Fintan O'Toole is an Irish polemicist, columnist, literary editor and drama critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988. Fintan was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001 and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books where he is Advising Editor, and contributes regularly to The Guardian.

He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator, with generally left-wing views. His recent books have focused on the rise, fall and aftermath of Ireland's Celtic Tiger. Fintan was born in Dublin, grew up in a working-class family, and was educated at University College Dublin.  He has been a strong critic of political corruption in Ireland throughout his career.

In 2011 he was named by The Observer as one of "Britain's top 300 intellectuals", although he does not live in the UK and was one of five on the list who would not claim to be British.  He is the winner of both the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize for his work on Brexit.

In 2012 and 2013 O'Toole was a Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University, and contributed to the Fund for Irish Studies Series.

He is author of Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (in 2018) and We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (in 2021).