Alexis Fitzgerald and the traffic in power
For over 40 years, Alexis Fitzgerald played a central role in Irish political and economic life. He had 'more influence on economic policy than any politician or civil servant since the foundation of the state'. His appointment as Special Advisor to the Government was recognition of a kind never accorded to anyone before and unlikely to be accorded to anyone again.
"As someone born under the mental hospital clock in this city and therefore mad enough to be standing here today, I want to introduce Senator Garret Fitzgerald".
Thus did Alexis Fitzgerald, perched precariously on the boot of a Ford Zephyr car, address some six citizens of Waterford over the heads off an FCA platoon being drilled outside the church gates during the by-election campaign of 1966. The episode at once reveals both the wry, self-deprecating sens of humour which was so characteristic of Alexis Fitzgerald and his idiosyncratic and essentially amateur attitude towards politics, to say nothing of this warm personal relationship with the companion who, when hw first became Taoiseach fifteen years later, was to create for him the unique position of Special Adviser to the Government with the right to attend and to speak at Cabinet meetings, an appointment which focussed upon him as never before the spotlight of public attention.
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Youth and Education
Alexis Fitzgerald was born on 4 September 1916, the fifth child of a family of eight, two of whom id not survive infancy. "Alexis" had long been a family name - one great great grandfather was "Alexius" - a name which has been traced back to the seventeenth century, although its precise origins remain obscure. His father, also named "Alexis", was a doctor who was Resident Medical Superintendent at Waterford Mental Hospital (nw St Otterans) for forty years, from 1901 to 1941. He and his family at first lived in a flat "under the clock" and over the main hall of the hospital until about a year after Alexis was born when they moved into a private house , Grangemore, in the grounds of the hospital. Grangemore was a substantial house with its own tennis court, croquet lawn, clock golf and a rose garden. It remained home until Doctor Fitzgerald retired in 1941 when he moved to Dublin.
Both parents came from strong family stock. His father from Ballintaggart in Callan, Co Kilkenny. His mother, Elizabeth, who was better known as Lily, was an O'Halloran from Mount Allan in East Clare and the Land Commission's subsequent demolition of Mount Allan caused resentment in the family.
Alexis was the fourth of five brothers. All his elder brothers followed in their father's footsteps and took up medicine as a career. The eldest, Oliver, became Professor of Therapeutics in UCD and is one ofIreland's most eminent physicians. The next brother, Paddy, who died in 1976, achieved equal eminence as Professor of Surgery in UCD. The third brother, Gerald, whom many regarded as the most able and brilliant of an exceptionally able family, specialised as a psychiatrist and neurologist but died of cancer at the early age of thirty-one. He had only one sister Peggy, and a younger brother, Kyran, who became a Jesuit.
His earliest, Montessori, education was with the Ursuline nuns in Waterford and he then attended Waterpark College, one of the more genteel of the Christian Brothers' schools. By then his father's custom of sending his sons to the Jesuits at Clongowes to finish their schooling was well esstablished. Alexis, however, suffered from bronchial asthma as a boy - he was absent from school for much of his Intermediate year - and the family were worried about how his health might be affected by a boarding school regime. But, after consulting a medical colleague with a special interest in asthma his father sent him to Clongowes in 1931; in the event he suffered only a single asthmatic attack during his three years there.
Alexis FitzGerald was only one of a number in that Clongowes class of 1934 who subsequently rose to posiitions of prominence in Irish life. One life-long friendship first formed at Clongowes was with Tom O'Higgins, Senior Counsel, Minister for Health, the Presidential candidate who only narrowly failed to unseat de Valera in the elecction of 1966, Chief Justice and, now, a Judge of the Euroopean Court. Other classmates included Doctor Tom Murphy, the President of UCD; Doctor Billy O'Dwyer, Professor of Medicine at the College of Surgeons; Brian Murphy, Professsor of Law at UCC; Martin Burke, the Chief Architect in the Office of Public Works; Anthony Murphy, the Chief Civil Engineer in the ESB; and Barney Daly, the County Registrar for Mayo. One classmate remembers Alexis FitzzGerald as "a good all rounder" who was always up in the first half-dozen of an intensely competitive class and whose inclination was more towards the humane than the scientiific subjects. He played tennis with sufficient distinction to win his colours for Clongowes but showed little other innterest in sports. Even as a schoolboy, however, he enjoyed a reputation for being exceptionally perceptive and this contributed to his popularity.
Intellectual development also owed much to home backkground. Doctor FitzGerald always read widely and insisted that his children do likewise, particularly during vacations at home in Grangemore when elaborate reading programmes were mapped out. Nor should Lily FitzGerald's intellectual influence be discounted. An alert and highly intelligent woman with a keen in terest in current affairs, her someetimes heterodox opinions fostered an independent spirit of thought among her children.
Their home atmosphere, Alexis recalled in a radio interrview with Andy O'Mahony in 1980, was "not oppressively religious - we all went to Mass but only on Sunday," and he remembered his father as "more a man of virtue than of religion," as someone for whom religion was fundamenntally "a matter of duty."
Alexis retained cynical memories of the Christian Broothers' attitude towards religion based on their habit of innvigilating the Bishop's examination in a manner so relaxed that it effectively allowed, if it did not actually encourage, "cogging" and cheating - a practice, incidentally, which the present writer can testify was still flourishing in 1960 in that other Christian Brothers' bastion of gentility at Monksstown Park. But he retained warmer memories of the Jesuits whose attitudes towards religion he described as "very open and understanding."
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University College Dublin
WHEN Alexis FitzGerald and Tom O'Higgins went to UCD in the autumn of 1934 they both entered the Arts Faculty where they read for the same degree in Legal and Political Science.
In 1937 they emerged at the top of their class, both with first class honours degrees with Tom O'Higgins being placed first in Economics and Alexis coming first in Politics a result which was afterwards a source of private amuseement between them in the light of their later careers.
The predominant intellectual influence on Alexis among his university teachers was Canon Denis O'Keeffe, the Proofessor of Ethics and Politics. He subsequently recalled how o 'Keeffe delivered series of lectures both on political science and on ethics "without ever mentioning the word Christian from beginning to end." He had especially vivid memories of an episode which epitomised O'Keeffe's objectivity and which occurred on the morning of May 1, 1937, when de Valera's new draft constitution was first published. Recoggnising as inevitable the speculation among his students as to how he might react to the new constitution, O'Keeffe told them: "I think it is all very fine. The only thing I object to is the piety."
A t first, the newly -graduated Alexis FitzGerald toyed briefly with accountancy as a career but he soon confided in his family that he regretted not having done law and he proceeded to an LLB degree, again with first class honours, in 1939.
Unlike his friend Tom O'Higgins, however, he was never attracted by the idea of becoming a barrister and he played little or no part in the I.&H or the other college debating societies which serve as stamping grounds for barristers in embryo, despite his having been active in school debates in Clongowes. But college contemporaries were aware of a certain inhibition which made public speaking something of an ordeal and which remained with him throughout his life. Nor would his personality and his unusually dispassionate intelligence have been suited to the rhetoric and flamboyyance which so frequently characterises the adversarial sysstem of the Bar. He chose, instead, to become a solicitor.
