The Life of Oreille: Frank McNally on a famous French anthropologist with a very Irish name

One of the newest and biggest museums in Paris is named jointly, and a bit awkwardly, after both its address and the former French president who established it.

The Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac could not but be big, covering as it does a vast subject: the indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.

But while studying one of its more extraordinary exhibits recently — a fearsome, life-size “initiation mask” from Papua New Guinea — I was struck by the familiar name of the man who collected it in 1935.

He was described only as “the anthropologist Patrick O’Reilly”, a detail that sent me off on my own ethnographical archaeology dig.

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This feat was complicated by the fact that the Paddy Reilly in question seemed to be unknown in Ireland, from where he had clearly descended, and is little remembered in France, where he was born.

Down one internet rabbit-hole, I thought I saw him described as a “Marxist priest”, which sounded intriguing until, on closer inspection, the adjective turned out to be “Marist”.

But as I now know, he was also a third-generation descendant of Wild Geese, born in 1900 at Meuse, near the border with Belgium.

The French part of his family story had begun with a James (later “Jacques”) Farrell O’Reilly from Cork, who emigrated to Le Havre aged 13 in 1771 to escape religious persecution at home.

He remained a dedicated cleric, rarely seen without his collar and usually dressed in a soutane, with wide-brimmed Roman hat, even while speeding through the streets on a Vespa

The young émigré so thrived there that a decade later he had his own company, O’Reilly et CIE, which he passed on to his son, Phillippe-Andre.

The latter’s son in turn became an army officer until, in 1906, he resigned in protest at a new law separating church and state, which might have required him to act contrary to his religion.

Then the first World War broke out and he returned to uniform, with tragic results. He was killed in the first month of hostilities.

His son, Patrick, was 14 at the time. And whereas previous generations had devoted themselves to French merchant and military life, he now chose the church and the study of ethnography, which he would combine to great effect.

After studies in the Sorbonne, he joined a religious mission to Buka Passage, now Bougainville, in New Guinea.

There, adopting the role of “missionary-ethnographer”, he began amassing a huge collection of artefacts and documents on the indigenous culture for a planned doctoral thesis.

Even the concept of a European museum devoted to the rest of the world’s cultures is problematic, which may explain the prosaic name

The thesis never happened, but the collection soon became important in its own right, especially after much of Bougainville was destroyed in the second World War. Had O’Reilly not preserved it, the cultural history of the area might have gone up in flames.

Among other projects of his decades in the south Pacific was to design and set up a museum in Tahiti, dedicated to the painter Paul Gauguin, who had spent years there depicting local life.

It was an unusual job for a priest, given what one Marist historian calls Gauguin’s “irreligion and dissolute ways”. But by all accounts, Fr O’Reilly was dedicated to the greater glory of France as well as God and pursued the museum project with the same enthusiasm he did everything else.

He remained, however, a dedicated cleric, rarely seen without his collar and usually dressed in a soutane, with wide-brimmed Roman hat, even while speeding through the streets on a Vespa.

He was popularly known as “Pere O’Reilly”, although the challenges of that surname to French speakers are emphasised by one biographical note explaining that it should be pronounced “oreille” (meaning “ear”, ironically).

The Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac has its critics, including those who argue that much of the collection is the misappropriated property of former French colonies.

Even the concept of a European museum devoted to the rest of the world’s cultures is problematic, which may explain the prosaic name, a compromise preferred to such earlier proposals as “Musée des arts premiers” (“first arts” being a euphemism for what used to be termed “primitive”).

Some cynics also suspect that naming it after a nondescript quai near the Eiffel Tower is a political Trojan horse. In time, they predict, the prefix will give way to the suffix, resulting in Musée Jacques Chirac.

Musée O’Reilly would hardly be a runner, however handsomely he contributed to the collection. The Hiberno-Frenchman died in 1988, as old as the century. And it’s not clear whether, during his long life, he had ever visited his ancestral homeland.

But he may have appreciated an irony of nomenclature in the part of the world he studied for so long. Just east of Bougainville is an island that used to be known as Neu Mecklenberg, after its German colonisers. Since O’Reilly’s time there, thanks to its then Australian administrators, it has been called New Ireland.

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