Born: 05 February 1872, Kilkeel, County Down
Entered: 08 July 1893, Sacred Heart, De Smet, Coeurs D’Alène ID, USA - Taurensis Province (TAUR)
Ordained: 31 May 1906
Final vows: 02 February 1911
Died: 26 May 1958, Jesuit Novitiate, Sheridan, OR, USA - Oregonensis Province (ORE)

Transcribed TAUR to CAL : 1909; CAL to ORE

by 1933 came to Emo (HIB) working

Born: 05 May 1929, Kill, Castlecomer, County Kilkenny
Entered: 07 September 1953, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Ordained: 29 July 1965, Milltown Park, Dublin
Died: 18 August 2013, Mercy Retirement Center in Oakland, CA, USA

Left Society of Jesus: 03 October 1968

Parents William and Eileen (O’Toole) were National Teachers. Family lived at St Alphonsus' Road, Drumcondra. Mother died in 1968

Oldest of two boys with three sisters.

Early education at Clogh NS, County Kilkenny and then with the Christian Brothers in Carlow.

After school he went into Pharmacy for 5.5 years, qualifying as an Assistant in 1953.

Baptised at St Patrick’s, Clogh, County Kilkenny, 05/05/1929
Confirmed at St Patrick’s, Clogh, County Kilkenny, by Dr Collier of Ossory, 14/04/1941

Left 05/10/1968, entered Capuchin’s and took vows in 04/10/1969. Known as “Father James”.

1953-1955: St Mary's, Emo, Novitiate
1955-1959: St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, Philosophy
1959-1961: Belvedere College SJ, Regency
1961-1962: Clongowes Wood College SJ, Regency
1962-1966: Milltown Park, Theology
1966-1967: Rathfarnham Castle, Tertianship
1967-1968: St Mary’s, Choma, Zambia
1968: On supply at the Jesuit Church of Sacred Heart, Lauriston Street, Edinburgh, and then came to Manresa House Dollymount.

After leaving and taking Vows in the Capuchins, he had worked at St Brendan’s Hospital and was living and working at St Mary of the Angels, Church Street.

Address 2000: Old Mission Santa Ines, Mission Drive, Solvang, CA, USA

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sfgate/name/edward-o-keefe-obituary?id=9716767

Edward O'Keefe Obituary
Fr Edward O'Keefe
Was born on May 5, 1929 in Kill, Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland, the son of William O'Keefe and Eileen O'Toole. He entered the Jesuit Order and made first profession at Emo, Port Arlington, Ireland in 1955. He was ordained at Milltown Park, Dublin in 1965 and was sent to the Jesuit Mission at Zambia Africa in 1967. His first contact with the Capuchins came on the banks of the Zambezi River in Central Africa. He was welcomed by the Capuchins and had frequent contact with them during the year. As a result he felt drawn to join the Capuchins; and so he did in the following year of 1968. He returned to Ireland and made his novitiate year. In 1969 he was solemnly professed and remained in Ireland as a Chaplain and ministering in giving parish missions and retreats.

In 1974 he came to Our Lady of Angels in Burlingame, CA as associate pastor.

From 1974 to 1981 he was assigned as a hospital chaplain in Fresno, CA. He also was actively involved in Marriage and Engaged Encounter retreats and the Focolare movement.

In 1981 he was associate pastor in Hermiston, Oregon.

In 1985 to 1987 he was associate pastor at St Francis Parish in Los Angeles and from 1988 to 1991 was associate pastor at St Francis of Assisi Parish in Bend, OR.

From 1991 to 1998 he was Pastor at St Lawrence of Brindisi Parish Watts, Los Angeles

1999 to 2000 he was associate pastor at Old Mission Santa Ines in Solvang, CA.

In 2000, he once again felt called to go out into the mission field. This time he went to our Mexico mission in Monterrey as guardian of the student community.

In 2010, it became obvious that Fr Ed was rapidly declining in health with Alzheimer's disease and he retired to Mercy Care and Retirement Center in Oakland, CA. After ministering so many years in so many different places Fr. Ed could no longer minister to others but in his silent prayer.

In June of 2013 Fr. Ed began to lose weight and in August he could barely eat anything. Fr. Ed died at 12:10 pm in the afternoon of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Mother at Mercy Retirement Center in Oakland, CA. He was 84 years old.

He is survived by his sister Noreen O'Keefe and his brother Gerard O'Keefe and his sister Frances Glavin.

