[1] His mother, Muriel Gifford, died of a supposed drowning, a year afterwards while swimming at Skerries to Shenick Island, County Dublin on 9 July 1917.
He and his sister Barbara (who later married actor Liam Redmond) lived briefly with their paternal aunt Eleanor Bingham, County Clare before being put into the custody of strangers until their late teens when they were taken in by Jack MacDonagh.
[4] At the latter institution he earned both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees and was a classmate with several writers who would achieve critical success, including Cyril Cusack, Denis Devlin, Charlie Donnelly, Brian O'Nolan, Niall Sheridan and Mervyn Wall.
He had three other plays produced: God's Gentry (1951, a ballad opera about the tinkers), Lady Spider (1959, about Deirdre of the Sorrows and the Three sons of Ussna) and Step in the Hollow a piece of situation comedy nonsense.
He also wrote short stories; staged the first Irish production of ‘’Murder in the Cathedral’’ with Liam Redmond, later his brother-in-law; and was a popular broadcaster on Radio Éireann.