In the meantime, however, Alexis FitzGerald retained close links with UCD where other major influences were Paddy McGilligan, the Professor of Constitutional Law, and George O'Brien, Professor of Political Economy and the National Economics of Ireland.
It was O'Brien who was responsible for his appointment as an assistant in political economy in October 1941 at a time when the college was grossly understaffed and when James Meenan was O'Brien's only other assistant.
Alexis FitzGerald continued to lecture on a part-time basis in economics and commercial law in UCD for the next twenty years. His lecturing responsibilities varied but, in the mid-forties, he assumed particular responsibility for a course on the history of economic theory. Three mornings a week during term he lectured from nine to ten in Earlssfort Terrace before hurrying off to begin his day as a pracctising solicitor. One student of those years remembers the content of his lectures as particularly stimulating, his deliivery (not surprisingly, perhaps, given his diffidence about public speaking), as somewhat less so.
Towards the end of his life Alexis FitzGerald was occaasionally heard to express regrets at not having embarked upon an academic career but this may well have been no more than self-deprecation about the scale of his success as a solicitor; none of his contemporaries remember him speaking in such terms when he was a young man. The reaality was that full-time academic appointments were virtually non-existent at the time and part-time appointments offfered only a supplementary income.
His major academic interests, apart from economics, were in history, literature, and political philosophy; his fascination with theology and biblical studies came later and was essentially an extension of these earlier interests. If he had been in a position to pursue an academic career it would have not been in law.
Law, for Alexis FitzGerald, demanded technical experrtise (and his own command of that expertise was outtstanding) but possessed little intrinsic intellectual interest. And it is remarkable how little of his writing was given over to law. Nor was he interested in the politics of the legal profession and he never sought or held any office in the Incorporated Law Society, the "cartel" aspects of which he distrusted.
He saw law, in short, merely as a profession. Sometimes, when his own children were grown, he even joked with them that being a solicitor was a form of slavery ."1 am not a barrister. I am an attorney," he told the Senate in 1971 on one of the few occasions when he spoke publicly about the law in a speech which well reflected his prosaic percepption of his profession:
"Attorneys are agents for their customers or clients, whose duty it is to express to members of the Bar what problem their client is faced with and to commprehend enough about the law to be able to express it lucidly to members of the bar. If I saw anybody in my office spending too much time on his law books, I would regard it as a waste of time. "
It may well have been because, rather than in spite of, his conviction that the law was no more than a way to make. a living and his consequent ability to eschew any emotional engagement in his legal work that Alexis FitzzGerald became the most successful solicitor of his generaation.
The Solicitor
ALEXIS FitzGerald served his solicitor's apprenticeship with Henry D. Keane, a prominent solicitor and well-known character in his native city of Waterford. He qualified in 1941, the same year his family moved to Dublin. Family ties were strong and Alexis was still living in the new family home, in Merlyn Park in Ballsbridge , when he obtained his first position as an assistant solicitor in the General Solicitor's Office in Molesworth Street.
The General Solicitor's practice was large and lucrative involving, among other things, responsibility for wards of court. The appointment rested with the President of the High Court and a vacancy in 1941 fell to PJ. Ruttledge, a founding member and a vice-president of Fianna Fail and a cabinet minister since 1932. Ruttledge had resigned from the Cabinet because of poor health and that same poor health together with his having become accustomed to relyying on civil servants in his years in the Cabinet made him ready to delegate extensively once he recognised the ability of his assistant. Such was his confidence in his subordinate that Alexis FitzGerald soon found himself effectively runnning the office and its sizeable staff on a day to day basis.
The managerial expertise he thus acquired at so relatively early an age stood him in good stead when he later moved into practice on his own account. His attention to detail was painstaking and he took special care that the informaation conveyed in his correspondence was absolutely accuurate. "A good letter," he used to say, "will always stand to you."
After some years, however, he decided that opportuniities for advancement within the office were limited and he feared it might ultimately prove something of a dead end when he learned that Eamonn de Valera had asked Paddy Ruttledge about the possibility of finding a place for his son, Terry.
So it was that, notwithstanding the fact that he had just married Grace Costello (the daughter of John A. Costello, Senior Counsel, Dail Deputy and Attorney General in the Cumann na nGaedheal governments of 1926-32) and could ill afford to surrender the security of such a relatively good salary, Alexis FitzGerald decided to strike out on his own in partnership with another young solicitor, Terence de Vere White with the encouragement of his academic mentor and regular dining-room companion, George O'Brien.
White and FitzGerald began business over a flower shop in Nassau Street. At first neither partner had much time to devote to their intellectual interests as their energies were absorbed by the hard grind of building up their new firm. They were joined in the same year, 1947, by Jack McCann of McCann and Murphy, a much older man who had qualiified in the early twenties; and the firm of McCann, White and FitzGerald had offices at 72 St Stephen's Green, beside Rosse's Commercial College.
Alexis FitzGerald placed the beginning of the firm's growh at about 1950 and one major breakthrough was a result of his acquaintance with Robert Taft, the United States Ambassador in Dublin from 1953 to 1957. This enabled him to make important American contacts which, coupled with his own specialisation in company taxation and company law, put the firm in an ideal position to take advantage of the growing interest of many American commpanies in Ireland.
McCann, White and FitzGerald similarly benefitted from the dramatic expansion of the Irish economy after 1958, particularly during the Lemass years. Increased foreign investment, the dismantling of protectionist barriers and the movement towards free trade, the spectacular increase in the number of banks with offices in Dublin and the Europeanisation of the Irish economy culminating in Irish entry into the EEC, all created the climate for expansion. Foreign and international clients made an increasing contriibution to the firm's growing volume of business.
AT THE end of 1964 Alexis FitzGerald dwelt on the problems of expansion during his traditional Christmas Day walk with one of his oldest friends, Tony Dudley, with whom he had sat the final solicitors' examination in April 1941 and who had worked with him as an assistant solicitor in Paddy Rutttledge's office before they went their separate ways. Dudley had returned to his own family firm of O'Connor and Dudley (established in 1890) which had subsequently merged with William Roche and Son (established in 1829). The outcome was another merger. McCann, FitzGerald, Roche and Dudley was established in May 1965 and moved into new and larger offices in 51/52 Fitzwilliam Square. Terence de Vere White had by now become a successful novelist as well as the literary editor of The Irish Times and, after a period as consultant, retired from active practice in the mid-sixties.
The final merger, with Fred Sutton and Company, which went back to 1835 and numbered Guinness among their clients, took place in 1980 when the present firm, McCann, FitzGerald, Sutton, Dudley was established and moved some hundred yards into still more spacious offices at 31 Upper Pembroke Street. The largest solicitors' firm in the country, it employs some fifty solicitors and about 130 people all told.
Although Alexis FitzGerald never sought dominance within the partnership his ability and the sheer strength of his personality ensured that he became, first, the nucleus and, later, the pater familias or father-confessor of the firm. He was not, as we have seen, much interested in the law for its own sake. But the fact that he was easily bored helps explain his gravitation towards the wider world of finance and international business which in turn placed him at the centre of the web of the partnership's diversifying interests.