His funeral arrangements are as follows: Rosary at 7:30 pm at Old Mission Santa Ines in Solvang, CA on August 18, 2013 and Funeral Mass at 11 am also at Old Mission Santa Ines on August 19, 2013. Burial following the Mass at San Lorenzo Friary in Santa Ynez, CA.

Born: 27 April 1853, Portland, Victoria, Australia
Entered: 07 June 1872, Sevenhill, Australia - Austriaco-Hungaricae Province (ASR-HUN)
Ordained: 1885, St Beuno's, Wales
Final vows: 15 August 1887
Died: 02 February 1925, St Ignatius College, Manresa, Norwood, Adelaide, Australia

Transcribed ASR-HUN to HIB : 01 January 1901

Brother of Saint Mary MacKillop; Cousin Colin McKillop - RIP 1964, and Ken McKillop - RIP 1945

◆ HIB Menologies SJ :
His sister with Father Tenison-Woods founded the “Sisters of St Joseph”, and they had a convent in the North Shore Parish. Their focus is on the education of poor children, and so tend to be situated in remote bush areas, where they had very little access to Church and Mass.

Memory of James Rabbitte :
“In 1882 Donald McKillop came to Europe for studies. I met him around 1894 at Riverview. He was then Superior, having been appointed in 1890, of the Daly-River Mission - a Mission the Austrian Fathers had established for the conversion of the Aborigines in the northern territory. A considerable amount of money had been spent there, and they had schools for boys and girls, machinery for working timber etc. Donald had come south to recuperate his health and collect money for his Mission. He was accompanied by two native boys, educated in his schools. Unfortunately the money collected was lodged in a bank which closed while Donald was at Riverview.
He was a man of above average height, with a broad forehead and a flowing beard. years later his health was bad, and he died in Adelaide 02 February 1925.

◆ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University online
McKillop, Donald (1853–1925)
by G. J. O'Kelly
G. J. O'Kelly, 'McKillop, Donald (1853–1925)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mckillop-donald-4111/text6573, published first in hardcopy 1974,

anthropologist; Catholic missionary; Catholic priest; Indigenous culture recorder; schoolteacher

Died : 2 February 1925, North Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Donald McKillop (1853-1925), Jesuit priest, was born on 27 April 1853 in Portland, Victoria, brother of Mary who founded the Josephite Sisters, the largest Australian congregation of nuns. He was educated at St Aloysius College, Sevenhill, South Australia, where he entered the Society of Jesus in June 1872 and did his noviceship and studies in rhetoric and philosophy until 1877. He then taught at the college until 1882 when he was sent for theological studies to Innsbruck in 1883, to north Wales in 1884-85 where he was ordained priest and to Roehampton for his Jesuit studies. With two Jesuit companions he returned to Adelaide on 14 October 1886, all three destined for the mission to the Aborigines in the Northern Territory. This mission, conducted in 1882-90 by the Austrian Jesuits from Sevenhill, involved nineteen Jesuits and had the largest number of Aborigines of any in the Northern Territory. Anthropologists such as W. E. H. Stanner and Ronald Berndt single it out for its insights and appreciation of Aboriginal culture.

The policy adopted on the mission stations followed the model of the Jesuit Reductions in eighteenth-century Paraguay, and McKillop became its most forthright exponent. In 1887-89 he was attached to the Rapid Creek station, near Palmerston, to work and study the Mulluk Mulluk dialect, the lingua franca of the Daly region. Late in 1889 he was sent by Fr Anton Strele to found a new station at Serpentine Lagoon on the Daly. With four companions he laboured for a year among the Madngella and other tribes who had never seen whites, but with little effect.

In December 1890 McKillop was made Superior of the whole mission which then had three stations and a residence in Darwin. He was responsible for the whole venture but the financial upkeep bore heavily on him since the assistance promised by the bishops did not materialise. Deeming the stations had failed, he closed them and in August 1891 concentrated his eleven Jesuits in one new station on the Daly. Despite some successes the policy of small, self-supporting agricultural townships did not attract the Aboriginals and most converts were inconstant. The station was struck by severe poverty and his begging tours in the south and east in 1892-93 were unsuccessful because of the depression and apathy.

The continuing decimation of the tribes made the Jesuits seriously doubt the survival of the Aboriginals. McKillop clung to his policies of preserving the native culture but outside factors crowded in to produce a tragic desperation as he foresaw the end of 'the daydream of my life'. In vivid prose he often lashed out in the press at 'blood-stained Australia', at the white and Chinese population and at the government, whom he castigated for pusillanimity in granting land and finance to missions in tribal territories. Worn-out and seriously ill he was ordered south in October 1897. Leadership of the mission then became mediocre and after floods in 1898-99 the station was closed.

