Fr Michael Keaveny’s eventful life took in the Omagh bombing, the discovery of a Spanish Armada shipwreck, the Olympics, and the US space programme
A scuba-diving priest who helped discover a Spanish Armada shipwreck and accompanied a local swimmer to the Olympics has been laid to rest following a funeral in Co Donegal.
Fr Michael Keaveney, a former vice President of St Columb’s College in Derry who taught two Nobel Laureates – John Hume and Seamus Heaney, sadly passed away on Friday.
He was described as a “bright and intelligent man, who could have succeeded in any path of life he’d cared to choose” during a touching homily in his native Moville on Monday afternoon.
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During his 77 years as a priest, he served in parishes in Derry, Donegal, and Tyrone and even briefly offered spiritual guidance to people working in the American space programme in Florida.
In an eventful life, he was also a priest in Omagh at the time of the 1998 bombing.
He played a role in the discovery of the a famous Spanish shipwreck near Kinnagoe Bay in Co Donegal, and travelled by private jet to meet Pope Francis in 2022.
Monsignor Andy Dolan, priest-in-residence in the Faughanvale parish in Co Derry where Fr Keaveny spent his final years, said Fr Keaveny’s life as a priest had taken him “from the bottom of the sea to the top of a spire”.
In conversation with Belfast Live in 2023, Fr Keaveny had recalled how, after completing his studies at Maynooth, he had travelled over land to Rome through a devastated Europe in the years following the Second World War.
He also fondly remembered the underwater discovery he made in 1971, alongside fellow members of City of Derry Sub Aqua club, that revealed the exact location of the famous La Trinidad Valencera – the third largest vessel of the Spanish Armada – off Kinnego Bay in Co Donegal.
And he enthused about his time at a parish near Cape Canaveral in Florida, where he said “quite a few of my parishioners” worked on the space programme and regularly invited the visiting Irish priest to rocket launches.
Monsignor Dolan, in his homily on Monday in Moville, also recalled how Fr Keaveny had accompanied the Derry Olympian and former St Columb’s College pupil Liam Ball to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.
He also paid tribute to Fr Keaveny’s family, saying: “When we’re setting up anything of value, we have to make sure the foundations are strong. And he came from a very strong foundation, a home of faith and prayer, where Christian values were very upheld.”
On the Omagh bombing, Monsignor Dolan said it was “an event that made such demands, beyond human endurance, to himself and brother priests at the time, who administered to the wounded and dying, in such awful circumstances.”
He added: “As we commend his soul, our brother priest, our most senior priest, to the Lord, we could sum him up by saying he was one-of-a-kind.”
Following the service, his remains were interred in Ballybrack cemetery.
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