He also took a particular interest in recruitment and for many years did most of the interviewing. He set store on background - "If he knew your father you were apprennticed," drily remarked one of the innumerable young reecruits he took on - but ability was the criterion which determined whether you would remain. Innate intelligence was what weighed most heavily with him. He sought first class minds like his own but cared little whether potential entrants had done law or economics or history.
As the firm grew larger he liked to have around him the people he had picked himself. Camaraderie and, in partiicular, the contentment and well-being of those with whom he worked closest was also important. He took infinite pains before his annual speech to the Christmas party to include at least one remark specially applicable to each person present, from the most senior of partners to the most junior of clerical staff.
He had the ability to inspire the youngest and most calllow of colleagues and the loyalty to the firm among those who worked there was largely his doing. Even today the reputation of the partnership rests less upon the entrepreeneurial skills of individuals than upon team work and the partners' capacity to complement each other's talents.
His style in consultations was cool and questioning.
"Would that be wise?" he would frequently ask and "unnwise" was a favourite term of disapprobation. In any disscussion, whether professional or political, he favoured the socratic technique of seeking to illuminate by way of quesstions rather than through direct argument and clients were invariably impressed by the quality of detachment which he brought to bear upon even the most heated discussions. He was, in a colleague's phrase, "never concerned with the short term view of a problem but he always looked instead towards his client's ultimate good." And he never allowed his own firmly held Catholic convictions to obtrude upon his objectivity in discussing with clients, problems with moral dimensions.
There is no evidence that Alexis FitzGerald valued size for the sake of size or that he initially aspired to what he in fact achieved: the creation in one generation of an instituution which matched, if it did not outstrip, the "big three" Dublin solicitors - Arthur Cox and Co, A&L Goodbody, and Matheson, Ormsby and Prentice.
Although Arthur Cox, the only Catholic solicitors of the three, did serve as the most obvious example to be emulaated and it is interesting to note that Alexis FitzGerald came to play much the same role as confidant to the inter-party governments that Arthur Cox had played to the Cumann na nGaedheal governments in the twenties. But he was connscious of the hazards of size, especially in ensuring that the quality of advice to clients was undiminished and that commplaints would not go unheard. He felt that it had become almost as big a job to manage the firm as it had been to build it up.
Although, as he grew older, he became increasingly ready to delegate his responsibilities for individual clients, he was continually concerned with economies of scale and he retained responsibility for office management and policy. In his later years" he also came to feel that the firm had a social obligation to take on certain cases which might be "economically unwise and so to harness the social conscience of younger colleagues who felt they were working for a juggernaut - "The Factory" was one disrespectful nickkname used about the firm by some who worked there. He once voiced similar sentiments in the Senate when he said:
"I am ashamed of my life at the fees I see going out from my office to people. I say 'really this is unconnscionable in terms of what the person has to pay,' but it is not unconscionable in terms of what has got to be recouped to make the operation even moderately successful. "
It was Alexis FitzGerald's achievement that, despite his central role in an operation which was, not moderately, but phenomenally successful, he at once enjoyed the esteem and admiration of so many in his profession without inncurring their envy or resentment.
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The Costello Governments
THERE is a curious intellectual neurosis prohiibiting many from entry into political life. If it is based upon any belief that commitment to action for an idea or ideas need lead to sacrifice of integrity, the belief is insupportable." So Alexis FitzzGerald wrote in an essay entitled 'Irish Democracy' pubblished in the University Review in 1958 when he was at the height of his powers and which stands both as a personal political testament and as an all-too-rare attempt to treat of some of the great questions of modern political philoosophy in an indigenous, Irish con text. In the same essay he observed how many of Ireland's "triumphs have been in fact the accidental fruits of good fortune."
The accident of his own entry into the arena of governnment and politics was in fact due to the fortune of his marriage to John A. Costello's daughter, Grace, in January 1946. Although he later acknowledged publicly that he "was born in the tradition which always voted against Dev," his family had no party affiliations. Indeed his father's high public profile as RMS in Waterford, through years which spanned revolution, civil war, and changes of governnment, made it imperative that he tread with wary imparrtiality.
One college contemporary recognised Alexis FitzGerald as an "instinctively Cumann na nGaedheal type of person," but one whose interests were as much in European as in Irish politics at a time when the Spanish Civil War was the source of heated political argument. Indeed his first clear memory of Alexis is of his asking to borrow a book on Mussolini. What appealed to him about Fine Gael was less the dogged protreatyite element epitomised by men like Richard Mulcahy and Sean MacEo in who had fought beside Collins and more the intellectual element embodied in men like Paddy McGilligan, John Marcus O'Sullivan and Eoin MacNeill - all of whom were professors in UCD.
McGilligan's influence as Professor of Constitutional Law, was marked and contributed to the tendency of Alexis FitzGerald and his friends to deride the 1937 Constitution for surrendering the traditional powers of a sovereign parrliament.
Alexis FitzGerald was among those who sought to deveelop an independent and intellectual identity, as opposed to a political justification, for Fine Gael and although he dissagreed with James Dillon's opposition to neutrality in World War II, he welcomed the display of independent thinking which it represented. He also welcomed the apppearance of Forum, a newspaper published on behalf of Fine Gael's Central Branch in 1944/50. But intellectual influence cannot be equated with influence in the parliaamentary party or at party headquarters.
Fine Gael, however, was in near-total disarray in these years, so much so that when W.T. Cosgrave finally stood down as party leader in 1944 his successor, Richard Mullcahy, lacked even a seat in the Dail. Each of the five successsive general elections between 1937 and 1948 saw a proggressive decline in their share of the vote (from 34.8% in 1937 to 19.8% in 1948) which made their coming to power in the inter-party government of 1948-51 as seemingly unnlikely as was the emergence of John A. Costello as Taoiiseach.
Costello's unforeseen elevation was a product of such unpredictable circumstances as the unacceptability of Richard Mulcahy to the other party leaders and particuularly to Clann na Poblachta's Sean MacBride (who had bitter memories of his role in the execution of republicans during the civil war), Mulcahy's remarkable magnanimity in standing down, and the freemasonry of the Law Library where Costello and MacBride were fellow barristers.
Once chosen as Taoiseach Costello was unencumbered by the baggage of advisers and henchmen who ordinarily surround a party leader in opposition. Nor was he indebted to a party machine which was, at best, ramshackle and, at worse, non existent. Indeed it was said that Costello himmself was never a member of a party branch. His familial relationship with his son-in-law was reinforced by a remarkkable temperamental affinity. 'Alexis FitzGerald and Costello had the greatest mutual respect and admiration for each other and nothing was more natural than that Costello consult his son-in-law about the problems of government, particularly in, what for him, were the unchartered waters of economic and fiscal policy.
Lawyers in politics, are perhaps, less parti-pris than those from other walks of life and that Costello was a barrister and FitzGerald a solicitor was an important factor in their political relationship. Costello, like most successful barrissters, was receptive to new ideas and unconcerned about their provenance if he thought they could help him win his case.
And if his son-in-law gave him, as he frequently did, what amounted to a good political brief then he was ready, in the argot of the Law Library, to "give it a run".