McKillop's direction had been realistic but his criticism of official policy probably lost him co-operation from the government. In intermittent good health he worked in Jesuit parishes in Norwood, South Australia (1898-1901), in Victoria at Hawthorn (1902-03) and Richmond (1904-10), Sevenhill (1911-13) and Norwood from 1914 until he died on 2 February 1925 in North Adelaide. His 'Anthropological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia' had been published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 1892-93. The evidence of J. L. Parsons and Charles J. Dashwood to the select committee on the proposed Aborigines' bill of 1899 suggests that the failure of the Jesuit enterprise in the territory helped to confirm the negative character of government legislation on Aboriginals for the next decades.

Select Bibliography
V. L. Solomon, N. T. Times Almanac and Directory (Palmerston, 1886-90)
Roman Catholic Mission Reports, Parliamentary Papers (South Australia), 1886-89, 1891-94, 1896-99
R. M. Berndt, ‘Surviving influence of mission contact on the Daly River…’, Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 8 (1952)
G. J. O'Kelly, The Jesuit Mission Stations in the Northern Territory, 1882-1899 (B.A. Hons thesis, Monash University, 1967)
Australian Jesuit Provincial Archives (Hawthorn, Melbourne).

◆ David Strong SJ “The Australian Dictionary of Jesuit Biography 1848-2015”, 2nd Edition, Halstead Press, Ultimo NSW, Australia, 2017 - ISBN : 9781925043280
Donald MacKillop, brother of Saint Mary McKillop, was a student at St Aloysius' College, Sevenhill, 1867-71, and entered the Society there, 7 June 1872, the third Australian to do so. He also studied rhetoric and philosophy, and did his regency there as well. He left for Europe in 1882, and studied theology at Innsbruck, Mold and St Beuno's, being ordained in 1885. Tertianship followed at Roehampton, London.
He arrived back in Adelaide, 10 October 1886, and went to the Northern Territory Mission, first at Rapid Creek, 1886-89, where he worked and studied the Mulluk dialect, and then to the Daly River, 1889-90, when he was appointed superior of the mission.
This mission, founded by the Jesuits at Sevenhill, 1882-90, involved nineteen Jesuits and had the largest number of Aborigines in mission stations in the Northern Territory Anthropologists praised the Jesuits for their insights and appreciation of Aboriginal culture.
MacKillop completely reorganised the mission. He obtained a new grant of higher and more fertile land on the Daly. abandoned Rapid Creek and concentrated all the missionaries at the new station of St Joseph's or "new Uniya". He installed a pump for irrigation, obtained a sewing machine for making clothes, planted coconuts and vegetables, learned the Larrikiyah language and used it in the small school. Unfortunately, only one adult was baptised in the nine years of the mission at Rapid Creek. When the whole Northern Mission was closed, 78 adults and 197 infants had been baptised, in addition to 78 being baptised in danger of death. If success were measured in terms of baptisms only, then the value of the mission would have to be questioned. He was critical of government for not granting sufficient land and finance to missions in tribal territories.
MacKillop encountered hard times in 1892. He had few funds, was suffering from influenza, and there were food shortages. During June 1893, he went on a tour collecting money and publicising the mission, and returned to the Daly in July 1894 with £800 and a magic lantern. In time he acquired a herd of pigs and a steam engine for sawing and pumping. Tobacco and sugar cane were planted. Leather was made from goat and bullock hides. Despite all this work, the mission was closed in June 1899 after disastrous floods.
MacKillop had been a real pioneer in accumulating knowledge of the religion and customs of the Aborigines. The Jesuits shielded them from exploitation and cruel treatment. Conversions were very slow, yet the influence of the Jesuit missionaries was long remembered. MacKillop's “Anthropological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia” was published in the “Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 1892-93”.
During the last years of the mission, MacKillop became unwell and was replaced as superior, going to the Norwood parish, 1897-1901. He spent time in the parishes of Hawthorn, Richmond and Sevenhill. During his final years at Norwood, 1913-25, he was impaired in health, but was a consulter, 1914-21. He said Mass, heard confessions and preached from time to time.
At his death, he was remembered as a man of gifts and attainments, exceptional knowledge of scientific matters, an eloquent preacher, and devoted priest. It is coincidental that the first three Australian Jesuits, MacKillop and the two O'Brien's, John and Thomas, all died in 1925 within a few months of each other.

◆ James B Stephenson SJ Menologies 1973

Father Donald McKillop SJ 1853-1925
Fr Donald McKillop was born in Western Australia on April 25th 1853. He entered the Austro-Australian Mission in 1872. His sister, with Fr Tennison-Woods founded the congregation known as “The Sisters of St Joseph”, which is widely spread in Australia.

