FRAGMENTS
Take the cedar cone
Picked up yesterday,
Green and of a piece.
I put it in the conservatory,
A new form to study,
To draw in pen and wash.
Today its carapace
Is dry and fissured
To drop its seeds.
I am a day older too,
Writing thoughts in fragments
To fall where they may.
Neville Keery 
Dear Neville
I hope I have not left it too late to get in touch with you, and how I have found you will probably be as interesting to you as it has been to me. I was going through Thomas Duddy’s fairly substantial volume : a dictionary on Irish philosophers, and I have to say I was very disappointed in it. There were very few proper philosophers in it: most of them were Catholics apologists or followers of Augustine or Aristotle who had been turned into props for the Catholic catechism and all that went with that. If I just give you a couple of sentences about my early life, you will, as a Dubliner, be able to fill in the rest of my intellectual history for yourself.
I was born in 1944 to two Irish Catholic teenagers, from Kildare,who couldn’t wait to get married, and so I appeared before I should and scandalised everyone. The young couple were very much in love, but that state little impressed the likes of Archbishop McQuaid and Dev in his new Free State, courtesy of the 1937 Catholic Constitution. Thomas Lockart, a nice chap who paid the nuns in st Patrick’s so called “Orphanage” to look after me while he tried to find a place for his girl and himself to live. But such was the shame of having in illegitimate child (even though Dev himself was illegitimate) my parents were driven away and I never saw them again. I was very lucky to be bought out of that place alive, and by a very unusual irish woman when I was near four years of age and she taught me to read, and nearly everything I know. I owe it all to her – including my life for I was very ill, and she brought me back to health. But Dev had run the country into the ground and I and her husband, Paddy, had to take the boat to Holyhead when I was 15, with the rest of the 1.5m Irish who left in the two decades after WWII. I didn’t go to school much in Ireland, a few months here and there, and I hadn’t a single Irish qualification getting on that boat. I was only eligible for unskilled, labouring jobs, but she taught me how to read and encouraged me to draw and I got very good ar both. I read my way through the 19th century European Classics in lodging houses and trailer parks and in the course of that stumbled on Descartes and Rousseau and Kant and Sartre; and my drawing got good enough to draw for many of the radical 60’s mags in London: Peace News, Oz, Black Dwarf, new society. And in 1969 I got a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and after that I read PPE at Worcester College. So I was in the world you wrote about in your charming essay ‘Encountering Philosophy’, the world of a j Aye and Williams. But that was a big disappointment to me. I wanted to know about Hegel etc and now there is a new wave of American scholars : charles Taylor, Pippin and Pinkard resurrecting Hegel. So how did I discover Mr Keery from Dublin.
well I taught Irish history for some forty years here in london, and I was looking through Thomas Duddy’s book of irish Philosophers and saw very few irish philosophers after Kant and just one serious Hegelian, H C Macan, (you have him down as MacCann, understandably enough) I looked up his book on Hegel, published from trinity, and found a copy in India and bought it.
excuse haste
your appreciative friend
Bernard T: 07960976025