This memoir is the development of an earlier text, completed in January 2011, entitled Surprised By The Years: A Memoir: Footnotes to Three Score Years and Ten.

That text emerged from the edited version of another manuscript called Peace Process, mostly written during a period of convalescence following a hip replacement operation in 1997. It covers the years from my birth on 5 May 1939 up to a, then imagined, retirement year.

My personal optimism in September 2016 prompted me to rename it, Forever Beginning.

For me, 2011 was a year that began a complete transformation in the trajectory of my life. Anne Keery-Moran, my beloved wife of 44 years, was diagnosed with a serious illness at the end of that year. The illness turned out to be terminal and she died on 8 July 2012.

My first decision as a widower was that I should make myself as comfortable as possible in my changed home environment, also trying to create for each day a programme that would give me one good meal a day, a worthwhile period of exercise, and a significant social contact. I pursued this programme in a very determined way and am very grateful to family and friends for all the support I received. Particularly in the first two years of my bereavement I greatly valued the support of new friendships and feel extraordinarily fortunate that one of these friendships led unexpectedly to a relationship of like minds.

I met Pauline Hall, widow of a Dublin architect, through our common interest in poetry and in October 2014 we both decided we wanted to try to build something deeper and permanent. We have greatly enjoyed living and working together and the publication of her second novel in 2016 encouraged me to see if this memoir can have some form of public existence.

There are 66 boxes of Keery Papers in the Boole Library at University College Cork. Work on the listing of these papers in a way that makes them available for researchers began on 1 October 2016.

An exhibition, “1972: Ireland Votes for Change”, which draws primarily from the Keery Papers, will be launched at University College Cork on 11 October 2017. The exhibition marks the 45th anniversary of the three Irish referendums, “Into Europe”, “Article 44” and “Votes at 18”.

The remaining Keery Papers – including manuscript and documentary material relating to this memoir – will become available at the Boole Library in 2018.

To conclude this introduction, here are some quick pointers presented in the hope of giving interested readers some feel for the events and attitudes shaping my recollections.

First, I am what I am because of the family into which I was born and its position in Irish society, Protestant middle class in the Dublin of 1939. My environment was radically changed by the arrival of my brother John, four years later, and the death of our father in 1946.

Secondly, apart from trying to situate socially, economically and historically, my family context and personal career, I want to record those moments of joyful exultation that have meant so much to me. This happy haphazard sequence of events will hopefully continue.

The events celebrated range from captaining the winning rugby team in the under-14 league competition in my secondary school, to being awarded a university Foundation Scholarship and College Historical Society oratory medals at Trinity College Dublin, to being elected to the Fianna Fail party’s National Executive.

Nomination to the Irish Senate led to involvement in historic referendum and general election campaigns and I was very privileged to work on Dr. Patrick Hillery’s personal staff at the European Commission and on major information projects during Jacques Delors’ term as Commission President. Eventual Commission appointment to a management post also brought great satisfaction.

One’s greatest moments of joy and thankfulness cannot be dated as specifically as career or academic success. I think, for example, of how I came to realise that in a work colleague at the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin I had found a life partner. Then, following our marriage, there were wonderful moments of delight for Anne and me, many linked to the arrival of children and grandchildren and to their activities.

Thirdly, the enjoyment of ideas and the particular pleasures to be obtained through art and literature have been a hugely important part of my life. Particularly since the 1980s, I have given a lot of time to trying to write creatively and to educating my tastes in film and the graphic arts. To my amazement I have had a short film shown at a UNESCO film festival in Paris and have won one of Ireland’s many poetry prizes. Behind these minor successes are boxes of notebooks and files recording attempts at memoir, fiction, and radio and film treatments.

Reflection on standards of behaviour, politics and economics, ethics and religion has been a constant preoccupation. This eventually led to both Anne and I becoming Quakers, Members of the Religious Society of Friends, in 1976, in Brussels. Quakers are few in number in Ireland and internationally. Since my retirement to Dublin in 2001, a significant proportion of my time has been given to involvement in the concerns and activities of Irish Friends and the Quaker Council for European Affairs. A recent involvement to note is with the three Christian congregations in Monkstown Co Dublin, who work together under the title MC3.

Pauline Kelly, a friend to both Anne and myself over many years, helped propel the editing and revision of this memoir some time ago. In trying to give this text a wider life I have drawn on the proofreading and technical help and advice of J. R. Hughes, the writer and editor who has been so helpful with Pauline Hall’s latest novel “Eoin Doherty and The Fixers”. Responsibility for the text and its presentation is of course entirely my own. I hope its publication may give some readers pleasure and offend none. May it also bring some happy surprises and more beginnings.

Neville Keery
October 2017

Read on: 1939 – Birth