In 1894 Fr Donald was Superior of the Daly River Mission, which had been founded by the Austrian Fathers for the conversion of the Aborigines in the Northern Territory. In 1893 he came south to recruit his health and to collect money for the Mission. He was accompanied by two native boys educated in his own schools. Unfortunately the money collected was lodged in a bank which failed while Fr Donald was at Riverview.

His health was never good and he died at Adelaide on February 2nd 1923.

Born: 15 August 1919, Dromore, County Tyrone
Entered: 05 April 1937. St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 09 February 2007, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin (Dublin, County Dublin)

Left Society of Jesus: 18 April 1938

Father was a bank-porter and the family moved to St Patrick’s Terrace, Omagh, County Tyrone

Youngest of three boys with three sisters.

Education was at the Christian Brothers schools in Omagh (primary and secondary)

https://www.dib.ie/biography/kiely-benedict-ben-a9533

DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY

Kiely, Benedict ('Ben')

Kiely, Benedict ('Ben') (1919–2007), writer, critic and journalist, was born Thomas Joseph Benedict Kiely near Dromore, Co. Tyrone, on 15 August 1919, the sixth and youngest child of Thomas Kiely, a British army veteran and measurer for the Ordnance Survey (born in Moville, Co. Donegal, son of an RIC man from Co. Limerick), and his wife Sarah Anne (née Gormley), formerly a barmaid. Kiely had two brothers (one of whom died aged eight) and three sisters. When he was one year old the family moved to Omagh, Co. Tyrone, where his father became a hotel porter. Kiely received his primary and secondary education from the Christian Brothers at their Mount St Columba's school in the town; he always spoke of his teachers with respect, recalling with particular admiration a lay teacher, M. J. Curry (model for the central character in his novella Proxopera) and Brother Rice, a most unusually enlightened Christian Brother who introduced him to the work of James Joyce (qv). Kiely was a member of the local GAA club but was suspended for playing soccer with Omagh Corinthians.

Much of Kiely's literary oeuvre draws on his youth in Omagh, and throughout his life he imaginatively recreated the townscape with its surrounding Strule Valley, its social and political divisions, concealed or unconcealed scandals, second-hand reports and fantasies of the wider world, and juvenile sexual curiosity – both the sexuality and the lure of an exotic world being sharpened by Omagh's ongoing history as a garrison town. From 1932 (when he attended the Dublin eucharistic congress) Kiely regularly holidayed in Dublin, staying with a married sister; the mid-Ulster town and the southern city were to become the twin poles of his career and imagination. Other holidays, in the Rosses area of Co. Donegal, also contributed to his imaginative formation.

After completing his secondary education (with a first place in English and second in history), Kiely worked as a sorter in Omagh post office (1936–7) before deciding he had a religious vocation and entering the Jesuit novitiate in Emo Park, near Portarlington, Co. Laois, in the spring of 1937. After a year in the novitiate Kiely was diagnosed with a tubercular lesion of the spine; he spent eighteen months at Cappagh hospital, Finglas, Co. Dublin, and wore a back brace for five years. Kiely later claimed that his vocation dissipated within a week of his arrival in hospital, partly due to his move from an unworldly all-male environment to the presence of shapely female nurses. In hindsight, Kiely believed the short-lived burst of fervour that produced his religious vocation had been a misunderstood yearning for a wider life of culture and scholarship. He retained from the novitiate a sizeable collection of miscellaneous religious knowledge, a number of clerical friends whom he respected, and a lifelong habit of rising at 5 a.m. and getting in several hours' work before breakfast.

Dublin and journalism
On discharge from hospital late in 1939 Kiely returned to Omagh, where he persuaded his elder brother (a self-made businessman) to lend him the money for a BA course at UCD (commencing autumn 1940). While studying history, literature and Latin, Kiely was a part-time editorial assistant on the Standard, a catholic weekly, and wrote articles, stories and verse in journals published by the Capuchin priest Fr Senan Moynihan (1900–70) (notably the Capuchin Annual, Father Mathew Record, Bonaventura and Irish Bookman). During his student days Kiely also organised a protest against the niggardliness of the coverage of James Joyce's death by Irish newspapers.

