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03/23/2022 08:30 AMEileen O’Keefe-Roxbee’s family history drives her love of the Irish American Community Center (IACC), which makes its home on Venice Street in East Haven but serves the entire Greater New Haven area.
That personal connection goes all the way back into Eileen’s childhood, having grown up around the regular happenings at the IACC, which includes the annual Connecticut Irish American Festival in North Haven.
“My dad [John O’Keefe] and mom [Maisie Kennedy] both emigrated from Ireland in 1949 and that was the year our club was founded. My dad was playing Irish football with the other founding members, so he was part of the beginnings of the club,” Eileen explains.
“The club was founded by people who had no place else to go,” she continues. “They were away from their families, and they wanted to keep their sports. [The club] started with sports, mostly. They wanted to keep sports alive because they didn’t play American football and they didn’t play baseball, they played Gaelic football and [Irish] hurling.
Irish hurling is an outdoor team game of ancient Gaelic Irish origin, played only by men, in which 15 team members on each side keep a small ball (called a sliotar) moving by use of an ash wood stick called a hurley until a goal is scored.
In ancient times, hurling helped young warriors prepare for battle, according to the history of the sport, by promoting fitness, bravery, and toughness.
“They wanted to keep playing the games they knew,” Eileen says of the Irish settlers to the East Haven area, “so they rented a hall and started this little program. They were very good players [since] they had played in their hometowns in Ireland. There were all these young men looking for a piece of home.”
From that early sportsmanship and camaraderie among the Irish people making new lives for themselves in America, the Irish American Community Center evolved through time.
“As [the men] got married and started having children, they realized they needed to do more for the families,” Eileen says. “So, they started adding other things, like dances, Irish step dancing lessons, and Irish music lessons.”
Eventually, drama programs were added, allowing the thespians of the club—like Eileen herself—to have a creative outlet through acting and the directing of plays.
“As the club grew, they kept adding more and more activities,” Eileen continues, “so they had not just the sports but the rest of the cultural activities that were important with the mission of the club, which is to preserve Irish culture in America. From there, they just added layer upon layer over the years.”
When Eileen’s dad passed in 2019 at the age of 89, the family spoke at his eulogy about how much John O’Keefe loved being an American.
“He flew an American flag, he fought in Korea, he was a man who loved two countries,” Eileen explains. “He adored and loved to be an American. He said, ‘Everyone in the world wants to be an American,’ but he never forgot his roots in Ireland because his family was involved in the Irish Revolution in 1916 and the subsequent civil war of the 1920s.”
Hearing all those stories of how the Irish fought against British oppression of the time makes Eileen think about what’s happening presently between Ukraine and Russia.
“This little country [Ireland] beat the strongest army in the world at the time, and they did it, like the Ukrainians, because they loved their country,” Eileen says. “They fought until they were free.”
As Eileen grew older and became more involved in the IACC, she ended up being the youngest person elected to the executive board in 1975.
“My parents ran the club from 1970 to 1980,” Eileen recalls, “so, through the years, I was always involved somehow.”
During her early days on the executive board, Eileen became actively involved in the Connecticut Irish Festival, Irish dancing, and she even introduced children’s activities to the festival. Later, in 2012, Eileen was named Irish Woman of the Year and then served as the IACC president from 2016 to 2020.
“I feel like it’s my home,” Eileen says, “and I have to honor my parents by keeping this club viable and alive and focused on our mission. It’s a very important part of who I am.”
Three years ago, Eileen retired from her position as principal of Roger Sherman Elementary School in Fairfield.
My mom was an assistant teacher. I come from a family of nurturers. Half of my family are either nurses or teachers,” she says with an easy laugh, adding, “it’s in our DNA, we can’t get away from it.”
Eileen began her career as an educator when her youngest child of three started school. She progressed from being a teacher to a reading specialist to director of language arts and finally into the principal’s chair.
Today, with five grandchildren, per diem consulting work in the Fairfield public school system doing teacher evaluations, filling in for other principals if they need a leave of absence, and enjoying her dancing, acting, and play directing at the IACC, Eileen keeps a full schedule fueled by her youthful energy.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic had put the annual Connecticut Irish Festival on the North Haven Green on hold, plans are in the works to restart the festival if not later this year, then most likely in 2023.
And the pandemic has put a number of personal things on hold that Eileen loves to do with her husband, Kevin Roxbee, like traveling and especially traveling to the O’Keefe ancestral hometown of Kiskeam, County Cork, Ireland.
Eileen has visited Ireland six times, and although all her aunts and uncles back in Ireland have passed on, she has 69 first cousins on her father’s side of the family who set down roots in not just the United States, but in England and New Zealand, while some remained in Ireland.
“We keep in contact through Facebook,” Eileen says, noting that one of her uncles was a famous Irish musician, “and the cousins try to gather for Easter in Ireland, in my father’s hometown of Kiskeam, at the Maurice O’Keeffe Festival. They are going to have it this year, finally, and my cousin who runs it is very excited.”
To learn more about the Irish American Community Center and its programs, visit www.iacc-ct.com.