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Born: 09 February 1945, Gilford Park, Sandymount, Dublin City, County Dublin
Entered: 07 September 1962, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 13 May 2015, Royal Hospital, London, England (London)

Left Society of Jesus: 28 May 1964

Father (Richard) was an Army Officer at Beggar’s Bush Barracks, Dublin.

Youngest of three boys and one girl.

Early education at a Convent school in Dublin and then he went to Belvedere College SJ for five years and finally to Clongowes Wood College SJ for five years.

Film Director; Co-founder of Focus Theatre

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/co-founder-of-focus-theatre-who-became-tv-producer-in-uk-1.2247794

Co-founder of Focus Theatre who became TV producer in UK

Richard Callanan: February 9th, 1945 - May 13th, 2015

Richard Callanan, who has died aged 70, was a founder member, with others including Deirdre O'Connell, Tom Hickey, Sabina Higgins (née Coyne) and Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, of Dublin's famous Focus Theatre, which flourished from 1963 to 2012.

He later made a successful career as a BBC television producer, winning two Bafta awards for children’s programmes in the 1990s.

He also made significant contributions to further education with the Open University (OU) and, after retirement, with the University of the Third Age (U3A).

Callanan had joined the BBC in 1969 to work with the newly established OU. One of his fellow trainee producers at the time was Nuala O’Faolain.

His interest in drama first surfaced at school, at Belvedere and Clongowes, and he was later an active member of Dramsoc at UCD, where he studied English and history from 1965 to 1968.

Among his roles was Antony, opposite Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy's Cleopatra and the title role in John Osborne's Luther.

He was part of the production team for the Focus Theatre's first show, Kelly's Eye by Henry Livings. It was at the Focus too that he began what was to become a lifelong friendship with the actor Sabina Coyne, now Sabina Higgins, wife of President Michael D Higgins.

At UCD, Callanan was also a leading member of the Literary and Historical Society, appearing in the first Irish televised student debate with Patrick Cosgrave, later an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and John Cooke, who became a High Court judge.

Jesuit training

Callanan had spent two years, after leaving Clongowes, as a seminarian at the Jesuit novitiate at Emo House in Laois, a stage of his life that was terminated, according to his brother Fionnbar, “by mutual consent”.

An Open University colleague, Nick Levinson, remarked at Callanan’s funeral service that his old friend retained the ability to be self-critical, which he speculated might have been a hangover from his Jesuit training, which helped him to “see both sides, and face both ways” when pondering a course of action.

One of Callanan’s special gifts, Levinson said, was casting actors. Among those he recruited were Patrick Stewart, Leo McKern and Ben Kingsley, all of them at a relatively early stage of their careers.

Callanan eventually left the Open University to work for the BBC, especially in children’s television.

In retirement, Callanan returned to further education with the University of the Third Age, where, his colleague Patricia Isaacs said, “he led a group on modern literature, sharing his great love of Irish poets in particular with members”.

Richard Callanan was born in Dublin in 1945, the youngest of five children of Richard Callanan, one of the first recruits to the Army of the Free State, who rose to the rank of major-general, and Margaret McGuinness from Longford, both of whom had been active in the War of Independence, and later, in the Civil War on the pro-Treaty side.

He is survived by his widow, Sally Burr, by his children, Sam, Megan and Joe, his brother Fionnbar and his sister Mona. A sister, Eithne, and a brother, Niall, predeceased him.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/aug/27/richard-callanan-obituary

My friend Richard Callanan, who has died aged 70 after a fall, made important contributions to two great educational endeavours: making TV programmes for the Open University and co-ordinating groups for the University of the Third Age (U3A).

He was a maker of arts programmes for the Open University between 1969 and 1979; and among those he recruited to appear in OU productions were Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Richard was largely responsible for the famous appearance of Max Wall as Vladimir opposite Leo McKern as Estragon in Waiting for Godot in 1977. He went on to become well known too as a producer and director of children’s programmes: in 1990 he won a Bafta as producer of the BBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men; and in 1993 a second for Archer’s Goon.

Richard was born in Dublin, the youngest of five children of Richard Callanan, an Irish army officer, and his wife, Margaret (nee McGuiness). He was educated at Jesuit schools and spent two years training to be a priest at Emo House, in County Laois, before the arrangement was terminated by mutual consent. From 1964 until 1967 he studied English and history at University College Dublin – during which time he became a founder member of the city’s Focus theatre – before moving to London to study for a diploma in modern social and cultural studies at Chelsea College.

Richard’s Jesuit education provoked some stark recollections of the pedagogic arts from him. It also, though, helped him to “see both sides and face both ways”. He never forgot the importance of drawing out his students and he was a supremely attentive listener. This attracted him to what the U3A, in north London, had to offer.

U3A’s guiding principle - “those who learn shall also teach and those who teach shall also learn” – was natural to him and his work on James Joyce, WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney was revelatory. He also taught a Shakespeare course to students in a residential home for the elderly, Mary Feilding Guild, who were not able to make even the shortest journey to reach normal classes. Prognostications of failure because of the age of the students were triumphantly repudiated.