The issue which had increasingly preoccupied Irish economists since the mid-forties was how Keynesian poliicies could be best applied in an Irish context and this was frequently the subject of conversation' when Alexis Fitz-
Gerald and Paddy Lynch (then a young assistant principal in the Department of Finance) who had known each other from UCD since 1940, dined regularly together in the Uniicorn restaurant in Merrion Row. Lynch and FitzGerald agreed that Ireland's central economic problem was chronic underemployment rather than the cyclical unemployment identified by Keynes. They concluded that the Keynesian remedy of borrowing for capital purposes to even out the cycles must be modified to meet Irish conditions and were emphatic that the current budget must be balanced. Allthough Keynes would have justified an occasionally unnbalanced budget, FitzGerald in particular thought this "a dangerous temptation for politicians, especially Irish poliiticians" .
These conversations of 1946/47 bore fruit after the forrmation of the inter-party government when Costello was persuaded by his son-in-law to request that Lynch be seconnded from Finance to the Taoiseach's Department as his adviser on economic policy. Lynch's appointment was without precedent and it was the vital step in incorporaating Keynesian principles in government economic policy.
THE NEW policy was delineated in a major speech drafted by Lynch and FitzGerald and delivered by Costello to the Institute of Bankers in Ireland on 19 November 1949, arguably the single most important speech on economic and financial policy by a head of government since the foundation of the state. Its significance did not escape Lynch's former collleagues in the Department of Finance who reacted with alarm to such poaching on their preserves. Jimmy McElliigott, then Secretary of the Department of Finance for over twenty years, made this plain when he encountered Lynch on the steps of Government Buildings next morning. "Lynch," intoned McElligott, "you're a very young man but I want to tell you that the more politicians know the more dangerous they are."
But McElligott's reservations were in vain because Lynch and FitzGerald had already secured the support of the Minister for Finance, Paddy McGilligan. McGilligan was an independent convert of Keynes and when Lynch showed him Costello's speech in advance and went through it line by line, McGilligan did not propose a single alteration of substance. The outcome was the introduction of the first capital budget in May 1950 when McGilligan's speech connstituted the first explicit Keynesian commitment in an Irish budget.
Alexis FitzGerald also played a major role in the creaation of the IDA in 1949 when the reputation he had allready won in Dublin business circles prompted the then senior partner in the accountancy firm of Craig Gardners to come to him with the idea and when, in his own phrase, he served "as a conduit pipe" in communicating it to Cosstello. And he was also credited with helping to dissuade Sean Lemass from winding up the IDA when he returned to office HS Minister for Industry and Commerce in 1951.
Alexis FitzGerald's influence on non-economic issues is less readily apparent but his pragmatic streak was crucial in convincing Costello that Fine Gael had effectively accquiesced in de Valera's tearing up the treaty in the 1930s. Pragmatism similarly persuaded him to share James Dillon's criticisms about de Valera's "dictionary republic" and he felt it was nonsense for Ireland to claim membership of the commonwealth when no Irish representatives attended commonwealth conferences. By 1946, unlike Richard Mullcahy, who still hankered after a commonwealth connection, he had concluded that the commonwealth issue was irreleevant. He did not accompany Costello on his controversial North American visit in 1948 and he shared in the general bemusement at home about the circumstances surrounding the dramatic announcement of the intention to repeal the External Relations Act at the Ottawa press conference. His own personal preference might well have been for a republic inside the commonwealth. But when Costello was once asked if his government had considered that option he replied that subtleties of that kind would not achieve his desired end of demonstrating to the IRA that the breach with Britain was final and so "taking the gun out of Irish politics". Alexis FitzGerald played a no less central role in 1951/54 when Fine Gael were again in opposition but when it was anticipated that de Valera's minority government might not long survive.
Costello had resumed his practice at the Bar and, deprived of civil service assistance, became especially reliant upon his son-in-law who served as a kind of one-man research centre and as speech writer. He was heavily involved, for example, in preparing Costello's response to Sean MacEntee's deflaationary budget of 1952 which sought to redress the mountting deficit on the balance of payments. This was a time of in tensive debate about the repatriation of sterling assets which, FitzGerald argued, could not be accomplished by deliberately running a deficit on the balance of payments as repatriation in any other sense was merely a metaphysical concept.
His hand may be detected too in Costello's Dail allegaations of a split between MacEntee's restrictionist and Lemass's expansionist policies and in his protests that Paddy McGilligan's policy had "been set aside in favour of the Victorian concepts of economy and ... the officials of the Department of Finance have triumphed over progress."
It was partly because McGilligan refused to serve again as Minister for Finance for reasons of ill health and partly because Paddy Lynch had resigned from the Taoiseach's Department to lecture in economics at UCD, that Alexis FitzGerald never exerted as great an influence upon the economic and financial policy of Costello's second governnment in 1954/57. Costello's new choice as Minister for Finance was Gerard Sweetman who had very much immpressed him not only as Fine Gael Chief Whip and by his energy in opposition but by the mastery of financial legisslation he had demonstrated in the Dail. Again, the legal nexus was important. Sweetman, too, was a solicitor who specialised in company taxation and who consequently enjoyed extra-parliamentary access to Costello through the Law Library during the years in opposition.
Sweetman's youth and dynamism meant that the balance of power in government decision-making on economic policy which, during McGilligan's frequent bouts of ill health during the first inter-party government had tilted towards the Taoiseach's Department, now swung back to the Department of Finance. Sweetman, moreover, was determined to be his own Minister for Finance and he bristled visibly when Costello, in announcing his appointtment at the first meeting of ministers, suggested that Paddy McGilligan and John O'Donovan (another civil servant in die Department of Finance who made the transition to UCD's Economics Department) would "give him a hand". Sweetman also found a formidable ally in Ken Whitaker, then a senior finance official of his own age whose drive and personality he found congenial, and he set the seal on Whitaker's meteoric rise through the ranks of Finance when he had him appointed as Secretary in May 1956.
Sweetman showed the same command of financial policy in government as he had done in opposition and he adopted the export tax relief scheme which became the foundation stone of Irish industrial development. This was yet another brain-child of Alexis FitzGerald and a classic example of his ability to act as a private and powerful vehicle for transmitting innovative ideas into the right hands.
But the Taoiseach and his son-in -law became progressively disenchanted with what they saw as Sweetman's excessive deference to the deflationary conservatism of his officials in the Department of Finance. Although they never lost confidence in Sweetman's ability they did come to question his judgement and Alexis FitzGerald in particular formed the view that Sweetman was no more than a highly intelliigent technician who knew nothing about economics.
The 1956 balance of payments crisis brought matters to a head and although, despite Costello's opposition, Sweetman won Cabinet backing for what Fianna Fail not unreasonably described as his third budget in four months, the consequent tensions contributed to the collapse of the government in March 1957.
Another major issue in the fifties was emigration and Alexis FitzGerald was a member of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems which sat from 1948-1954. His "reservation" to the majority report striikingly illustrated his bleak vision of how little Ireland could do for its would-be emigrants and his moral courage in saying publicly what others might think but would leave unsaid. He could not, he wrote, "accept either the view that a high rate of emigration is necessarily a sign of national decline or that policy should be over-anxiously framed to reduce it," and he urged recognition of the significance and the "providential" role of Irish emigrants in the history of the Catholic church.
