Former director of Cork Life Centre, Don O'Leary, has passed away aged 68

Don O’Leary, a past member of Cork City Council and the former director of the Cork Life Centre, has passed away. He was 68.

Through his work with the Cork Life Centre, Mr O’Leary, who had been living for more than four years with terminal cancer, made life immeasurably better for hundreds of young Cork people failed by Ireland’s mainstream education system.

A native of Ballyphehane who lived most of his life in Fairhill, Mr O’Leary was jailed in 1987 for three years in Portlaoise Prison for membership of the Provisional IRA.

He often said his real crime had been possession of Sinn Féin election posters, and he once told The Echo that while he had not actually been a member of the IRA when he went to prison, “I most certainly was when I came out”.

Elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for the Cork city north-west ward in 1999, contemporaries remember him as a firebrand who always defended the oppressed and the overlooked. Ill health forced him to stand down in 2000 and he was replaced on the council by future TD Jonathan O’Brien.

In 2006, Mr O’Leary began as director of the Cork Life Centre, a volunteer-led alternative education facility offering one-to-one, relationship-based tuition to students who have not thrived in the mainstream education system.

When he took over, the centre, founded in 2000 by Nash’s Boreen native Brother Gary O’Shea, tutored five students every year, up to Junior Cert.

In his time as director, Mr O’Leary expanded the curriculum and introduced Leaving Certificate subjects for those who wished to study them, growing the number of students tutored there every year to 55.

In late 2022, after long and often fractious negotiations, and following several interventions by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Mr O’Leary announced that a deal had been agreed with the Department of Education whereby nine of the centre’s staff would be given contracts by the department, a development Mr O’Leary said would secure the Life Centre’s future.

In December 2023, Mr O’Leary resigned as director of the Life Centre, a position he had held for more than 18 years, following a number of unresolved disputes with the centre’s board of trustees.

In his professional life, his time as director of the Life Centre meant more than anything else.

He would arrive in the office early every morning, some days before dawn, and he would stay into the evening, doing everything he could for the young people who found a new purpose in life during their time under his care.

In December of 2021, when he made public his diagnosis of terminal cancer, he told The Echo:

“If I had one wish for anyone, it would be to give them one day of the last 16 years of days that I have had in the Life Centre.” 

Mr O’Leary is survived by his wife Betty, their children Don and Eilis, and their beloved grandchildren Daniel, James, Eoin, and Cian.