He is survived by his wife, Sally, and his children, Sam, Meg and Joe.

Born: 22 June 1915, Iona Crescent, Glasnevin, Dublin
Entered: 02 December 1939, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 20 February 1941

Father was a Civil Servant and died in March 1925.

Second in a family of two boys and two girls.

Early education at Holy Faith Convent Glasnevin and then Christian Brothers, James’ Street, Kilkenny for two years and then at O’Connell's School, Dublin. He then went to Rockwell College CSSp. After school he went to UCD studying Architecture and got his degree in 1939.

Born: 02 December 1917, Surrey Street, Belfast County Antrim
Entered: 01 October 1940, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 25 September 1941

Father was an electrical welder and mother died in Feb 1940. Family moved to Griffith Avenue. Drumcondra, Dublin

Younger of two boys with three sisters.

Early education was in convent and Christian Brothers Primary schools, at age 12 he went to St Joseph’s CBS Fairview, Dublin. In 1935 he went to O’Connell Schools, and after the Leaving Cert was awarded a scholarship to St Patrick’s Training College, Drumcondra. he was two years there.He then took a job teaching Maths and Irish at O’Connell Schools, and later took a job at St Joseph’s BNS, East Wall, Dublin. At the same time he attended evening lectures at UCD, and got a BA.

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.

Born: 20 June 1884, Dundrum House, Dundrum, Dublin, County Dublin
Entered: 06 September 1902, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Died: 16 May 1963, Sandyford, County Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: July 1903

Father was Chief Justice in Newfoundland, and died in 1897. Mother lived at New Brighton, Monkstown, Dublin.

3 sisters (one deceased) and none brothers (2 deceased) and is the youngest in the family.

Education at Clongowes

https://www.dib.ie/biography/little-patrick-john-p-j-a4851

DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY

Little, Patrick John (‘P. J.’)

Contributed by
Coleman, Marie

Little, Patrick John (‘P. J.’) (1884–1963), journalist, lawyer, and politician, was born 17 June 1884 in Dundrum, Co. Dublin, son of Philip Francis Little and Mary Jane Little (née Holdwright). His father, born in Canada of Irish parents, was a former leader of the Liberal party in Newfoundland, and served as premier, attorney general, and high court judge in Newfoundland, before coming to Ireland, where he became a supporter of the Irish parliamentary party.

Educated at Clongowes Wood College, Little studied law at UCD, where he was a prominent figure in the Literary and Historical Society. Associated with journalism from his time as manager of UCD's St Stephen's magazine, he was editor of various Sinn Féin newspapers between 1915 and 1926, including Old Ireland, New Ireland, Éire, Sinn Féin, and An Phoblacht. Involved in the forgery of the ‘Castle document’ which ordered the suppression of the Irish Volunteers prior to the Easter rising, he was on the Sinn Féin executive 1917–22, and stood as Sinn Féin candidate for Dublin Rathmines in the 1918 general election but was defeated by the unionist Sir Maurice Edward Dockrell (qv). From April to December 1921 he was a diplomatic representative of Dáil Éireann, visiting South Africa and South America, and in January 1922 attended the Irish Race Conference in Paris as Brazilian representative. He also became a partner in the legal firm Little, Proud, & Ó hUadhaigh, where one of his partners was Seán Ó hUadhaigh (qv).

An opponent of the Anglo–Irish treaty and founder member of Fianna Fáil, he was elected TD for Waterford in the June 1927 general election, a seat he held until his retirement from politics in 1954. Having served (1933–9) as parliamentary secretary to Éamon de Valera (qv) as minister for external affairs and president of the executive council/taoiseach, he was minister for posts and telegraphs 1939–48, which included responsibility for broadcasting. As minister he utilised the influence of his office for the development of arts and music. He had a particular interest in developing the potential of radio, and promoted the broadcasting of traditional and classical music on Radio Éireann, which included the hosting of a large series of public symphonic concerts by RÉ during the 1940s. Opposed to direct political control of broadcasting, he believed that it should be administered by a semi-state body.

Throughout the 1940s he championed unsuccessfully the establishment of a national concert hall, which he linked with his support for a council of national culture. When the British government established the Arts Council of Great Britain in late 1945, he looked to it as a model of what might be established in Ireland. The Arts Act 1951, which established An Chomhairle Ealaíon (Arts Council) and was enacted shortly before the government of John A. Costello (qv) left office, was essentially what Little had proposed in 1946. It was appropriate that de Valera, who regarded Little as his arts advisor, should appoint him director for a five-year term (Costello had intended to appoint Thomas Bodkin (qv)). Despite his age (he was 68 on appointment) he was an energetic director, and effective to the extent that the financial constraints of the early 1950s permitted. He established specialist panels to advise on particular aspects of the arts and followed the British example in launching local advisory committees (an initiative that ultimately petered out). Little did not stand in the 1954 general election.

Outside politics,
Little was involved for many years in working for the sick in Lourdes as a brancardier and was made a chef de service in 1935. He married (1917) Seonaid Ní Leoid; they had no children, but Seonaid had two daughters and a son from a previous marriage. He died 16 May 1963 at his home, Clonlea, Sandyford, Co. Dublin.

