Keating, Sean P. (1903–76), republican, businessman and administrator, was born John Keating in Darrell Cottages, Kanturk, Co. Cork, on 14 July 1903, the son of Michael Keating, baker, and his wife Johanna, a native of Co. Kerry; he was the youngest of six surviving children (four sons and two daughters; two other siblings were dead by 1911). He was educated at a local school and was an active member of the GAA, playing football and hurling. After the Easter rising he left school aged 13 to join the Irish Volunteers (supporting his older brothers against their Redmondite father), and in the war of independence was a member of I Coy, 4th Bn, Cork No. 4 Brigade, IRA. Captured by crown forces in November 1920, he was so badly beaten that the governor of Cork county jail protested at his condition (though Keating later expressed gratitude to a British military doctor who treated him). After a month in Cork jail he spent a year interned at Ballykinlar camp, Co. Down, where he participated in three hunger strikes and several escape attempts.
Released in December 1921 on the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty, he fought on the republican side in the civil war under Sean Moylan (qv), and was again interned. After release in 1924 his economic prospects were exiguous; he worked as a freelance for the Cork Examiner while saving up to emigrate to the USA. One brother emigrated to Australia and became a prominent trade unionist before his death in 1954; another remained in Kanturk and successfully ran the family bakery.
In 1927 Keating moved to New York city, where he found work as a car washer, paid $15 a week. He was fired for being absent without leave to attend the St Patrick's Day parade, but soon found employment as a messenger and then a clerk in a small chain of grocery stores; he worked his way to a managerial position within three years, while attending high school night classes and taking extramural university courses to improve his education. In 1930 he was discharged temporarily for overstaying his honeymoon leave of absence, but was rehired the same day; this experience, however, brought home the precariousness of his employment situation during the great depression, and he decided to acquire a skill that no one could take away from him. He trained as a photolithographer and eventually set up his own lithography business. In 1946, having taken a course in insurance, he set up his own insurance firm; it enjoyed modest success and he acquired an office in the Wall Street area.
Having no relatives in New York, on arrival Keating lodged with the O'Doherty family from Kanturk, and in 1930 married Una O'Doherty, with whom he had two children. In the absence of extended family he drew on an informal social network of Old IRA veterans (including such figures as Connie Neenan and Michael Flannery (qv)) and on the city's Irish-American county organisations. In the 1940s and 1950s, Keating rose to prominence in these bodies, assisted by organisational skills, a warm and outgoing personality, and his emergence as a witty and forceful stump speaker. President of the Corkmen's Association in 1946, he held several offices in the United Irish County Associations (UICA), including two terms as president in the 1950s. He was grand marshal of the St Patrick's Day parade in New York in 1956, and in 1959 edited The Rebel, an elaborately produced, 200-page volume commemorating the diamond jubilee of the Corkmen's Association.
Keating was also active in various charitable organisations, such as United Cerebral Palsy in New York, but perhaps his most striking impact on Ireland came through his role in the foundation by the UICA of the Irish Institute on West 48th Street in 1951. Initially providing a building as a meeting point and social venue for the UICA, the institute later organised regular excursions to Ireland and became a centre of fund-raising for Irish causes. Keating served from the beginning on its executive, and as president (1960–66); both before and after his retirement to Ireland in the mid 1960s, he appeared regularly in the Dublin newspapers, delivering cheques derived from the Irish Institute's annual fund-raising dinners to such causes as the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, the reconstruction of the Martello tower at Sandycove, Co. Dublin, associated with James Joyce (qv), the construction of a new library in TCD, a fund for indigent Irish artists, the development of the Irish tourism and design industries, and a scholarship in agricultural science in memory of Sean Moylan. All this can be seen as reflecting Keating's desire to open to his compatriots educational and cultural opportunities that had not been available to him and his contemporaries.
Soon after his arrival in America, Keating became active in the Democratic party, whose support coalition in New York included a strong Irish element. In 1940 he was a founding member of the American Friends of Irish Neutrality, established by Paul O'Dwyer (qv) to oppose British and US government pressure for Ireland to enter the second world war; Keating organised Old IRA associates to keep the organisation from being taken over by pro-Nazis and isolationists. After the Pearl Harbour attack, he tried to join the US armed forces but was rejected as too old.
After the war, Keating was publicity director of the American League for an Undivided Ireland, campaigning for Marshall aid to Britain to be made conditional on an end to partition, engaging in a vitriolic exchange with James Dillon (qv) after Dillon suggested the US anti-partition campaign was run by communists, and putting his name to public statements challenging Basil Brooke (qv) to debate partition in New York and calling on Winston Churchill and Harry Truman to put their praise of democracy into effect by ending partition. In 1948 Keating campaigned in support of Paul O'Dwyer's unsuccessful attempt to secure election to the US house of representatives. In the late 1940s he publicly and privately backed Jewish groups supporting attacks on British forces in Palestine and making military preparations to support the nascent state of Israel; this did not spring from simple anglophobia or political expediency, as he was influenced towards philo-semitism by O'Dwyer as well as by press coverage of the Nazi genocide.
