Local Faces: Mary Keegan

OVER the course of more than three decades of involvement in community work in Fettercairn in Tallaght, Mary Keegan’s passion for helping and supporting those in the area has never waned.

Growing up in a small Donegal seaside village called Rathmullan, Mary, 61, saw firsthand how important community involvement is and she has carried this with her throughout her life.

“We would’ve spoken to and went to the shops for the elderly people in the village,” she recalled, when reflecting on her childhood in Rathmullan.

“Doing that, in itself, was a bit of community development and community spirit. But that’s just the way we were brought up, we didn’t see crime or any bad things happening – and that’s what you want for everyone.”

At 18-years-old, Mary moved to Dublin and worked in catering. She first lived in Rathmines, and can still remember the initial trepidation she felt when she stepped off the bus from Donegal in Bus Áras.

“There never was very much employment in Donegal, so you’d move down to Dublin to see what was there,” she explained.

Mary Keegan

“I remember the shock horror of getting off the bus in Bus Áras. And my focal point was the Harp Bar at O’Connell Bridge, because I was meeting someone there who had moved down to Dublin before me.

“I met them and then we headed out to Rathmines. I’d be getting the bus in and out of town and carefully watching the streets I went through to learn where everything was.”

Mary had worked in catering in hotels in Donegal during the summer when she was a teenager, so she easily found catering work when she moved to Dublin.

“I was working in catering, but after a while I thought that it was one of those jobs that I could do for the rest of my life, or I could go and do something I found more interesting,” Mary said.

This thought remained with Mary. While several years later she met her husband, James, who she married in the 1980s, her interest in community work was growing.

“At that particular time, Dublin was swamped with drugs,” she said. “I went to the Community Action Network on Gardiner Street, where I did some courses.”

Mary gets great satisfaction from seeing the things you can achieve – no matter how small it is

It was around the time when she was doing courses about community development that Mary and James got a flat in the St Teresa’s Gardens flat complex in Dublin 8.

“The first night we moved in, there was nothing in the flat,” remembered Mary. “There hadn’t been windows in the flat, but they put windows in for when we moved in.

“Every so often you’d hear a bang – it was pigeons flying into the windows, because they’d been roosting in the flat before we moved in.”

The young couple saw firsthand the deprivation that was caused by the drug epidemic in the inner city in the 1980s, and how it had worsened over the four years they spent living in the flat complex.

“Our daughter Aoife was born in 1990, and by that time things had gotten really bad in the flat complex. There were so many drugs and so many needles in the stairwell.”

When Aoife was six-months-old, the Keegans successfully applied for a house swap with a council tenant in Fettercairn and Mary was keen to get involved in her new community, where she also raised her son, John, who was born in 1992.

“Tallaght was very different,” Mary explained. “It was better for me, because I had more room. And we weren’t crammed into a stairwell that we had to go up, where there was drug use, vomiting and arguments.

“There was a lot of joyriding in St Teresa’s Gardens. On the night we left, people were joyriding and they had knocked down a child and killed them.”

While the community in Fettercairn also had issues with anti-social behaviour and drug dealing, Mary said there was a strong appetite for change which she readily got involved in.

“There was so much happening in Tallaght, and people wanted better for their area. I wanted to make things better for the people in the area I was living in.”

Mary Keegan

Mary has succeeded in doing that over the years. She was involved in the anti-drug movement in the area in the 1990s, and was instrumental in organising the refurbishment and extension of the Fettercairn Community Centre.

She’s also a proponent of the importance of education, and previously set up an afterschool club for children from the area, in a bid to deter them from getting involved in nefarious activities.

“Education is a way to support kids and get them up the ladder into a better life, away from a life that’s no good,” she explained.

“We had people who had been inclined to take kids out of education and get them involved in drugs and criminal activity.”

Mary said she’s pleased to see that, nowadays, many young people from Fettercairn go to college and further their education.

Her involvement in the community, via Fettercairn Estate Management, began when she moved into the area in 1990 and started volunteering for the group to improve the appearance of the estate. In June 1998, Mary successfully applied for the salaried position of manager of Fettercairn Estate Management. She has proudly been in that role ever since.

“There’s a great aul community spirit in Fettercairn,” said Mary. “There are lovely people there who are willing to participate very easily with you.”

While Mary enjoyed living and working in Fettercairn, she and her husband decided to leave the area and move to Monasterevin in Kildare in 2011, as she had found it difficult to separate her work and home life.

But her affection for the area and passion for improving it has never erred, and continues to inform her work.

“I did struggle for a couple of years after I left Fettercairn,” she said. “I missed it so much because I missed the people there, but I still get to see them when I’m working.”

As for what has kept her motivated in her work in the area over the last 31 years, Mary said: “I get great satisfaction from seeing the things you can achieve – no matter how small it is – to get something for the community that makes their lives better.”