Mick O'Dea was born in Ennis, County Clare, in 1958, the second youngest of five children. He studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and later completed a Masters in European Fine Art in 1997 through a joint program split between the Winchester School of Art (UK) and its campus in Barcelona (Spain). He went on to serve as the first Principal of the RHA School and was elected President of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2014 - a position he held during the centenary commemorations of the 1916 Rising, for which he created a major exhibition at the RHA.

A member of Aosdána and Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy, O'Dea's work is held in collections spanning the National Gallery of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, Belfast City Hall, Government Buildings, and institutions across Europe, the United States and Asia. His commissioned portraits include those of President Michael D. Higgins and Brian Friel.

During the centenary commemorations, he produced renowned pieces through his celebrated series Black & Tan, Trouble, and The Split. In his exploration of the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War — he worked from historic photographs to restore life and complexity to their protagonists. As he has written: "Artists are keen observers and realists, not fantasists or sentimentalists, who are driven by a desire to get to the truth, which is not what society often wants but what is occasionally necessary."

It is entirely fitting that Mick O'Dea now comes to discuss his work in Bere Island, a place whose people were active in that revolutionary period, a place that served as a British naval base until 1938, that held an internment camp during the War of Independence, and that carries that layered, complex history still in its memory and landscape.