Sources
Liam C. Skinner, Politicians by accident (1946); Arts Council of Ireland, Annual Reports (1951–6); James Meenan (ed), Centenary history of the Literary and Historical Society (1955); Ir. Press, 17 May 1963; Maurice Gorham, Forty years of Irish broadcasting (1967); Vincent Browne (ed.), Magill book of Irish politics (1981); Walker; DCB, xii (1990); Brian P. Kennedy, Dreams and responsibilities. The state and the arts in independent Ireland [1990]; Ronan Fanning et al. (ed.), Documents on Irish foreign policy, i, 1919–22 (1998)

Born: 23 December 1919, Castlecomer, County Kilkenny
Entered: 07 September 1937, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Died: 08 November 2003, County Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 05 February 1938

Father was Barrack foreman of works. Family then resided at North Circular Road, Dublin

Older of two boys with three sisters.

Early education at a Convent school and then at Westland Row CBS. He then went to O’Connells School until 1937

https://www.dib.ie/biography/mcgough-joseph-christopher-joe-a9334

McGough, Joseph Christopher (Joe)
Contributed by
Clavin, Terry

McGough, Joseph Christopher (Joe) (1919–2003), army officer, barrister and businessman, was born 23 December 1919 at Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, the fourth child and first son of John McGough, originally of Co. Clare, and his wife Ann (née Brennan). His father, having served as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, joined the Irish army on the formation of the Irish Free State (1922). In 1923, he was transferred to Beggars Bush barracks in Dublin, settling with his family on the North Circular Road; Joseph attended the nearby O’Connell’s CBS. In 1938, he commenced an arts degree at UCD, but switched to law a year later. At secondary school he had organised sporting events and he was similarly active at college; a member of the UCD rowing club, he also served as secretary of the Students’ Representative Council.

Army and law He enlisted in the Defence Forces on 29 June 1940. A member of the Army Signal Corps, he was commissioned a second lieutenant within two months, and was subsequently promoted first lieutenant (1942) and captain (1946). During the 1940s, he completed a course in electronics in Kevin Street College of Technology. He served throughout the country, including service with the Irish‐speaking Céad Cath battalion in Galway. On 1 August 1945 he married Dr Ann Frances (Nancy) Hanratty, a psychologist, daughter of John Hanratty of Parnell Square, Dublin. They had a son and a daughter. From 1948 the family lived in an impressive Georgian house – later a listed building – in Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin. Attached (as a member of the Signal Corps) to the Army Air Corp at Baldonnell, Co. Dublin, he enrolled at King’s Inns in 1947, qualifying as a barrister in 1951; he was called to the English Bar six years later. He served as staff officer to the director of signals at Army HQ from 1949 to 1955, when he was appointed one of two judge advocates on the staff of the adjutant general; he was promoted commandant soon after.

By 1960 his pension entitlement was sufficiently generous to permit him to retire from the army and practise at the bar. While sick with influenza in early 1962, he applied (apparently on a whim) for three jobs advertised in the newspapers. All three applications were successful and he elected to become the secretary of An Bord Bainne (the milk board), a newly established state agency. This career change was facilitated by his service in a part‐time capacity during 1960–62 as secretary to the Irish Exporters Association through which he obtained in autumn 1961 a scholarship for a twelve‐week marketing course in Harvard.

Kerrygold With his newly acquired marketing knowledge, and possessing administrative expertise and an understanding of the civil service mindset, McGough was suitably qualified for the daunting task at hand. Irish dairy was geared towards self‐sufficiency and hobbled by a surfeit of small, inefficient creameries which, like the dairy farmers, were resistant to change and unwilling to consider the good of the industry over their own interests. Bord Bainne effectively provided a minimum price for farmers’ milk by buying dairy products for export from the creameries at a guaranteed price with two‐thirds of any resulting loss being absorbed by the Exchequer – the remainder was passed back to the dairy farmer in the form of a levy.

With McGough as his right‐hand man, the Bord Bainne general manager Tony O’Reilly sought to cajole a faction‐ridden board into supporting an export drive. McGough established an immediate rapport with the youthful O’Reilly with whom he shared a sharp sense of humour. In his reminiscences, O’Reilly emerges as eager to lead the modernisation of Irish economic life and inwardly exasperated by the incomprehension and hostility with which farmers and dairy producers greeted his strictures. Older and more inclined to accept the world as it was, McGough’s diplomacy complemented O’Reilly’s zeal; so too did his ability to defuse a tense situation with a well‐timed quip. Their first and most important initiative was the launch of Kerrygold, the first ever branded Irish butter made specifically for the British market. The campaign, which began in October 1962, proved a resounding success by utilising modern marketing techniques in promoting a very traditional view of Ireland as an unspoilt Arcadia. Both McGough and O’Reilly worked frenetically on the campaign and it was the making of them.

