He took a position as part-time editor of Tax Briefing, a technical journal produced in Ireland, as well as reviewing poetry for Hibernia and The Crane Bag.
O'Driscoll stayed in the revenue business for as long as he did due to the advice of a colleague, who told him: "If you ever leave your job, you will stop writing.
Even so, in his memoir entitled Sing for the Taxman, O'Driscoll states: "I have always regarded myself as a civil servant rather than a 'poet' or 'artist' – words I would find embarrassing and presumptuous to ascribe to myself.
[3] His wife, the poet Julie O'Callaghan, and siblings – brothers Proinsias, Seamus, Declan, and sisters, Marie and Eithne – survived him.
[3] President Michael D. Higgins noted that O'Driscoll was "held in the highest regard not only by all those associated with Irish and European poetry".
The majority of his works were characterised by the use of economic language and the recurring motifs of mortality and the fragility of everyday life.
As he aged, O'Driscoll's works became more fluid and thoughtful as well as more frequent, and, according to some sources, like Alan Brownjohn of The Sunday Times for instance, even though he is younger than some of the poetic greats, "at best he is already their equal.
O'Driscoll published a collection of literary criticism entitled Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, which contains a selection of his essays and reviews.