"In the order of values, it seems more important to preserve and improve the quality of Irish life and thereby the purity of that message which our people have communicated to the world than it is to reduce the numbers of Irish emigrants. While there is a danger of complacency I believe that there should be a more realistic appreciation of the advantages of emigraation. High emigration, granted a population excess, releases social tensions which would otherwise exxplode and makes possible a stability of manners and customs which would otherwise be the subject of radical change. It is a national advantage that it is easy for emigrants to establish their lives in other parts of the world not merely from the point of view of the Irish society they leave behind but from the point of view of the individuals concerned whose horizon of opportunity is widened.
"While we should so cultivate our resources that as many Irishmen as possible can live their lives in Ireeland this should not be done in a manner or to the extent of imperilling the imponderable values and liberties of our traditional society. I cannot look forrward as to an improved state of society to an Ireland where a greatly increased population can be supporrted only at the expense of a reduced standard of living. "
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The National Observer And The Just Society
ALEXIS FitzGerald's influence never rested with the Fine Gael party, over whose fortunes Sweettman now exerted an ever-increasing influence, but with John A. Costello and once Costello left office that influence lost its focus. The establishment of the Fine Gael Research and Information Council and .the publication of the National Observer under the joint editorrship of Alexis FitzGerald and his brother-in-law, Declan Costello, was an attempt to provide an alternative focus and to attract those who were intellectually interested in politics by providing them with a platform in public affairs. Alexis FitzGerald's first editorial put it more irreverently:
"The conviction which has moved us into existence is that to obtain the new recruits, to improve the stanndards and to freshen the controversy of politics it is necessary to undertake a complete reappraisal of all aspects of national policy. All the sacred cows may be chased around our pastures and we are not withhout hope that some of them will expire from the exxhaustion of the exercise. "
The paper's contributors were not confmed to party members and included Christopher Hollis, Owen SheehyySkeffington, Michael MacLiammoir, Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Lynch, Desmond Fennell, Desmond Williams and Garret FitzGerald. One notable example of editorial objecctivity was the reaction to the Fianna Fail government's publication of Economic Development in 1958 which it "unreservedly welcomed as a real contribution to the resstoration of national self-confidence."
The National Observer was short-lived. It appeared monthly between July 1958 and April 1960 and thereeafter more irregularly until it finally expired in December 1960 due to lack of financial support and the excessive demands it made upon its editors' time.
In the meantime, in 1959, Richard Mulcahy had retired as leader of Fine Gael. Although John A. Costello expressed an interest in the succession he was not prepared to give up his career at the Bar and Gerard Sweetman, who had not forgotten their differences in 1956/7, engineered the elecction of James Dillon. Alexis FitzGerald's reservations about Dillon found expression in a National Observer editorial:
"So far from Mr Dillon being an unsafe man the real danger that he may prove too safe ... a public man's mind must be always kept open for new ideas, no matter from what quarrter they may emerge."
It is unlikely that the party hierarchy regretted the deemise of the National Observer and they were equally susspicious of the public meetings which Alexis FitzGerald and others organised in Jury's Hotel under the auspices of the Fine Gael Research and Information Council - this was the genesis of his essay on Irish democracy where he reflected on the:
"Particular need in politics for men who are prepared honestly to advise parties out of power. Admittedly, the man who goes fully into politics and joins a party has got to give up some portion of the good he sees to make room for some of the good that others see. He has to abandon the pleasure reserved for those who never recommend any policy other than the best, who can always afford the unattainable, unnrealisable perfect. A man who goes into politics and joins a party is required to have the moral stamina (and this is a considerable requirement) of making a choice between two evils. He will" be required to suffer crippling compromises, infurating concessions and sombre boredom. He can console himself with the knowledge that only through compromise are institutions built and that if he is to have influence in his society for his ideas this will never be greater than when he is at the centre of some great institution like a political party. "
In practice, however, Alexis FitzGerald's influence was very much in abeyance with the triumph of the Dillon-Sweetman axis in the party. He was not a member of the group which drafted the Just Society document particuularly associated with Declan Costello and his next major involvement was in the events which led to Garret FitzzGerald's en try in to politics.
When Garret FitzGerald first broached the subject of his joining Fine Gael with Declan Costello over lunch at the Unicorn in the spring of 1964 Costello told him of his own dissatisfaction with the party leadership and of his inclinaation to get out of politics. But John A. Costello persuaded his son that it would be unreasonable to leave a party unnless it had first rejected his ideas. The outcome was Declan Costello's hastily cobbled-together social and economic prooposals (the so called eight points) which were just as hastily" accepted by a party leadership alarmed at how his secession might damage Fine Gael's electoral standing. The leveerage this gave him led to the Just Society document which, although diluted by Gerard Sweetman, formed the core of Fine Gael's 1965 election manifesto.
When the election was announced both Declan Costello and Alexis FitzGerald put considerable pressure on Garret FitzGerald to run for the Dail in Dublin South East where. John A. Costello was willing to stand down in his favour. Although Garret refused and resisted what was a consiiderable temptation - John A. Costello kept the seat warm for another term - renewed pressure to run for the Senate was applied after his outstanding television performance on the night of the election-count.
This time Garret FitzGerald succumbed but only on the understanding that he and Alexis would both run for the Senate. Garret was elected but Alexis lost by the narrowest' of margins (one-quarter of a vote) after a joint campaign in which they received much help from Tom O'Higgins.
The first Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting after the 1965 election saw the sudden resignation of James Dillon as party leader and his instant succession by Liam Cosgrave, the solitary candidate, with Gerard Sweetman once more playing the part of king-maker. Alexis and Garret FitzGerald and their wives were dining that night in the Beaufield Mews and a great depression settled upon the company when Declan Costello telephoned to say that Cosgrave had become party leader.
In fact Alexis FitzGerald's relations with Cosgrave were good. They were contemporaries who used go to the same dances at the Gresham and he had long appreciated Cossgrave's dry sense of humour; they had also worked closely together when Cosgrave was Costello's Parliamentary Seccretary in 1948-51. But it was inevitable that he would graviitate towards the more intellectual and social democratic side of the party where Garret FitzGerald, given Declan Costello's progressive disenchantment with politics, was becoming more and more the standard-bearer.
Sweetman beat off a challenge to rename the party "Fine Gael - Social Democratic Party" at the 1968 Ard Fheis, but Fine Gael's fourth successive defeat in the 1969 election further eroded the credibility of the party leaderrfuip. The conservative element in the party suffered another major reverse when Sweetman was killed in a car crash in 1970. Although Alexis FitzGerald was bitterly disappoinnted by the decision of Declan Costello with whom he was always very close, not to stand for the Dail in 1969, that same election witnessed the emergence of Garret FitzzGerald as a central figure in national politics after he had stood for John Costello's Dail seat and had headed the poll in Dublin South East.
It was in 1969, too, that Alexis FitzGerald was first elected to the Senate.
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The Senator
MEMBERSHIP of the Senate carried with it membership of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party and his intimacy with such powerful figures as Tom O'Higgins and Garret FitzGerald gave Alexis FitzGerald considerable prestige which he enhanced by his contributions to party meetings and in the Senate. For the first time he had an influential position in the party in his own right as distinct from the reputation he had long enjoyed as an eminence grise.