After graduating in September 1943, Kiely began a research MA in history, but abandoned it after he was recruited by Peadar O'Curry (1907–85) to a full-time job on the Standard, where he took over a 'Life and letters' column previously written by Patrick Kavanagh (qv). Francis MacManus (qv) became a literary 'guide, counsellor and friend' (Eckley, 164), persuading him to cut down a rejected novel, 'The king's shilling', to a long short story (later published as 'Soldier, red soldier'). In 1945 Kiely joined the editorial staff of the Irish Independent. He later commented wryly on the difference between the romanticised image of journalism that he had acquired from his adolescent passion for the writings of the English catholic columnist G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and his subsequent experience of sub-editors' queries and quotidian visits to provincial towns to cover 'human interest' stories; this experience, however, reinforced his fascination with the interplay of locality and personality. From his earliest journalism to his last years, much of his writing took the form of an itinerary. He also regularly reviewed books in Irish journals and on Radio Éireann.

On 5 July 1944 Kiely married Maureen O'Connell (d. 2004); they had three daughters and a son (born 1945–9). The marriage broke down in the early 1950s, partly because of the strain between family life and the nocturnal, pub-centred lifestyle of a journalist. From the late 1950s Kiely lived with Frances Daly, whom he married in 2005 after his first wife's death in Canada.

Kiely as critic
Kiely's first publications were non-fiction works. Counties of contention (1945) is a series of essays on partition whose central argument is that unionism is a defence of ascendancy sustained by appeals to protestant 'persecution mania', and that reconciliation and an end to partition are necessary to save the whole island from mediocrity. Poor scholar (1947) was a pioneering study of William Carleton (qv), whose experiences as a storyteller, who was both inspired by and at odds with Tyrone, in many respects paralleled Kiely's own. In his last years, Kiely was a patron and regular attendee at the Carleton Summer School in Clogher, Co. Tyrone.

A number of published essays on contemporary Irish writers (mainly in the Irish Bookman) were reworked into Modern Irish fiction: a survey (1950) published by the Standard's Golden Eagle Books imprint. Much of this material, with further reflections and reworking, was incorporated into the essay collection A raid into dark corners (1999), which also contains reassessments of nineteenth-century Irish writers from throughout Kiely's career. (These serve the dual function of identifying material on which Kiely himself can draw and justifying his departures from nineteenth-century idealism and decorum for conservative provincial readers who might still see Kickham (qv) or Canon Sheehan (qv) as models.) Kiely's literary criticism, in its attempt to chart a path for post-revival and post-partition Irish literature, is noteworthy for its implicit rejection of the cultural nationalist view (as expressed by Daniel Corkery (qv)) that most nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish fiction was not really Irish, and the view (associated with Sean O'Faolain (qv) and Frank O'Connor (qv)) that post-revolutionary Irish society was too provincial and uncertain to allow for the development of the novel as a social art form. Kiely presents contemporary Irish literature as divided between an ethos of rebellion incarnated by Joyce and one of acceptance reflected in Corkery. His own literary work tries to bridge this gap, as he moved between the thriving and confidently pious Dublin catholic weeklies and reviews and the more cynical worlds of the dissident literary intelligentsia and of Dublin journalists brought into contact with aspects of Irish life unacknowledged by the idealised self-image of catholic Ireland.

Early fiction
Kiely's first three novels are 'state of the nation' exercises: group portraits of Ireland in wartime as a Plato's cave of stasis. Their narrative structure moves among groups of characters in cinematic style. The first two are set in a thinly disguised Omagh in the period 1938–40, and are characterised by a dyad of naïve young enthusiast and detached older intellectual which recurs in Kiely's work. Land without stars (1946) portrays a romantic triangle involving two brothers (a spoiled priest turned journalist and a romantic republican and ex-postal sorter, brought to destruction by association with a sociopathic IRA killer). In a harbour green (1949), set in 1938–9, is a more panoramic view of small-town Ulster catholic life owing something to Joyce's Dubliners; its depiction of a young woman's simultaneous sexual involvement with a naïve young farmer and a sybaritic older solicitor led to its being banned by the Irish censorship of publications board (while in Britain it was taken up by the Catholic Book Club). The ban encouraged Kiely's move (at the behest of M. J. MacManus (qv)) from the Irish Independent to the less clericalist Irish Press, where he became literary editor, editorial writer and film critic. Kiely's third novel, Call for a miracle (1950), a similar group portrait set in Dublin in 1942, escaped banning despite its portrayal of marital separation, prostitution and suicide, possibly because its dark ending could be interpreted as the wages of sin. Kiely later jocularly commented that he had disproved Aodh de Blacam's (qv) proud claim that no Ulster writer had been banned; this underplayed the anger visible in his 1966 anti-censorship essay, 'The whores on the half-doors', written in response to the censors' last stand against authors such as John McGahern (qv) and Edna O'Brien (b. 1930).

