A Monument More Lasting Than Bronze: Eoin McKiernan, 1915-2004

On July 18, just as the last issue of this journal was going to press, we learned of the death of Dr. Eoin McKiernan, the honorary chair of our editorial board and the founder of the Irish American Cultural Institute from which the Center for Irish Studies descends. In many ways, his was a happy death; he was eighty-nine, and, because he had been failing physically, he was confined to a nursing home for the past several years—though he remained mentally alert right up until the last days of his life. One meets few men to whom the word "patriarch" may be applied without irony, but Eoin was such a man. The editors extend their deepest sympathies to his family—all nine of his children were at his bedside when he died—and to his many friends around the world.

With his passing, the world of Irish Studies lost one of its founding intellects. There is a story told about Patrick Kavanagh being ambushed by a bar-room critic who sneered, "You're nothing but a bloody minor poet." Kavanagh took the insult in stride, paused a moment, and replied, "After Homer, we all are." Those of us who are engaged in continuing the mission of Irish Studies, in this journal and in other academic initiatives, might well say something like that about Eoin McKiernan.

He was born in New York City in 1915, but raised on a farm near Cold Spring, New York; unlike most Irish Americans of his generation, his childhood was almost completely rural. At the age of fifteen he won a scholarship to study Irish in the remote village of Ros Muc, Conamara, the site of Pearse's Cottage (Teach an Phiarsaigh). He would return to Ireland more than three hundred times.

McKiernan earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at St Joseph's College in New York and the University of New Hampshire before completing his doctorate in English at Pennsylvania State University. In those days, Irish dissertation topics were all but unheard of in the United States; he wrote his doctoral thesis on "The Psychology of Nathaniel Hawthorne." People who knew him as a young scholar all reported that there was an air of boundless potential about Eoin: "You just knew," one said, "that this young man was going to mark somewhere, some day. You didn't know where—it might have been in American literature, it might have been as a college president, it might have been in Ireland. But you knew he would be great." In the end, of course, it was Ireland that best captured his imagination.

More than most, Eoin had that distinctly Irish capacity to be simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic. In the 1960s, after moving to Minnesota to become chairman of the English department at what was then the small College of St Thomas, Eoin set out to do something about what he saw as the appalling state of Irish cultural programming in America. He gained national recognition when he scripted and hosted a series of sixteen films and fifty-three television programs on Irish history, literature, and culture. These were broadcast nationally on public television: instead of a sentimental view of Ireland, he taught Americans that Ireland was a land of antiquity, dignity, and achievement. The programs stimulated a national outpouring of support. More than 10,000 enthusiastic letters of praise arrived from viewers.

The success of the television shows spurred McKiernan to leave teaching in 1971 to devote all of his energies to developing the Irish American Cultural Institute, a foundation he had formally incorporated in 1962, but which had lived in his ambitions for many years before that. This was a leap of faith—but with his wife Jeannette's support, he made that leap. Eoin was never afraid to aim high. In an early prospectus for the organization that he dreamt of, he wrote, "The situation is simply that there has been no effort—previously—to operate, nationally and internationally, on a level of sophistication required for our times, an imaginative program for the stimulation of Irish cultural growth...