Tension between the liberal and conservative wings of the party increased and the dining-room in Alexis FitzzGerald's home in Nutley Road was frequently the venue for councils of war which included Tom O'Higgins, Declan Cosstello, Garret FitzGerald, Jim Doege and Michael Sweetman in the late sixties and early seventies. This group were among those labelled the "mongrel foxes" by the beleagured Liam Cosgrave when he lashed out in self-defence at the Ard Fheis of May 1972. Criticism within Fine Gael came to a head during the Dail debate in December 1972 on the Offences Against The State (Amendment) Bill about which
Cosgrave had vaccillated and only the dramatic explosion of two bombs in central Dublin which cost two lives caused the party to come into line behind his leadership at the last moment. Within months, however, the healing balm of office bound up the wounds in the party when, in March 1973, Fine Gael returned to government under Cosgrave as Taoiseach and with Garret FitzGerald as Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Alexis FitzGerald played two distinct roles during the years 1969-73, first as the intimate adviser of Garret FitzzGerald who made few, if any, major speeches during this period about which he did not consult him in advance; and, second, his role in the Senate.
"It has been the greatest honour that has been done to me to have been elected to a house of the Irish parliament," he told his fellow senators when he first addressed them on 11 November 1969 and he frequently expressed his gratiitude to Garret FitzGerald for being the only person ever to have asked him to enter politics on his own account.
His contribution to the Senate was remarkable in terms of its impact upon legislation, especially in the financial and legal areas where he was professionally expert. He took great pains with his Senate speeches, writing and re-writing them, although he never lost his inhibitions about public speaking. Some of his speeches, in the opinion of a senator who was not of his political persuasion, "stood out for their' meticulous attention to the most intricate pieces oflegislaation. If any man justified the existence of the Senate it was Alexis."
The Senate debates revealed how often Fianna Fail ministers reacted sympathetically to his amendments which sought to perfect, and not to thwart, their legislative purrpose. He won the particular respect of civil servants who would sometimes approach him for advice and with whom he would discuss at length, sometimes on the telephone, thornier details of legislation. One Secretary of a governnment department commented that "you could always tell that Alexis was speaking in the Senate because the civil servants took out their notebooks." Finance Bills, in partiicular, were food and drink to him. He would apply himself to the task of shutting off what loopholes he could detect Later, when they were law, he would examine them again and again in his capacity as a solicitor seeking to uncover still more arcane loopholes which might be to the benefit of his clients.
Oilier speeches, however, especially in his first Senate term, were remarkable for their philosophical content. His' speech on the Censorship of Films Amendment Bill of 1970 was a disquisition on the relationship between art and morality which ranged from Plato and Aristotle to Epicurus and Cicero, to St Paul, St Augustine and St Thomas to Bossuet, Rousseau and Voltaire, to Shakespeare and Yeats, to Goethe and Freud, to Dewey and Alfred North Whiteehead, to Lord Acton (always a particular favourite), Oscar Wilde and Jacques Maritain.
But he more commonly addressed the larger questions of political philosophy such as the nature of liberty and social justice, the morality of politics and the institutions of the state. He led the attack in the Senate, for example, on the Fianna Fail government motion establishing a trio bunal of enquiry into RTE's 7 Days programme on unnlicensed money-lending when he questioned "the validity, the propriety, the wisdom or even the constitutionality" of the proposal and when he attacked the government's "fear of criticism" as "a source of fatal mischief."
Another early speech attacked "the social injustice of inflation" and urged "the necessity for economic manageement" and "a commitment to a policy of social justice of a peculiarly definite kind." He shared that strong streak of anti-materialism characteristic of the Irish Catholic proofessional class which he sometimes expressed in the folksiest of language - one old friend observed that, not withstandding his long years of residence in the heartland of Dublin 4, there always remained about him something of the shrewd countryman.
"Looking back to the earlier years of my life I think that society here was happier when we were not overrall as well off The moment we all got mad was when. we were standing in the bus queues and ministers passed in their state cars and shortly afterwards there were a few people who had been watching carefully the different ways of putting money into their pocckets without paying the proper taxes on it and they began to spend it. "
Although Alexis FitzGerald was no enemy of the properrtied class and, indeed, he once felt it necessary in 1975 to remind the coalition government that it was important in framing economic policy that "the timidity of capitalism be recognised because whether we like it or not we are part of the capitalist system," he also shared the profound disstaste of many successful professional men for the nouveau riche. "It is not bad to have a lot of money," he told the Senate, "but to spend it conspicuously or selfishly is bad." "A private swimming pool," he insisted, "should be well and truly taxed." Yet he himself was insulated from the way of life of the poor and he reacted with emotion and with horror when he encountered squalor and deprivation while canvassing in the Dublin South West by-election of 1969.
But if Alexis FitzGerald nevertheless described himself as belonging to "the extreme left wing" of his party on social issues, he placed himself unambiguously on the right in regard to law and order: "nobody would get any support from me for any measure which threatened the security of the state because the security of the state is the protection of our weakest citizens." Always imbued with the pessiimism of the conservative, the eruption of the Northern Ireland cataclysm followed by the Arms Trial induced in him a mood of black despair. His greatest anxiety was the threat posed to the institutions of the state.
"I object less to the conduct of the IRA," he had writtten in 1958, "than Ido to the moral cowardice of those who fail openly to condemn it." He now put that dictum into practice in the Senate. "If we who are in public life do not express ourselves with absolute truthfulness and with absolute fidelity to the state," he warned in 1971, "then the state is in a situation of danger greater than it has been since it was founded." He welcomed all measures designed to strengthen the security forces and repeatedly put on record his readiness to "accept internment absolutely as an extreme measure that the state is fully entitled to employ" if the threat to its survival were sufficiently grave. "I see no theoretical reason whatsoever why this state should not intern all armed conspirators," he declared in 1975. "The only reason why the state should hesitate in doing so is if it could not do it effectively and would not retain the consensus of the support of public opinion."
His conservatism also emerged when issues of sexual morality were discussed, particularly in the debate on the 1973 Family Planning Bill, when he angrily disputed John Horgan's allegation that opponents of unrestricted family planning were motivated by no more than the sexual jealousy of the old for the young. He insisted that "there is value in the state maintaining what is the old Christian common law against fornication in so far as it is prudent for it to do so," although he also quoted Lord Chesterrfield's more worldly axiom on the subject: "the pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous and the expense damnable." But he refused to accept the liberal proposition "that the law cannot be used to enforce standards of public morality."
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Special Adviser To The Government
THE mid-seventies had been a bad time for Alexis FitzGerald. Politically, his role in the party was less important when Fine Gael were in government from 1973-1977 as he never had the kind of access to Cosgrave as Taoiseach or to Richie Ryan as Minister for Finance that he had enjoyed with Cosstello and McGilligan. Garret FitzGerald, moreover, had been denied the Finance portfolio and, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, was frequently abroad. Declan Costello, to his father's particular irritation, had not been made a minisster but was relatively isolated as Attorney General. Persoonally, Alexis FitzGerald was caught up in the family tragedy of the illness and death of his first wife, Grace, in 1972 which accentuated his ever-present vulnerability to deppression and insomnia and which for a time thereafter threaatened to overwhelm him when he fell prey to too much alcohol and too many sleeping pills. But his strength of character eventually prevailed with the support of his chilldren and of his subsequent marriage to Barbara Sweetman, whose own first husband had also died in 1972 in the catasstrophic Staines air-crash.
