We are heartbroken to share the news that Maurice O’Keeffe, Irish Life and Lore co-founder with his wife Jane, beloved husband, father, grandfather and friend passed away on 26th August 2024. His passion for Irish history and heritage and his unwavering commitment to its preservation through oral history will forever be remembered and valued.
Maurice was born in Tralee on 7 August 1949 into an accomplished GAA family. His father, Frank O’Keeffe, a businessman and a member of the famous Kerry football team that played in Polo Grounds in New York in 1947, earned the family’s first All-Ireland medal against Roscommon in 1946. His brother John O’Keeffe earned seven more during his time with the Kerry football team. Maurice’s passion and aptitude was for athletics. From his earliest years at Terenure College in Dublin, he excelled at long-distance running, a passion he brought into adulthood, participating and placing in athletics competitions. He took up cycling in his forties and in 1995 established a new Irish time-trailing record on the route between Galway and Limerick in two hours 39 minutes and 12 seconds. Also a keen swimmer; he rose with the sun every morning to meet the waves in Banna Beach.
Maurice’s deep interest in the architectural, culture and natural history of his home place was fostered during his youth, primarily through his friendship with the late Tralee historian Russell McMorran, with whom he collaborated on numerous editions of the ‘Old Kerry Journal’ and, in 2005, ‘A Pictorial History of Tralee’.
With his beloved wife Jane (née O’Hea), Maurice forged not one, but two successful careers of which he was immensely proud. Many will recall the beautifully furnished rooms in the Georgian building in Princess Street, Tralee that was, for seventeen years, O’Keeffe’s Antiques and Interiors. He loved the old things, the shape of them, the craftsmanship, but most of all their stories – the stories of the generations who loved them before, and the stories of those who would love them next.
Enthused by the conversations he had when visiting homes to appraise or deliver antiques, Maurice began carrying a tape recorder on his visits. His inherent ease in any company, his openness, integrity, and genuine interest, made for wonderful recordings. In the mid-1990s, Maurice and Jane founded Irish Life and Lore, thus beginning thirty years of oral history recording and archiving during which Maurice recorded more than 4,000 people in Ireland and as far afield as Hong Kong, the Falkland Islands, and Chicago.
A significant part of his legacy is an unparalleled and extraordinarily rich archive of Irish voices, stories, traditions and music. Funding from libraries, local authorities, businesses or institutions that valued his professionalism, focused the themes of many of the collections. Maurice spoke often about how recording oral history in each part of Ireland was different: On the west coast, the energy of the people was matchless – the music, the dancing, the sport and the story-telling. In the midlands, he was gifted a rich history of agriculture, farming traditions, and factory life. On the east coast, he recorded stories of business and migration and the history and legacies of the Anglo Irish families that settled in counties Kildare, Dublin and Meath. Working in the North of Ireland, he recorded the difficult history of divided communities.
Maurice’s seventy-six oral history collections, including the many county-based collections, those on the 1916 Rising, the residents of the Falkland Islands, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, ‘1922-2022: A Century of Change’, and his final work on the Rhineland Palatines, represent very significant additions to the historical record. On the occasion of the presentation of the 1916 Rising Oral History Collection to the National Library of Ireland on 21 January 2016, for example, President Michael D. Higgins commended Maurice and Jane O’Keeffe on ‘this remarkable collection, which is a great gift to Irish society and a great exercise in citizenship’ and thanked them for their work in ‘recording of voices from the different settings that make up our country and contemporary Irish history’.
Maurice’s interest in the Big Houses would extend nationwide and result in four oral history collections. The Big House in Kerry: Social History, edited by Jane O’Keeffe and published by Irish Life and Lore in 2022, was inspired by the couple’s interest in this aspect of Irish history.
In his final months, when he was still compiling episodes of his Irish Life and Lore Podcast, Maurice said that he felt ‘privileged to have had the trust and willingness of the people he interviewed to speak openly about their own experiences and their lives’. He was ‘proud that the recordings had been archived, organised into collections, and placed in libraries and universities across the county’.
So notable among the many tributes paid to Maurice, have been the many that acknowledged not only his energy and enthusiasm but also his significant and lasting contribution to history and heritage in Ireland.
