Previous research has established thermal infrared imagery of faces as a valid biometric and has shown high recognition performance in a wide range of scenarios. However, all these results have been obtained using eye locations that were either manually marked, or automatically detected in a coregistered visible image, making the realistic use of thermal infrared imagery alone impossible. In this paper we present the results of an eye detector on thermal infrared imagery and we analyze its impact on recognition performance. Our experiments show that although eyes cannot be detected as reliably in thermal images as in visible ones, some face recognition algorithms can still achieve adequate performance.