing, your Daddy is still there’. But he’s not, so [there are] all these other types of grief that we learned about.”
O’Brien “just loved” carrying out the research.
In order to rise further in the HSE “you needed to get more experience elsewhere” so he took on the job as co-ordinator of BowelScreen, a screening service for bowel cancers.
“It wasn’t patient-facing, so I started to think ‘oh this is not for me’.” He applied for and was appointed the HSE’s youth mental health taskforce co-ordinator, which saw him leading development of the national mental health strategy.
It meant structures were in place when Covid hit to provide counselling in emergency departments, in the home, “and for young people in particular who were sitting the Leaving Cert and were panicked about being isolated”. It was “brilliant and it was one of the most successful things that I have done in my career”.
He was then asked “to do a policy on loneliness, which was the biggest problem for older people. But I had enough policy at that stage.” Instead he headed primary care for the Dublin north city area, covering “every service in the community”.
After Covid, he felt things fell back into the old ways at the HSE, and for some the bureaucracy became “stifling”. As he ascended the ranks, it was a case of being “at meetings every day, thinking about other meetings”.
By then O’Brien “was speaking with the archbishop and I had been a self-supporting minister for 10 years”, having undertaken training for ministry at the Church of Ireland Theological College in Dublin while working at the HSE. He served as curate in Howth and Balbriggan parishes.
“I said to the archbishop, you know I love what I’m doing at the HSE but I just feel as though, should I wait until I’m 65 and then come into a church and be too old to do anything, or I’m open to exploring coming into the church and doing something dynamic before I retire and see how it works out.”
Besides, by then he had realised that “sitting at meetings would have just killed me”.
There was also an incident when his son Dylan was very ill in hospital. O’Brien was about to visit him when he was asked to attend another such HSE meeting. “We’d love you to be here, Tom, because there’s something urgent we need to discuss,” he was told. He attended the meeting but there was “nothing”.
The archbishop knew of a vacancy that would suit O’Brien. He was interviewed for the position as rector at St James’s in Crinken, south Dublin, and three years ago got the job. “I took a huge salary decrease, huge, but I’ve never been happier.”
He loves it at Crinken – his biggest difficulty with accepting the job as dean of Christ Church “was the people” at Crinken. He had been to “very many churches where select vestries have been kind of difficult at times,” but in a very active three years at Crinken “I’ve had nothing but an easy ride”.
The people have been “very supportive, no matter what I wanted, they said ‘yes, let’s do it’” and he and his wife Daniella have “made very good friends. It’s a beautiful location.” Now he was headed for “the city centre into what is a very formal role”.
The archbishop has been “very supportive. He is very wise. He sees an awful lot of things that I don’t even see, you know. He sees talents that I probably didn’t see about myself. He knew that Crinken would be a great fit. I don’t know how he knew that, but it was. He knows the cathedral’s going to be a good fit for a different reason.”
O’Brien and his wife Daniella have three children, Rebecca (27), Dylan (24) and Tara Rose (20). He and Daniella met in London during an earlier life when both were, briefly, studying law. She is from Prague and her father is a senior figure in the Czech Republic’s Baptist Union.
From Waterford and a Catholic background, O’Brien had by then already found his way to the Baptists as his faith search went on. It continued, until he found his spiritual home in Anglicanism.
It is expected he will be installed as dean of Christ Church in October.