Bord Bainne head McGough became assistant to the general manager in April 1965 before succeeding O’Reilly in late 1966. A fluent and witty speaker (much in demand for speaking engagements) he showed a particular flair for dealing with the media, which combined with the goodwill generated by the success of Kerrygold guaranteed him a largely adoring press, who portrayed him as the archetypal Lemass‐era business leader driving the country’s renewed engagement with modernity and the wider world through the medium of commerce.

Nonetheless the Bord Bainne ‘success story’ did elicit more cynical responses in some sections of the press and among the wider public who were subsidizing dairy export losses while having to pay higher prices for domestic dairy products. In particular Bord Bainne’s failure to produce fully transparent financial statements drew adverse comment. Undoubtedly very good at marketing Irish dairy products abroad, he also excelled at promoting the heavily subsidized dairy sector and the marketing skills of both Bord Bainne and himself to the non‐farming Irish public. A consummate insider, his urbane manner and relentless optimism made it easy to caricature him as an overly complacent member of the state sector aristocracy.

Pre‐EEC McGough promoted the ongoing diversification of Irish dairy manufacturing into products that were less reliant or not at all reliant on subsidies, such as cheese, skimmed milk powder, fresh creams and chocolate crumb, although butter remained predominant because it absorbed the most milk. In the UK he focused on developing a market for quality Irish cheeses, which culminated in the launch of Kerrygold cheese in 1969. The quota system imposed on Irish dairy products imported into the UK led him to continue the policy of orderly marketing whereby a demand was first created for a product thereby strengthening Ireland’s efforts to have import quotas increased.

His early years as general manager were spent grappling with Ireland’s ballooning exportable milk surplus, which rose from 120 million gallons in 1962 to some 340 million gallons in 1970. With the UK only gradually lifting its import quotas and with Ireland shut out of the most important continental markets by the EEC, McGough was obliged to seek more far‐flung outlets, leading him to travel 245,646 miles between 1 January 1967 and 31 March 1970. Bord Bainne in 1969 invested £12 million in a plant in the Philippines for reconstituting Irish skimmed milk to accord with regional preferences. But during 1968–9 the global overproduction of milk precipitated a collapse in world dairy prices and this meant that some 10% of Ireland’s milk output could not be disposed of in a remotely economical fashion. Unsurprisingly McGough and Bord Bainne came in for much knee‐jerk criticism, although an independent economic survey conducted in 1970 found that Bord Bainne was performing well given the circumstances.

The advent of the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) intensified Ireland’s reliance on the UK dairy market and the failure in 1970–71 of Bord Bainne’s Filipino venture was another blow to non‐UK exports. In early 1972 McGough used the capital salvaged from the Philippines failure to establish Bord Bainne’s own distribution network in the UK by acquiring Adams Foods, a UK butter and packaging company, with a view to diversifying into marketing and distributing a wide range of foodstuffs including dairy produce sold by Ireland’s competitors within the UK. This alarmed Irish dairy interests, but McGough’s success in building Adams Foods into a profitable foodstuffs company that made Kerrygold products available throughout the UK silenced his detractors.

Inside the EEC Concerns about continental competition within the Irish market once Ireland and the UK joined the EEC helped McGough to persuade the co‐ops to accept the introduction of the Kerrygold brand into Ireland on a restricted basis in 1972. Following Ireland’s accession to EEC membership in 1973 McGough was praised for his foresight, for the manner in which Bord Bainne was skillfully exploiting CAP regulations to sell in non‐EEC markets, and for the speed with which it moved into continental markets, particularly the Ruhr valley in West Germany.

He also handled with assurance the transformation of Bord Bainne from a semi-state institution into a cooperative (more precisely an export cooperative of all the Irish dairy cooperatives) so as to comply with EEC anti‐monopoly regulations. Under the new dispensation Bord Bainne, with McGough as managing director, served as a proxy for the EEC’s intervention authority by buying dairy products for export from the cooperatives at or near intervention price and by distributing any profit achieved evenly among the cooperatives. Bord Bainne as a cooperative enjoyed a privileged relationship with the state, which pledged to underwrite its borrowings up to £5 million; a guarantee that rose to £40 million by 1977. But one happy consequence for McGough of Bord Bainne’s new status was its freedom from public sector pay restrictions; this facilitated a rise in McGough’s own yearly salary from £6,000 in 1973 to £26,000 in 1977, comfortably outstripping inflation.

McGough’s policy was to use intervention only as a last resort and he noted proudly that he sold no butter into intervention, a strategy considered eccentric in other EEC countries, and by some Irish dairy manufacturers. McGough justified it as designed to strengthen Ireland’s hand in EEC negotiations; more pertinently, sales into intervention might lead to questions about the Irish dairy industry’s need for a central marketing agency.

Entry into the EEC removed the burden of guaranteeing milk prices from the Irish taxpayer and the EEC more than trebled the price of milk per gallon by 1977. Nonetheless, smarting from their experiences in the late 1960s Irish farmers were reluctant to recommit themselves to dairying, and milk production fell in 1974 after a severe winter. McGough launched a well‐publicised ‘More milk’ campaign, yielding a dramatic rise in production from 590 million gallons in 1974 to 735 million gallons in 1977.

