A patriotic intellectual

Although in politics for just 27 years years, Taoiseach for just over five years, Garret FitzGerald has been and remains involved in public affairs in Ireland for over 50 years, as a politician, a columnist and campaigner. He has had a very considerable influence on Irish politics, far more than that attaching to his period as Taoiseach, on Church-State relations, on Northern Ireland, on transport, on our involvement in the European Community, on foreign affairs.
He lives now in a modest terraced house in Ranelagh, Dublin. He has no wealth, other than his income from his pension, his journalism and lecturing. At 80 he still works well over 40 hours a week, which represents for him retirement from the 60 hour week that marked his career until he left politics 14 years ago.
Son of one of the founders of the State, Desmond FitzGerald, who was a minister in the first Cumann na nGaedheal government, he inherited from his father, according to those who recall his father, his mannerisms, his mode of speech, his judgementalism, his patriotism, and, for much of his life, his conservatism. As he says in this interview, it was only after he was passed 40 that he shed those deeply Catholic conservative beliefs and perhaps also his religious beliefs, but he won't speak of that.
It is hard to disentangle him, even now, from his late wife and partner, Joan, who died in 1999. She became part not just of his life and thoughts but of his being. In part of the interview (which we have had to delete for space reasons) he expressed remorse for selfishness in his relations with her during part of their life together – a remorse that everyone who knew them will find entirely misplaced because of his extraordinary and selfless dedication to her welfare at every turn.
In a way he has a similar dedication to what he refers to, at times, portentously, as “the public good”. But it is true he has devoted himself to public discourse and the public welfare here over half a century that nobody now can claim to rival, except perhaps Ken Whitaker. His Irish Times columns, although at times “reader-challenging”, frequently raise issues of major public importance that have been overlooked by almost everyone else – for instance his recent column on the dangers of what is called “restorative justice” in Northern Ireland.
There have been others in politics that have rivaled his intellectual prowess – certainly the likes of Patrick McGilligan, Sean McEntee, Charles Haughey, Conor Cruise O Brien, Declan Costello – nobody has deployed their intellectual energies in the public good as he has done over such a long time.