Life
1945- ; b. Dublin; ed. Cork Univ. and Cambridge (King’s Coll.) Prof. of English, University College Cork; author of works on Brendan Behan to whom he is related through the Kearney line; author of a novel, The Consequence (1993), which concerns Fintan Kearney, a lecturer in English at UUC who learns that an autobiography he cannot remember having written is being published in London; includes reminiscences of schooldays, a portrait of Behan, and memories of popular music in the 1950s; he published his memoirs as Down by the Lifeeyside in 2019; in 2023 Kearney donated the oil painting Girl Going by Trinity (1965) to the National Gallery of Ireland.
DIB/RIA: Kearney is the author of entries on Brendan Behan and Eoghan O Tuairisc in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA) - online [accessed 29.08.2023].
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Commentary
by Cecilia Keegan, review of The Consequence (Belfast: Blackstaff; Chester Springs: Dufour 1993, 1994), [324pp.], in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1994): the novel is the conseqence of another called Gone With Time, and the narrator Fintan Kearney’s attempt to tell the truth; mentors of Fintan are his hard-drinking uncle Pearse; Eugene Watters, and Brendan Behan, each represented as ‘characters’; narrator wins attention of first girlfriend by forging Behan’s signature; the real story, as remembered by the women in his life, is ribald.
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Notes
The Consequence is used as a central text in C. L. Dallat’s discussion of the ‘rise of the novel as a critque of de Valera’s Ireland’ (‘After the Censor had gone’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 Sept. 1996, pp.21).
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