He began to emerge yet again as a figure of consequence within Fine Gael when they returned to opposition in 1977 and when Garret FitzGerald succeeded Liam Cosgrave as party leader, although he played no real part in the party reorganisation which absorbed almost all of the new leader's energies over the next two years.
Although he was a member of the Fine Gael strategy committee which masterminded the 1981 election campaign he attended rarely and he was intensely suspicious of the marketing and PR techniques which the committee used so effectively. The difference was one of style as well as of generation and the very phrase "National Handlers" well summed up all that set them apart from FitzGerald to whose more measured and quasi-philosophical contributions they listened with barely disguised impatience.
But, the election over, it was not the "National Handdlers" but Alexis FitzGerald and another long time political confidant, Jim Dooge, who accompanied Garret FitzGerald to the secret Sandymount talks with Labour Party leader, Michael 0 'Leary. Here the terms of the coalition pact were hammered out and then presented to both parties as a fait accompli.
Alexis FitzGerald was always an ardent supporter of coalition, not merely as a strategy for winning political power but also on ideological grounds. He saw it as a way of getting powerful in terest groups in society, such as trade unions, to assume responsibility for their political actions. The Labour leader found him generally helpful and cooperaative in the negotiations on all issues other than divorce. And he did not object when Garret FitzGerald raised the quesstion of his appointment as Special Adviser as soon as he beecame Taoiseach. That appointment was the first decision agreed by the new cabinet after ministers had received their seals of office and met briefly in Arus an Uachtarain (allthough at least one Fine Gael Minister, John Kelly, demurred) and it was announced by the Taoiseach at the same time as he announced the composition of his government.
Michael O'Leary at first assumed that Garret FitzGerald wanted Alexis to act as Special Adviser to him as Taoiseach and his appointment as Special Adviser to the Government caused a flurry of concern among Labour ministers who feared that what was intended was that he should have an overview of departmental papers over their heads. But this 'misapprehension, in Labour circles still smarting from their effective exclusion from the secret Sandymount talks, was quickly corrected when his terms of reference were clariified.
Alexis FitzGerald sat close to the Taoiseach at the cabiinet table and, conscious that some ministers never fully accepted his presence, did not speak without first seeking agreement that he should do so. When he did speak, he generally endorsed the view of the majority and his contriibutions were designed to ameliorate, rather than to provoke or to compound, controversy.
His more important contributions were made outside the cabinet room when he was sometimes able to play a modest role behind the scenes in smoothing out differences which had arisen at senior official level between Departtments. The delineation of ministerial demarcation lines beetween Michael O'Leary and John Kelly after the creation of the Department of Industry and Energy was a case in point. Another example was his involvement in a review of indusstrial policy undertaken in that Department which aimed to establish a tax-based leasing system to give the banks and other financial institutions credit for investment to lease back to industry and about which he opened discussions with other Departments.
Alexis Fitzflerald believed that his appointment as Special Adviser marked the apogee of his career. He had good cause to do so. The appoin tmen twas, and seems likely to remain, a unique tribute to his extraordinary reputation for wisdom and for good counsel. But circumstances connspired to prevent his making the most of the remarkable role he had been given. He was only weeks short of his sixtyyfifth birthday when he was appointed and much of the resttless energy which had so characterised his contribution to the Costello governments had long since been spent. Indeed some of those closest to him believe he was already an ill man, suffering from the earliest depredations of the cancer which ultimately killed him.
Nor was his effectiveness enhanced by the floodlight of the public stage for which he had no relish but which he could not now avoid. He was irritated and embarrassed by the media publicity and political controversy surrounding his appointment. Indeed it was strangely ironic that someeone who had always disdained the vulgar abuse which was part of the currency of Irish party politics suddenly found himself the object of just such abuse. And he was hurt by the attack which Charlie Haughey launched as Leader of the Opposition in the Dail on 8 July 1981 when he desscribed him as "somebody who is now being imported into the public service by the back door," and his appointment as "a scandalous example of cronyism." Such accusations took their toll notwithstanding the convictions of both Taoiseach and Special Adviser that they were baseless and notwithstanding the vigour with which the Taoiseach defennded his appointment in the Dail.
In fact the unorthodoxy of the appointment was a byyproduct of Garret FitzGerald's highly unorthodox percepption of the party which he led. Although Garret FitzGerald and John A. Costello were never close and had little else in common - even today the Taoiseach habitually refers to his predecessor as "Mr Costello" - both were curiously insulated from the mainstream of their party's internal politics. Indeed their middle years were largely devoted to professional careers outside politics - the Bar in Costello's case; his career as an economist in Aer Lingus, as a lecturer in UCD and as a journalist in FitzGerald's.
Scornful of those whom he despised as party hacks and uneasy in the company of those on the right of the party whose star was in the ascendant during Liam Cosgrave's government, Garret FitzGerald sought the comfort and support in the cabinet room of some with whom he was both socially and intellectually at ease. Hence his appointment not only of Alexis FitzGerald but also of Senator Jim Dooge as Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Once exposed to the extraordinary pressures of the Taoiseach's office, however, Garret FitzGerald quickly formed intimate working relationships with departmental officials, some of whom had already won his confidence when he had been Minister for Foreign Affairs and whom he had seconded from that department. So it was that, although Alexis FitzGerald was given a room just down the corridor from the Taoiseach's, he had to compete with others for the Taoiseach's ear and he rarely enjoyed quite the kind of unrestricted access he might have anticipated. Indeed he was occasionally heard to complain that he could get no time with the Taoiseach. It happened at least once that a paper which he prepared on the assumption that it would be circulated to the cabinet never got beyond the Taoiseach's desk.
The frenetic tempo of Garret FitzGerald's first governnment, moreover, hamstrung by the precariousness of its Dail majority which made for a hand-to-mouth existence, was singularly ill-suited to Alexis FitzGerald's reflective temperament and philosophical disposition. Crisis manageement was the order of the day and others in the Taoiseach's Department felt that the very fertility of Alexis FitzGerald's mind and the breadth of his interests made it difficult for him quickly to focus on a single issue. Worse still, from Alexis FitzGerald's perspective, was the fact that he was quite out of sympathy with the Taoiseach and with the prevailing departmental mood on the single issue which so dominated the short life of that government: the hungerrstrikes in Northern Ireland.
Mention has already been made of the deep depression which the eruption of the Northern Ireland crisis induced in Alexis FitzGerald and he was present with Tom O'Higggins and Michael Sweetman on the historic occasion when Garret FitzGerald first met John Hume in Ivan Cooper's house in Derry in December 1969. His own instincts, howwever, led him to distrust Garret FitzGerald's self-confessed loyalty to Northern Ireland, as distinct from his loyalty to this state, and he tended to warn him against too obsessive an involvement in Northern Irish affairs. Such advice fell on deaf ears at the height of the hunger-strikes and led to some loss of intimacy with the Taoiseach.