Problems However, the workings of the EEC also had the effect of restricting and undermining Bord Bainne’s role. In particular, by providing a guaranteed price only for butter and skimmed milk powder, the EEC subverted the board’s longstanding policy of diversification. Ignoring McGough’s protests, the Irish creameries took the immediate profits available, and by 1976 seventy‐five per cent of Ireland’s exportable milk was going into butter. The EEC had been expected to eliminate Australia and New Zealand from the UK dairy market, but the UK secured special trading rights for New Zealand; combined with a fall in butter consumption in the UK, this made the 1970s a challenging period for Kerrygold sales. The UK’s forbearance towards New Zealand and refusal to countenance EEC levies on dairy substitutes frustrated McGough, who condemned what he saw as the excessively consumerist orientation of British food policy. In one of his last public pronouncements as managing director of Bord Bainne, he criticized the UK for negotiating in bad faith in EEC talks, and urged the Irish government to adopt a similarly ruthless attitude to negotiations.

EEC membership also precluded McGough from compelling cooperatives to export through Bord Bainne. More fundamentally, the sense of urgency and unity instilled into the industry by the adverse trading climate of the 1960s dissipated once Ireland joined a large and lavishly protected agricultural market. The larger cooperatives increasingly sought to export independently when prices were high and only relied on Bord Bainne when they believed they could do no better. McGough threatened to expel wayward cooperatives from the Bord Bainne fold but settled for preserving the appearance of central marketing. It was also reported that he was obliged to grant the most powerful cooperatives a larger share of Bord Bainne’s profits.

During the mid 1970s McGough harboured ambitions to establish a central marketing organization for all Irish food exports. His appointment in July 1974 as chairman of the Pigs and Bacon Commission (which essentially performed the same role as Bord Bainne for pig and bacon exports) was seen as part of this process. In the event, his three‐year term of office was marred by his sanctioning in August 1975 of the purchase of the British firm Bearfield Stratfield, already the commission’s main British distributor, which he hoped to use as a vehicle for distributing bacon under a national brand. But by summer 1976 it was clear that this attempt to recreate the success of Adams Foods had miscarried disastrously. When McGough failed to persuade the pig farmers and processors to provide necessary further capital for Bearfield Stratfield, which had recorded substantial losses, the company had to be wound up. Furthermore, in 1977, Adams Foods experienced temporary difficulties after a failed expansion into frozen foods. These setbacks encouraged a reaction against McGough’s empire‐building within Irish political and agri‐business circles.

During 1976–7 the government considered reducing or even ending its underwriting of Bord Bainne’s borrowings which were reaching alarming proportions arising from the breakneck growth of the dairy industry from 1973. The industry’s growing stock requirements and seasonality – the overwhelming majority of milk produced was sent to the dairies in the summer – obliged Bord Bainne to become one of the larger borrowers on the London money markets from the late 1960s and to cope with increasingly troublesome cash flow and interest charge conundrums, which the introduction of a capital levy in 1977 was but a first step towards resolving. In 1977, peak seasonal borrowings were £131 million. Despite these difficulties, McGough maintained a good reputation, benefiting by association from the subsidy‐fuelled increase in dairy farming incomes and in milk output that occurred after 1973. This was borne out by his appointment in 1976 to head a commission established by the International Dairy Federation to examine the marketing of milk and dairy produce, and by the decision of Business and Finance magazine to make him their Irish business executive of the year for 1976.

Final years Aware that challenging times beckoned, he left Bord Bainne in February 1978 to resume his practice as a barrister. Thereafter he divided his work time between the bar – he became a senior counsel in 1982 – and his rapidly accumulating company directorships; by 1984 he was a director of eighteen companies (ten as chairman) involving him in a diverse range of business sectors. Throughout his career he showed his public spiritedness in membership of many societies, charities and commerce‐ or export‐related bodies, and he was able to devote more time to these after leaving Bord Bainne. In 1978 he was appointed chairman of the newly established Co‐operation North which had been founded to improve relations between the Republic and Northern Ireland, a priority for McGough ever since the unionist community in Northern Ireland had effectively boycotted Kerrygold products (for being so identifiable with the Republic) following the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969. He was appointed chairman of Gorta in 1979 and of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in 1981. Under his direction the ASA drew up the first code of practice for the Irish advertising industry. He was also a director of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and chairman of the Salvation Army Advisory Board. In 1987 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ulster. Easing into a new role as the avuncular elder statesman of the Irish business scene, he appeared frequently on RTÉ television and radio throughout the 1980s, reminiscing (often humorously) about his business and army experiences. Effortlessly debonair, always immaculately attired and deeply cultured, McGough enjoyed literature, theatre and ballet, serving as president of the Irish ballet society in his army days. He died in Dublin on 8 November 2003 and was buried at Kilmashogue cemetery on 11 November. In the 1970s he wrote a draft autobiography, which was not published.