Kiely's next novels continued the earlier works' preoccupation with neurotic states of mind while experimenting with different narrative techniques and closer attention to single protagonists. Honey seems bitter (1952), a first-person narrative of neurotic obsession involving a murder, emotional voyeurism and sexual infidelity, was banned. The cards of the gambler (1953), regarded by some critics as Kiely's best novel, is a literary reworking of a traditional folk tale (a genre often favoured by nineteenth-century Irish writers): the gambler's receiving three wishes from an enigmatic God, and his attempts to evade Death take place in 1950s suburban Dublin. The novel is influenced by Chesterton's novel The man who was Thursday (1908) and by the 1929 play (and 1934 film) Death takes a holiday. After various ambivalent triumphs and traumas (including a narrow avoidance of hell described as another version of suburban Dublin, inhabited by pious haters so concerned with keeping up respectable appearances that they refuse to acknowledge the true nature of their surroundings), he departs for heaven via a celestial version of Dublin airport, then seen as symbolising a new Irish modernity.

Kiely's next novel, There was an ancient house (1955), was also banned. It describes a preliminary year in a religious novitiate seen principally through the eyes of McKenna, an idealistic young novice, and Barragry, a progressively disenchanted ex-journalist pursuing a late vocation, both of whom eventually leave. The portrayal of religious life is respectful but increasingly implies that idealism, religious or otherwise, takes too little account of everyday humanity and is finally inhuman. The book, like Kiely's other fiction with autobiographical elements, should be read as a fantasia inspired by real-life events rather than a simple transcript of Kiely's own experiences. (It is set in the mid 1950s, and involves a fictitious religious order based on the Redemptorists and the Marists as well as the Jesuits.) The ban may have been due to the strong hint that Barragry's spiritual crisis was caused by his girlfriend having an abortion. (After leaving the novitiate he resumes the relationship.) The captain with the whiskers (1960), much admired by Kiely critics, is a grim Gothic study of a tyrannical gentry patriarch's malign overshadowing of his children's lives even after his death, as told by a narrator who himself is corrupted by his fascination with the captain; it can be read as a comment on colonialism.

Broader horizons
The 1960s saw Kiely's professional blossoming as Ireland grew more prosperous and more open to outside influence. From the late 1950s the New Yorker began to publish his short stories, and Kiely established contact with American academics such as Kevin Sullivan, author of Joyce among the Jesuits (1958), whose search for his ancestral Kerry glen inspired Kiely's famous story 'A journey to the seven streams', and the novelist and critic of nineteenth-century Irish fiction Thomas Flanagan (1923–2002). Kiely moved away from professional journalism to become writer-in-residence at Hollins College (latterly University) in western Virginia (1964–5), visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon in Portland (1965–6), and writer-in-residence at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia (1966–8). During this period in academia, Kiely contributed a fortnightly American letter to the Irish Times, commenting on American society with particular reference to the black civil rights movement and the wider upheavals of the 1960s; he also wrote numerous book reviews for the New York Times and essays and reviews for other periodicals (including the Nation of New York).

After returning to Ireland in 1968 Kiely spent the rest of his life as a full-time professional writer. (He was also an extern lecturer at UCD.) His later work is more exuberantly pagan and less haunted by faith. The 1968 novel Dogs enjoy the morning, an outspoken celebration of the sexual impulse and the bawdier aspects of Irish provincial life and folk culture which had been denounced or denied by censors such as William Magennis (qv), marks this new confidence and recognition in contrast to the social insecurity and aura of disreputability he experienced as a journalist-writer in the 1950s.

From the appearance of his first story collection, A journey to the seven streams (1963), Kiely's output was dominated by short stories, which became his most popular works and on which his literary reputation chiefly rests. In contrast to the 'well-made' short story encapsulating a life in a single emblematic incident, based on French and Russian models and favoured by many twentieth-century Irish authors, Kiely preferred an outwardly 'artless' approach, in which carefully structured digressions, multiple foci, garrulous narration, incorporation of familiar quotations and verse snatches, drawing on personal memories (generally recombined and reinvented, rather than straightforwardly reminiscent), and refusal to tie up apparently loose ends draw strongly on the oral storytelling tradition. (Surviving drafts in the NLI suggest Kiely composed many of these stories in his head for oral delivery, and that they underwent relatively little revision after being committed to paper.) Some critics complain that with age this operatic or performative style lapsed into self-indulgence, and Kiely's reliance on quotations and allusion grew to such an extent that his later works are virtual or actual anthologies. Kiely's later collections are A ball of malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A cow in the house (1978), and A letter to Peachtree (1987). Several selections from these stories have also been published, and a Collected stories appeared in 2001 with an introduction by Colum McCann.