Indeed one of Alexis FitzGerald's oldest friends, who is also one of the most discreet and evasive of witnesses, unequivocally asserted that "he had absolutely no interest in the North - none. He felt it would be much better forrgotten than taken seriously." It was one of the few issues on which he was closer to Liam Cosgrave than to Garret FitzGerald.
But this negative attitude towards Northern Ireland must be set in the context of his positive and intense committment to the institutions of this state and his fears for their survival; and we have already seen how strongly he spoke upon this subject in the Senate in the early seventies. Allthough he welcomed the proposed deletion from the Connstitution of the article giving a special place to the Catholic church on the grounds that it showed a "lack of generosity one never expects to find in a legal document" and had given Ireland "a bad name", he explicitly repudiated "the view that the chief obstacle to the unity ofIrishmen in this country is the influence of the Catholic church." But he innsisted that "the main objective of public policy here must be, not unity, but peace." He was not among those who reejoiced in the collapse of the Northern Ireland government in 1972. "We have been overpleased with the destruction of Stormont," he warned and, in a classically conservative statement, he argued that:
"The objective of destruction is not a good one and we have not fully savoured all the consequences of the fall of Stormont. If loyalties of passionate men are set footloose it raises questions as to where they are going to be fastened. "
He returned to the theme of Irish unity ill a Senate speech in July 1974 when he predicted that "the unity of Ireland is a unity which will. be achieved no more successsfully than unity within a nation is ever achieved." What sets such speeches apart is their historical sense of pride in the achievements of Irish nationalism in the twentieth century: "the very success of our winning, establishing, maintaining and developing successfully Irish indepenndence." That success, he insisted:
"Was due to patience, constant acceptance of commpromise, constant recognition of the daily realities we had in the building up of independence .... There is nothing inevitable about these matters. There are ruins of states in Eastern Europe which conducted their affairs on the basis that their histone claims were due for realisation and would be certainly reaalised. "
It was sentiments such as these which also set him apart from party colleagues in his readiness to pay generous triibute to Eamon de Valera in an essay published in Studies on the occasion of de Valera's death and in another essay published in The Irish Times on the centenary of his birth in 1982 where he wrote that "de Valera's major achieveement was in rendering legitimate the institutions of the State and creating that broad consensus of support which gives them the strength they have." He appreciated, too, de Valera's "practical political skill" as well as "the reality of his religious commitment." And it is in this essay also that we find the crystalisation of a political philosophy which must have sat uneasily with the desperate dayday concerns of a government striving to settle the hungerrstrike.
He deplored the excesses of nationalist ideology and innsisted that "nations have no more (they may have less) divine rights than kings whose rights have long since been abandoned as insupportable." In politics, he argued, "there are problems which are as insoluble as the incurable conncerns which afflict the physical body."
Such pessimism contrasts starkly with the optimism which characterises Garret FitzGerald's approach to the political process and is another reason why he did not reenew Alexis FitzGerald's appointment as Special Adviser when he formed his second government. Neither man regarrded the experiment as a success and some of those who were closest to Alexis are convinced that, although he would have liked to have been invited to serve again, he would have declined.
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Last Years
ALEXIS FitzGerald had still been senior partner in McCann, FitzGerald, Sutton, Dudley in July 1981 when he was appointed Special Adviser to the Government. He then immediately severed 'all connections with the firm, which was a very considerable financial sacrifice, in order to avoid any possible connflict of interest. He returned to the firm as chairman after the government fell early in 1982 but he did not reoccupy the pre-eminent position he had filled for the previous thirty years. His responsibilities were largely administrative and he did less and less work directly for clients, but he would make exceptions in the case of personal friends. Although his health began to fail visibly shortly thereafter his intellectual curiosity was unimpaired.
He had a particular intellectual passion, which began some time in the early seventies, for theology and for bibblical studies and he often spoke to friends about "how wonderful it was to discover a new intellectual influence in one's fifties."
He read as voraciously as ever and one eminent authority reflected that the wealth of glosses and annotations scribbled in his personal copy of the bible would have done credit to a professional scholar. He became specially enamoured of the massive and scholarly six-volume work on The Glory of God by the German theologian Hans Drs Von Balthasar and he may well have been the first person in Ireland to read the two volumes (of some 800 pages each) which have been translated into English.
One of the last times he appeared in public was when he went to hear Hans Kung when he sat in, what were for him, conditions of acute discomfort for over three hours. But his air of self-mockery was as evident in regard to theology as in other things and he shrank from taking it too seriously or from having others take him too seriously. His was essenntially a simple faith and he was never a pious man who sought to impose his theological interests on those who did not share them .
His interest in theology was very much part of his more general intellectual and political interests. He became very in terested in Wittgenstein near the very end of his life as he was attracted by Wittgenstein's view that religious belief could exist independently of philosophy.
The importance of the church, in his view, was as a conntinuing community which provided a service for people's relationship with God and with each other rather than as an end in itself. He had a strong sense of weakness, perhaps even of evil, and his profession as a solicitor left him few illusions about human frailty. But neither his bouts of depression nor his belief in the virtue of Christian sceptiicism undermined his sense of hope about humanity.
Yet his pessimism led him to recognise the possibility that the Christian position might become a minority posiition. He was fond of paraphrasing Cyril Connolly's aphorism - "it is closing time in the Gardens of the West" - and in his 1980 interview with Andy O'Mahony he spoke of the need to avoid the "anarchic consequences of a collapse of authority". But, for him, authority must be founded on respect and he worried about the failure of the Catholic church in Ireland to offer "the excitement of a challenge". He admired intelligence in bishops as in statesmen and he despaired at the contemporary decline in the intellectual calibre of Irish church leaders.
"Courage in bearing a decline in natural powers is ... the ally and the servant of noble living," wrote Alexis FitzGerald in his obituary essay on de Valera, and he commended him as an example of the Platonic text "that what life is about is learning how to die." Alexis FitzzGerald had learnt that lesson well and, even at the end, he never lost what his own obituary in The Times described as his "quizzical, almost impish sense of humour and great personal charm." Indeed those who were closest to him were amazed at the extraordinary demands he would make upon his fading reserves to make his visitors relax and to put at ease, above all, those who were uncomfortable in the presence of the dying.
In an autobiographical fragment written in 1975 or 1976 in which he referred to himself as having constantly expeccted death for many years, Alexis FitzGerald wrote that if he died then:
"History would record that without a penny in his pocket by hard work (a) he became the youngest university lecturer at that time appointed and for twenty years so continued, although only part-time, in two entirely different subjects and faculties, in one case inaugurating in Dublin the first set of lectures on a new subject; (b) he believes that at least as much as anyone else he saved the Fine Gael party for which he worked for twenty-five years without even formming an ambition of holding any office until elected Senator in 1969 ... ; (c) he built up the biggest firm of solicitors in Ireland with the emphasis on skill and rapid advancement for promising young people. "
He might have added Paddy .Lynch's considered postthumous opinion that "he had more influence on economic policy than any politician or civil servant since the state was founded." But he could not then have been expected to know that the quality of his counsel was yet to achieve, in his appointment as Special Adviser to the Government, recognition of a kind never accorded to anyone before and unlikely to be accorded to anyone again. •