Don O'Leary: 'I can’t control the cancer, it’s there, but there are things I can control'
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It’s not dark yet. Don O’Leary is still showing up every day. He can’t control the cancer which he has been told will end his life, but he can control how he lives in the meantime.
O’Leary has been the director of the Cork Life Centre for the last 16 years. The centre, based in Sunday’s Well in the city, caters for young people who are not properly served by the education system. They might be, as the euphemism goes, troubled, or traumatised by events in their life, or have experienced addictions problems, or simply don’t have the wherewithal to negotiate an education system that has relatively strict parameters. As such, the Life Centre is working to ensure that as many young people as is humanly possible will reach their potential.
“I’m happy to say that I haven’t missed a day since I got the news,” O’Leary says. “I was told in February that I had stage four lung cancer and that I had between eight and 11 months to live. I’m at peace with this. Early on, I decided I can’t control the cancer, it’s there, but there are things I can control; what I want to do, who I want to be around and where I want to be. I’m here in the centre that I love.”
The centre is his passion, education his calling. “A lot of us go through life and you can be stuck in what some see as the drudgery of work but you’re not happy.
“I’m working with an amazing group of young people and an amazing staff. If you can find a passion that is within every young person and drive that on, then you will start to make inroads.”
Don O’Leary took a circuitous route to the role of educator, despite having a feeling from early on that it would be a fulfilling role for him.
“I did the leaving in [Coláiste] Chroist Rí and if you asked me then what I wanted to be I’d have said a teacher. But I couldn’t have done it. I was the eldest of 11. Where was the money going to be found for me to go to university? So I worked part-time in a bar and then I went into an office, doing cost accounting. If you paid me all the money in the world I wouldn’t go into an office again. I ran from it, went back to bar work, worked in a taxi base, was manager of a clothes shop, all those things.”
Along the way, he also acquired an interest in politics, particularly the national question. That brought him into Sinn Féin at a time when the party was closely linked to the Provisional IRA, which was conducting its campaign of violence. O'Leary stood for Sinn Féin in various elections, but following one local election, he maintains, he became a person of interest to the Special Branch of the gardaí, which was tasked with monitoring subversives.
They arrived at his house and took away some posters. “They came back six months later and said I was being charged with membership of the IRA. I was a Sinn Féin member. When I went to the Special Criminal Court, the judge laughed and released me on £250 bail. But then before it came to trial, a bomb went off in Enniskillen.”
The bomb was an IRA operation on Remembrance Day in 1987. Eleven people, 10 of them civilians, were killed, prompting a fresh wave of revulsion across the island about the campaign of violence.
“I said to my wife, this is not looking good,” O’Leary says. “When I got to court, a superintendent said I was a member of the IRA, I said I was not and the judge took the word of the superintendent.”
He was sentenced to five years. He served three on the subversive wing of Portlaoise prison. He says he was not a member of the IRA when convicted, but once on the group’s landing in the prison, he became a member.
He says the imprisonment was far worse on his family than on himself. “I had a wife and two children and my daughter had health difficulties. None of that was easy. It’s the families of prisoners who had it really bad.”
On his release, the Special Branch were still on his tail. He got some temporary work with a charity in the city and was asked would he take on a role full-time. He was enjoying the work and delighted with the opportunity for something stable.
“I went home and told my wife. The next day on the way to work I was absolutely walking on air. Two hours into the day I got called into the office and the manager said you never said you were in prison. I said you never asked me, I wasn’t ashamed of it. She asked me to leave, the job was gone. I said it was the Special Branch who told you that but she didn’t answer. It was a hammer blow.”
He recovered and eventually got work in a school where his wife worked. One thing led to another and before he knew it he was teaching. He had arrived at the station which he had glimpsed in the distance as a teenager. That brought him to the Life Centre, where his passion has driven him on since.
Last year, his contribution to education was recognised with an honorary doctorate.
“I never thought that UCC would have given me a doctorate,” he says. “But it was celebrating a link between the Life Centre and third-level institutions. I don’t think I deserved that. I think everyone here deserves it but when I try to pass that on, people say I’m the leader and I suppose the buck stops with me.
I’m 63, I’ve had 16 years working here with a really great staff and the kids. It’s all about the kids, the kids, the kids. I wish we could all be a little less hard on them and realise that education is every child’s right.”
- Don O’Leary is this week’s guest on the Mick Clifford Podcast