In 1950 Keating handed over the insurance business to his wife after being appointed deputy director of commerce for New York city by Mayor Bill O'Dwyer (qv), who later made Keating commissioner of licences; Keating always praised O'Dwyer as a highly effective mayor who had been maligned, and O'Dwyer's brother Paul was Keating's closest friend and ally in many causes. (On occasion Keating acted as intermediary between the O'Dwyers and elements of the Democratic party establishment who found them an embarrassment.)
Under Bill O'Dwyer's successor as mayor, Vincent Impellitteri (1950–53), Keating continued to serve, as vice-president of the Board of Standards and Appeals. He also served as assistant (1958–61) to Mayor Robert Wagner, which placed him in charge of appointments to civic offices and allowed him to serve as intermediary between the reforming mayor and local machine politicians from whom Wagner wished to distance himself but who could not be ignored. Keating himself lived a modest lifestyle with his family in Queens. He played a significant role in supporting Wagner in his long-running conflict with Carmine De Sapio, the last significant boss of the declining Tammany organisation. Keating's relationship with the mayor was reinforced by the fact that Wagner, whose mother came from Co. Cork, was a longstanding member of the Corkmen's Association. Some commentators speculated that Keating would eventually become mayor of New York, but he is unlikely to have held such ambitions, as he never stood for elected office.
At an Irish Institute dinner in 1957, Keating was the first public speaker to address Senator John F. Kennedy as 'the next president of the United States'. He subsequently participated in various Kennedy political campaigns, and was a personal friend of the family. In January 1961 Keating became one of President Kennedy's first federal appointees when he was nominated as regional director of the US Post Office Department with responsibility for New York (state and city), Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. He was the first native-born Irish person to hold such a senior federal appointment in the twentieth century. (His appointment was delayed after Paul O'Dwyer jocularly stated that his postal experience consisted of blowing up post offices during the Irish war of independence, leading to an FBI investigation.) According to contemporary press reports, Keating's job involved supervising nearly 2,000 post offices, 85,000 workers and 37.5 million mail items daily in the city alone. He took particular pride in his pioneering role in employing disabled persons and in his pursuit of a fair deal for black applicants and employees (when he died, his former administrative assistant, an African-American, crossed the Atlantic to act as pallbearer at his funeral). In 1963 Keating received an 'outstanding civil servant of the year' award from the Council of Jewish Organizations.
After Kennedy's assassination, Keating chaired the committee that organised and raised funds for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park and Arboretum near New Ross, Co. Wexford; when the park was opened by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in May 1968, Keating, who on retiring from the Post Office Department in 1966 had moved back to Kanturk, took a prominent role as representative of Irish-American societies. He returned to America for the funeral of Senator Robert Kennedy, appearing in the CBS studio with Walter Cronkite to comment on the ceremony (8 June 1968) at the request of the Kennedy family. Embarrassingly, when Keating welcomed Senator Edward Kennedy at Shannon airport in March 1970, the senator referred journalists' questions about the July 1969 Chappaquiddick incident (a young woman whom Kennedy was driving in his car late at night drowned after a road accident) and the 1972 presidential election to Keating.
Keating had regularly revisited Ireland in the post-war era for presentations, holidays and commemorations. In 1960 he acted as a judge for the Rose of Tralee festival, and the following year he was sent to Dublin on a successful mission to persuade the Irish government to take up a pavilion in the 1964–5 world's fair in New York, which was boycotted by several major nations. On returning to Kanturk in 1966, he built a bungalow at Curragh, a mile north-west of the town, and secured appointment as a special sales representative for Pan American World Airways. Regarded as the unofficial leader among several returned Americans living in the area, he deployed his administrative skills in support of a variety of community causes ranging from economic development, to charities (the Irish Wheelchair Association), civic bodies (the Tidy Towns Association, the Town Park Committee) and sporting associations (he was president of Kanturk handball club and, as founding president (1973–6) of Kanturk golf club, oversaw the development of a nine-hole course; after his death a golf tournament was established in his memory). He also joined colour parties and gave orations at several local republican funerals and commemorations (notably the annual commemoration of Liam Lynch (qv) at Kilcrumper); in these, he emphasised that he had merely been 'a humble volunteer'. Although highly critical of partition and of British policy in Northern Ireland before and after the outbreak of the troubles, he believed that the policies pursued by Taoiseach Jack Lynch (qv) offered the best hope of ending partition, and was an active supporter of Fianna Fáil.
Sean P. Keating died on 2 July 1976 at his home in Kanturk, and was buried in a local cemetery with military honours. He represents an emigrant political and social milieu which is often treated dismissively by later, more cosmopolitan Irish commentators, but his career reflects not only his own considerable talents but the ways in which this milieu sustained a generation of immigrants, and the contribution of Irish America to Irish development in the post-war decades.