In his belief in close cooperation between the state and certain economically significant corporations and in his belief that these quasi‐state corporations were obliged to consider not just the profit motive but also the impact of their actions on society, McGough was of his time. Such paternalism could engender a sense of impunity and collusion between vested interests that ill served the interests of the consumer and taxpayer. Similarly his demanding clients in rural Ireland often contended that he and Bord Bainne favoured the big farmer over the small. These complaints failed to take account of Bord Bainne’s important, politically necessary but largely unacknowledged role in mitigating and retarding – in the interests of social stability – the inevitable dissolution of Ireland’s small‐farming social structure. As the dynamic figurehead of Ireland’s burgeoning agri‐welfare complex McGough played a pivotal role in the management of this fraught transition.

Sources
GRO (marriage and death certificates); Ir. Times, 9 Sept. 1940; 7 July 1945; 6 Nov. 1946; 31 Oct. 1960; 30 Sept. 1967; 14 Mar., 24 June, 24 Oct. 1968; 2 Jan., 13 Mar., 18 Sept., 31 Oct., 1969; 21 Jan., 10 Sept., 17 Dec., 18 Dec., 1970; 31 Dec. 1971; 25 May, 11 Nov. 1972; 7 July 1973; 23 Mar., 16 May, 22 June, 25 July, 26 Oct., 7 Nov., 4 Dec. 1974; 27 Mar., 24 May, 29 May, 5 June, 18 Sept. 1975; 29 Apr., 26 May, 14 June, 16 June, 24 June, 1 July, 22 Oct., 10 Dec. 1976; 4 Jan., 29 Jan., 21 Feb., 21 Apr., 4 May, 23 May, 4 Nov., 20 Dec. 1977; 19 Jan., 13 Feb., 25 Feb., 2 Mar., 2 Oct. 1978; 31 Jan. 1980; 4 Dec. 1982; 10 Feb. 2000; 22 Nov. 2003; Ir. Independent, 2 Oct. 1940; 8 July 1942; 12 May 1967; 10 Dec. 1968; 8 May, 18 Sept. 1969; 16 Dec. 1971; 26 May, 20 July, 5 Aug. 1972; 1 Sept. 1973; 9 Jan., 5 Apr., 12 June, 25 July 1974; 28 Mar., 15 Apr., 18 Apr. 1975; 19 Mar., 3 Apr., 16 Oct. 1976; 5 Jan., 29 Jan. 1977; 28 Oct. 1982; 31 Aug. 1989; Sunday Independent, 4 Sept. 1960; 10 May, 2 Aug. 1970; 17 Dec. 1995; Irish Farmers' Journal, 17 Apr. 1965; 14 Dec. 1968; 17 May 1969; 5 May, 14 July, 18 Aug., 8 Sept., 15 Sept. 1973; 12 Jan., 9 Feb., 9 Mar., 4 May, 27 July, 12 Oct. 1974; 3 May, 24 May, 20 Sept. 1975; 2 Oct. 1976; 19 Mar., 9 Apr., 16 Apr., 21 May, 18 June, 5 Nov. 1977; 21 Jan., 4 Mar., 25 Mar. 1978; ITWW (1973); Business and Finance, 14. Mar, 29 May, 19 Oct. 1974; 6 Jan., 14 Apr. 1977; 8 Apr. 1982; Irish Business, Sept. 1975; May, July 1978; June 1979; Thom’s Commercial Directory (1983), 869; C. H. Walsh, Oh really, O’Reilly (1992); I. Fallon, The player (1994)

Born: 25 January 1920, Gortmore, Omagh, County Tyrone
Entered: 28 September 1940, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois

Left Society of Jesus: 27 June 1942

Family moved when he was aged 3 to Lackaboy, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Father was a Guard on the Great Northern Railway.

Family of four, three boys and one girl.

Early education at the Convent of Mercy Enniskillen and then at the Presentation Brothers, Enniskillen. After school i 1939 he went to UCD on a scholarship and studied Engineering. Also studied violin and piano at the RIAM.

Born: 21 November 1923, Kevit Castle, Crossdoney, County Cavan
Entered: 07 September 1942, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 25 November 2012. Bloomfield Care Centre, Rathfarnham, Dublin City, County Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 28 August 1944

Father was a doctor.

Youngest of four boys with four sisters.

Early education at a Convent school in Kildare he then went to Clongowes Wood College SJ for seven years.

https://www.dib.ie/biography/smith-louis-patrick-frederick-a10051#:~:text=Smith%2C%20Louis%20Patrick%20Frederick%20(1923,wife%20Isabella%20(n%C3%A9e%20Smith).

Smith, Louis Patrick Frederick
Contributed by
Clavin, Terry
Smith, Louis Patrick Frederick (1923–2012), agricultural economist and academic, was born on 21 December 1923 in Kevit Castle in Crossdoney, Co. Cavan, the youngest of eight children of Dr Frederick Paul Smith, a farmer and ophthalmologist of Kevit Castle, and his wife Isabella (née Smith). He was born into a thriving branch of an ancient Cavan family, known originally as O'Gowan. His grandfather Philip Smith bought the Kevit Castle estate in the 1850s and later became Cavan's first catholic JP. Of his uncles, Philip H. Law Smith was county court judge for Limerick; Louis Smith, the crown solicitor for Cavan; and Alfred J. Smith an internationally respected UCD professor of midwifery and gynaecology. As well as having a successful ophthalmological practice, his father was elected to the first Cavan County Council and helped establish the local cooperative movement.

