Researching John Keane

Born in Waterford, Keane first played competitive hurling during his school days at Mount Sion CBS. He arrived on the inter-county scene at the age of fifteen when he first linked up with the Waterford minor team, before later lining out with the junior side. He made his senior debut in the 1934–35 National Hurling League. Keane went on to play a key part for a Waterford team that made a long overdue breakthrough, and won one All-Ireland medal and two Munster medals.

As a representative of the Munster inter-provincial team for twelve years, Keane won seven Railway Cup medals during that period. At club level he won eight championship medals with Mount Sion.

Keane's retirement came following the conclusion of the 1951 championship.

In retirement from playing, Keane became involved in team management and coaching. As trainer of the Waterford senior team in 1959, he guided them to Munster and All-Ireland victory. He was also heavily involved with training various Mount Sion teams.

Keane has been repeatedly voted onto teams made up of the sport's greats, including at centre-back on the Hurling Team of the Century in 1984 and the Hurling Team of the Millennium in 2000.

John Keane is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. Well before the European revolutions of 1989, John Keane first came to public prominence as a theorist and defender of ‘civil society’ and the democratic opposition in central-eastern Europe. Throughout the 1980s, he contributed extensively to the programme of ‘flying university’ apartment seminars in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. His political and scholarly writing during that period was published under the pen name Erica Blair. His Times Literary Supplement series of 18th-century-style dialogues with prominent underground human rights figures such as Adam Michnik and György Konrád was read widely, and translated into many languages. He arranged and edited Vaclav Havel’s first book in English, The Power of the Powerless (1985). In the spring of 1989, just before the revolutions that shook central-eastern Europe, he founded the world’s first democracy research institute, the London-based Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD). During the past decade, he founded and directed the Sydney Democracy Network (SDN). He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper's, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post.

During his many years in Britain, the Times of London described him as 'one of the world's leading political thinkers and writers. (Madrid) has ranked him as 'among the world's leading analysts of political systems' (2018). The Australian Broadcasting Commission called him 'one of the great intellectual exports from Australia.' His work has been translated into approximately 35 languages. During the period 2014-2019, his experimental online column "Democracy Field Notes" attracted nearly a million readers in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the prize-winning, best selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy(2004), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013) and a full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). Forthcoming in Arabic, it has been published in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Korean; it was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Literary Award (2012) while the Japanese translation (2014) was ranked in the top three non-fiction books of that year published in Japan. His most recent books are When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017); Power and Humility: the Future of Monitory Democracy (2018); and The New Despotism (2020). He was recently nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize and the Holberg Prize for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences.

In 2021 Keane published the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism co-authored by Debasish Roy Chowdhury.