The image of Kiely as cosy storyteller was reinforced for a generation of Irish radio listeners by his melodious Northern voice reminiscing in six- or seven-minute radio essays on the Sunday morning RTÉ radio programme Sunday miscellany (from the early 1970s). The germ of these can be found in an Irish Press column about travels throughout Ireland (written with Sean White under the shared pseudonym Patrick Lagan). Kiely the raconteur is also in view in such works as All the way to Bantry Bay (1978), a collection of essays describing journeys in Ireland; Ireland from the air (1991), for which he provided text for a photobook; Yeats' Ireland: an illustrated anthology (1989); and And as I rode by Granard moat (1996), a selection of Irish poems and ballads with linking commentary on their local and personal associations. In 1982 Kiely received an honorary doctorate from the NUI. He served as council member and president of the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1996 became a saoi of Aosdána. Admirers such as Colum McCann have complained that this late image of the 'grey Irish eminence' conceals Kiely's edge and significance from potential readers.

Troubles fiction
Kiely was profoundly affected by the Northern Ireland troubles from 1969; while denouncing unionist misrule and the extremism of Ian Paisley (qv) as having precipitated the conflict, he was horrified at the revelation of the violence latent in Northern Irish society, lamenting 'the real horrors have passed out the fictional ones', and commenting that the churches had contributed greatly to the divisions which made such things possible (Ir. Times, 29 January 1977). He praised Omagh as a solitary bright spot, marked by its people's efforts to maintain good cross-community relations. His last two lengthy works of fiction were the novella Proxopera (1977), whose cultured elderly protagonist is forced at gunpoint by IRA men to drive a proxy bomb into his native town, and the novel Nothing happens in Carmincross (1985), set in the early 1970s, in which the elderly Irish-American protagonist's joyful rediscovery of Ireland (in the company of an uninhibited old flame) on his way to a family wedding in an Ulster village ends with the death or mutilation of numerous villagers (including the bride) by bombs planted to divert the security forces from an IRA operation elsewhere. (This is based on the murder of Kathleen Dolan, killed by a loyalist car bomb in Killeter, Co. Down, on 14 December 1972 as she posted wedding invitations; Kiely abandoned a commission to write a coffee-table history of Ireland when the publishers refused to allow him to commence with this incident.) In contrast to his usual methods of composition, Kiely worked on Carmincross for twelve years; its narrative techniques experiment with postmodernism (the ageing lovers, pursued by the old flame's estranged husband, are ironically assimilated to Diarmuid and Gráinne (qv) pursued by Finn (qv)) and, beside Kiely's usual collage of literary and folkloric references, incorporate newspaper reports of real-life atrocities committed by republican and loyalist paramilitaries and state forces, and by regimes and guerrillas elsewhere in the world, whose fragmentary horrors mirror both the destructive power of the bomb and the breakdown of grand narratives of identity. These stories acquired additional significance after 15 August 1998 (Kiely's seventy-ninth birthday), when twenty-nine people were killed and over 220 injured in Omagh by a car bomb planted by the Real IRA splinter group.

Some critics hailed the Troubles stories as masterworks; other commentators (generally but not always holding republican views) argued that they were essentially outraged and myopic expressions of bourgeois complacency, and that their reduction of republicans' political motives to one-dimensional psychopathy was an artistic as well as a political flaw. (These criticisms are more applicable to Proxopera, where IRA members are portrayed directly.) A variant on this criticism argues that Kiely's view of culture as a naturally unifying force founded on human decency unfitted him to portray genuine disagreement as anything more complex than a destructive irruption of anti-culture (though his nuanced portrayal of the conflict between sacred and secular calls this into question). While these criticisms have substance, it can be argued that they run the risk of normalising the un-normalisable; a cry of pain and horror has its own integrity.

Kiely's last major works were two memoirs, Drink to the bird (1991), about his Omagh boyhood, and the more fragmentary and anecdotal The waves behind us (1999). He died in St Vincent's hospital, Dublin, on 9 February 2007 after a short illness and was buried with his family in Drumragh cemetery, Omagh. The principal collection of his papers is in the NLI, and additional material is in Emory University. Since 2001 he has been honoured by an annual Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend in Omagh. He awaits comprehensive reassessment; at his best he was a remarkable explorer of the pieties and darknesses of a mid-twentieth-century Ireland overshadowed in popular perception by the first and last thirds of the century.