Louis was educated in Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, before studying economics and history in UCD, graduating with a first class honours BA (1947). Continuing in UCD, he won the Coyne Memorial Scholarship while receiving a first class honours MA in economics (1948), writing a thesis comparing agriculture in Northern Ireland and the Republic. He also studied law at King's Inns, passing his bar exam finals, but preferred a career in economics and spent a year at Manchester University researching British agriculture and getting lecturing experience.

In January 1949 he sat the civil service examination for the position of third secretary of the Department of External Affairs. Despite otherwise coming first by a distance, he failed the oral Irish test, which he retook unsuccessfully in August and then September. The examiners were unmoved by his protests that the test was unfair so on 28 November the cabinet intervened by temporarily appointing him economic assistant in the trade section of the Department of External Affairs. This was at the behest of the external affairs minister, Seán MacBride (qv), who wanted Smith to explore the potential for trade liberalisation.

In 1951 he joined the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) for which he organised agricultural cooperatives in the northern parts of the state. Farmers were initially suspicious of the 'man from Dublin', but were won over by his lucidity and soft-spoken decency. That year he married Sheila Brady of Herbert Park, Dublin. They lived in Dartry, Dublin, later settling in Donnybrook, Dublin, and had three sons and three daughters. Tall and with refined features rendered distinguished by his prematurely grey hair (a family trait), Smith relaxed by playing tennis at the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club. He also enjoyed cycling, boating, rambling and do-it-yourself work, including furniture making, and was fluent in French.

Formatively impressed by what he saw on a research trip to Scandinavia, he lauded the progressive cooperative farming that prevailed there as a model for an Irish agricultural sector resistant to modern scientific and business methods. He concluded that Ireland's weak social structures had bred a suffocating state paternalism towards agriculture and that strong vocational institutions were needed to counteract this. Drawing upon his training as an economist and personal experience of cooperatives, he later wrote The evolution of agricultural co-operation (1961), which examined the application of the cooperative principle in various countries with a characteristic emphasis on the practical over the theoretical.

In 1954 he left the IAOS to join Macra na Feirme, a vocational association that trained young farmers. He directed its activities in economics and marketing, and became involved in efforts underway towards creating a farmers union spanning all commodity interests. Appointed economics adviser to the National Farmers Association (NFA) formed in January 1955, he helped establish the system of commodity committees that served as the basis of the NFA's organisation. (His brother Alfred Myles Smith served as the NFA's legal adviser and later as president of its Cavan executive and vice president of its Ulster executive.) At this time Louis worked a ninety-hour week making the case for the NFA to farmers.

His main function was to conduct research, an important role given that agricultural policy had previously been developed on a non-factual basis in response to short-term political exigencies. Part of a vanguard of experts who placed the Irish economic debate on a firm statistical footing, he established the NFA's credibility by churning out facts and informed arguments, clashing regularly with politicians and civil servants discomfited by the advent of a well-organised farmers lobby. Through his public lectures and newspaper pieces, he exerted an important influence over young farmers, most notably by persuading them of the advantages of cooperative livestock marts over unsanitary and inefficient cattle fairs.

From 1954 he combined his work in farm organisations with lecturing in agricultural economics and international trade in the UCD economics department. He also introduced courses on European institutions and was awarded a Ph.D. by UCD in 1955. His dual roles complemented each other, bringing home to him the importance of linking agricultural education with research. He criticised the government for failing to do so and also for starving agricultural education and research of resources and for maintaining political control over the farming advisory services. He identified a lack of training and basic schooling as the besetting weakness of Irish farming.

His research for the NFA revealed that Irish agriculture was unproductive and undercapitalised, but that much of this was attributable to government policies which lumbered farmers with high input and transport costs, arbitrary rates, mistaken breeding programs, volatile prices, weak cooperative marketing and export restrictions. Above all he showed how the strategy of seeking trade preferences for Irish farm produce in Britain had run aground once Britain began protecting its farmers through subsidies rather than tariffs. With their traditional British outlet emerging as the industrial world's most open food market, Irish farmers received the lowest prices in western Europe and became increasingly reliant on exporting unfinished cattle, a form of production that provided the least employment.

Pointing to the European common market as a secure, well-paying alternative, he highlighted the untenable nature of Ireland's position as a small, politically isolated food-exporting country, particularly as generously protected continental farmers produced ever-larger surpluses, which were then dumped on the British market. His arguments convinced previously sceptical farmers that there was a political solution to their economic difficulties, though his assertion that Ireland could join the EEC even if the UK did not was unrealistic. He was a founding member of the Irish Council of the European Movement, established in 1954, serving as its chairman (1962–5).

