BELFAST (IRELAND)
Belfast Telegram
January 12, 2019
By Alf McCreary
Donal McKeown (68) grew up in Randalstown. He has a brother, James, and sisters Mary and Teresa. As children, they played with neighbours from other Churches.
His first 11 years were spent in a house with a water pump in the yard, and there was no electricity until he was 10.
His father, James, was a watchmaker, and his mother, Rose, a primary school teacher, though she could not work always, because she was married and had four small children.
There was a strong sense of community and of being part of a large family network – his father was one of 13 children and his mother was one of eight. As a young man, Donal McKeown played Gaelic football and hurling with Creggan Kickhams, near Randalstown.
He has run a number of marathons, one in 1982 as part of a 48-strong parish team raising funds for a new church building, and another in 2001 to raise money for a new minibus for St Malachy’s College, where he had been principal in Belfast. He also took part in the Belfast-Dublin Maracycle in 1996.
“My studies at Queen’s University in German and Italian gave me a chance to travel in Germany from 1970 to 71. In my last two years at Queen’s, I was the Belfast correspondent for a German news agency,” he says.
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