Sources
Grace Eckley, Benedict Kiely (1972); Daniel J. Casey, Benedict Kiely (1974); John Wilson Foster, Forces and themes in Ulster fiction (1974); Ir. Times, 29 Jan. 1977; 13, 17 Feb. 2007; Benedict Kiely, Drink to the bird: a memoir (1991); id., The waves behind us: further memoirs (1999); Belfast Telegraph, 6 Aug. 1999; Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland troubles since 1969: (de-) constructing the North (2003); Wordweaver: the legend of Benedict Kiely (dir. Roger Hudson, 2004; DVD with additional material, Stoney Road Films 2007); Sunday Independent, 11 Feb. 2007; Guardian, 12 Feb. 2007; Times, 19 Feb. 2007; Anne Fogarty and Derek Hand (ed.), Irish University Review, xxxviii, no. 1 (spring-summer 2008; special issue: Benedict Kiely); Derek Hand, A history of the Irish novel (2011); George O'Brien, The Irish novel 1960–2010 (2012); Benedict Kiely website, benedictkiely.info/index.html (accessed May 2013)

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/author-benedict-kiely-dies-aged-87-1.803094?

Author Benedict Kiely dies aged 87

Novelist, short-story writer, critic, journalist, broadcaster and seanchaí Benedict Kiely, who was a dominant presence on the Irish scene for many decades, has died aged 87.

Novelist, short-story writer, critic, journalist, broadcaster and seanchaí Benedict Kiely, who was a dominant presence on the Irish scene for many decades, has died aged 87.

Born in Dromore, Co Tyrone, Benedict Kiely was brought up in Omagh.

He began working as a journalist in Dublin, where he spent close to 70 years of his life. The first of his many novels, Land Without Stars,was published in 1946 and he will also be fondly remembered for his work on RTÉ's Radio One's Sunday Miscellanyprogramme.

"Over six decades he has created a body of work which is impressed indelibly in contemporary literature," Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, said. "His exquisite prose explored and celebrated humanity in all its complexity and intrigue."

Interfuse No 156 : Summer 2014

AN ANCIENT HOUSE

Kevin Laheen

The Omagh-born writer Ben Kiely entered the Jesuit noviciate in 1937 but left before taking vows. Shortly after he left, he wrote a book called There was an ancient house. The ancient house referred to was St Mary's, Emo, which is still standing but is no longer occupied by Jesuits. However, the Jesuits also occupied another ancient house which has since been demolished: Loyola House, Dromore, Co. Down, which for a brief four years (1884-88) was occupied by Jesuit novices. In 1888 Fr Robert Fulton, the Province Visitor from USA, ordered the novices to be moved to Tullabeg, which would prove more suitable for their training. The Jesuits sold the house in Dromore shortly after the novices moved, but until 1917 they retained the 211 statute acres on which that house had stood, leaving it in the hands of a caretaker. In October 1938 I asked Fr T V Nolan why they retained the land but sold the house.

He told me there were two reasons. Firstly, though the Orange Order and the local Protestants were anxious to purchase both house and land, the money they offered was less than what the Jesuits had paid for it. In addition the stock from the farm were regular prize-winners at the annual Belfast Agricultural Show. Eventually when T.V., as Provincial, received a satisfactory offer, he sold the property, making a handsome profit on what they had originally paid for it.

In 1818 four novices arrived from Hodder to continue their training as novices in Tullabeg. They found the building already occupied by pupils of the Jesuit school which had just been opened; there was no room for novices. From that date Irish novices could be found in various novitiates both in Ireland, in Hodder and in other places on the continent. Eventually in 1860 they were located in Milltown Park. In time this location proved incapable of providing the correct atmosphere for the training of novices, so they were moved to Dromore, which was regarded as a more suitable location. So in April 1884 the novices arrived in Dromore and were located there until July 1888.

Towards the time when the novices were about to leave Dromore, T.V. Nolan arrived there. He told me that another novice called O'Leary arrived about the same time. In later years their lives became entwined in a number of ways, when T.V. became Provincial and O'Leary began recording earthquakes.

Although the Jesuits left Dromore, they will always be remembered there, because the names of two of them can be read on a gravestone beside the parish church in Dromore. They were Elias Seaver, who had just completed his training as a novice, and Fr John Hughes who had been bursar and who died some weeks before the Jesuits departed from Dromore in 1888.

I was happy to have had this chat with Fr Nolan in 1938, because he died some eight months later, and the history of this ancient house might well have gone to the grave with him.