Having become a full-time UCD lecturer, he resigned his position in the NFA in January 1963, continuing for a time on the NFA's National Council. He received a doctorate in economic science from UCD in 1963 for his published work and became an associate professor of political economy (international trade) in 1969. Enthusiastic and engaging as a teacher, if at times impenetrable and absent-minded, he co-wrote an economics textbook, Elements of economics (1969), and expressed public sympathy for the late 1960s student protests against the UCD administration. A long-serving president of the Irish Council for Overseas Students, he was a council member of the Irish Federation of University Teachers and active in the Academic Staff Association as a committee member and secretary.

Continuing to comment regularly in the print media on farming, the EEC and economics, he had a well-regarded weekly farming column in the Irish Independent (1965–69) under the penname 'Agricola'. In 1971 he contributed to a booklet outlining the farming benefits to be derived from Ireland's membership of the EEC and later disputed claims made by anti-EEC campaigners concerning high food prices within EEC member states. After Ireland joined the EEC in 1973, he opposed efforts to subject the newly enriched farming sector to meaningful taxation. He also argued influentially that Ireland's currency link with a depreciating sterling reduced the benefits of EEC membership by causing high inflation.

He was a director in a firm of management consultants and of the South Dublin Provident Society, and was retained as an economics consultant by various semi-state agencies, the European Commission and AIB. His 1971 AIB appointment reflected his successful efforts to encourage the banks to lend more to farmers. During the 1960s and 1970s, he published a labour survey of the Cooley peninsula as well as studies of the Irish food processing and retailing sectors, the finance costs associated with Irish farming and the compliance costs associated with the Irish tax system. He condemned the high tax policies of the 1970s and 1980s for discouraging savings, employment and investment, and devised tax reform proposals on behalf of the Irish Federation for the Self-Employed. A longstanding member of the Christian Family Movement, he drew attention to the rapid 1970s increase in Irish working mothers and annoyed feminists by suggesting this would put families under strain and encourage lesbianism.

He co-wrote two histories, Milk to market (1989) and Farm organisations in Ireland: a century of progress (1996): the former capably described the role of the Leinster Milk Producers Association in supplying Dublin; the latter contains invaluable anecdotal material relating to the founding and early years of the NFA, though as a history it is workmanlike, partial and sketchy in places. After retiring from UCD in 1988, he kept active by playing tennis into his mid-eighties before switching to snooker and swimming. Following a long illness, he died in the Bloomfield Care Centre, Rathfarnham, Dublin, on 25 November 2012. He was buried in Mount Venus Cemetery, Rathfarnham, and left a will disposing of €1.26 million.

Sources
GRO, (birth, marriage cert.); Ir. Independent, passim, esp.: 2 Nov. 1943; 29 Oct. 1948; 24 May 1963 (profile); 14 Aug. 1979; NA, Dept. of the Taoiseach, S14603, 'Irish test for the post of third secretary: complaint of Louis P. F. Smith' (1949); Louis P. F. Smith, 'Agricultural education by co-operatives', The Irish Monthly, vol. 79, no. 935 (May 1951), 224–30; Nationalist and Leinster Times, 13 Dec. 1952; 15 Jan. 1965; Ir. Times, passim, esp.: 23 Oct. 1954; 3 Aug. 1955; 4 Aug. 1956 (profile); 21 Sept. 1957; 25 Aug. 1959; 28 Nov. 2012; 15 Dec. 2012 (obit.); Louis P. F. Smith, 'The role of farmers organizations', Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 44, no. 173 (spring 1955), 49–56; Kilkenny People, 6 Aug. 1955; Cork Examiner, 6 Mar. 1956; Irish Farmers' Journal, 24 Aug. (profile), 14 Dec. 1957; 4 Nov. 1961; 1 May 1971; 1 Dec. 2012; Ir. Press, passim, esp.: 29 Oct. 1957; 6 May, 11 Nov. 1969; 2 May 1972; National Observer, vol i, no. 1 (July 1958); Southern Star, 16 July 1960; Sunday Press, 27 Aug., 29 Oct. 1961; 3 Nov. 1963; 24 Apr. 1966; Kerryman, 17 Feb. 1962; Sunday Independent, 27 Oct. 1974; 19 May 2013; Hibernia, 2 May 1975; European Opinion, Dec. 1976; Report of the President; University College Dublin, 1988–1989, 185–6; Louis P. F. Smith, Farm organisations in Ireland: a century of progress (1996); Gary Murphy, In search of the promised land: the politics of post war Ireland (2009)

Forename: Louis, Patrick, Frederick
Surname: Smith
Gender: Male
Career: Agriculture, Education, Scholarship, Social Sciences
Religion: Catholic
Born 21 December 1923 in Co. Cavan
Died 25 November 2012 in Co. Dublin

Born: 09 February 1921, Magerafelt, County Derry
Entered: 14 November 1939, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly

Left Society of Jesus: 11 December 1940

Father (a Donegal man) worked in the Department of Justice in Dublin and moved the family to Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, Dublin. Mother was a Roscommon woman.

Eighth in a family of 12, with six brothers (he is second youngest) and five sisters.

Early education was at St Mary’s Haddington Road, then went to Synge Street CBS at age 10. After school he went for one year to study Medicine at UCD.