Terry O'Keeffe (1941-2020)

Pioneering Academic and Activist in Northern Ireland's Turbulent Era

Student 1962-66

Professor Terry O'Keeffe, who played a pioneering role in several aspects of academic and intellectual life in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s onwards, died in retirement at his home in Portstewart, Co. Down on October 2020 at the age of seventy-nine.

His most notable contribution was in establishing Philosophy as a serious subject in the secular milieu of the New University of Ulster at Coleraine, taking up a long tradition of influence by Catholic clerics in the teaching of philosophy in Northern Ireland, particularly at Queen's University, thus following on from such distinguished names as Denis O'Keeffe, Arthur Ryan (a one-time lecturer in Fundamental Theology at Maynooth) and two Maynooth theology graduates, Cahal Daly and James McEvoy (the latter, a near contemporary and co-diocesan of Terry O'Keeffe, served as Professor of Philosophy at Maynooth from 1995 to 2004, and died in 2010).

In the interview below, given to an Italian magazine in 2008, the year in which he retired, he surveys his life as student, priest, layman, professor and philosopher.