A portrait of Patrick J. Hillery as President

He's standing there at the top of the steps, waiting. Eyes squinting, staring off into the distance, fingers plucking at the hem of his jacket. The few dozen people in the garden have seen him, are turning, standing, looking, waiting.He stands there. He cannot simply step down into the garden. There are protocols.

Sin a fianna fail ...

No, it's not the National Anthem. It's the Presidential Salute, possibly the ugliest spurt of music ever ejaculated from a tuba. The No. 1 Army Band has brought its instruments all the way here to Trinity College so that the President of Ireland may be properly heralded into the Provost's garden, for the garden party.

Everyone stands still for the Presidential Salute. The geniuses who concocted this special piece of music to be played whenever the President shows up amongst the commoners were cheapskates. Rather than commission a new piece they took the first eight and last eight bars of the National Anthem and superglued them together. The result is a jerky little number with a jump-cut in the middle, like it's coming from a record player that just got a very nasty kick.
 
Dr Patrick J. Hillery's hands are plucking at the hem of his jacket, perhaps in nervousness, perhaps in boredom. The skilled hands that delivered a fair proportion of the population of Milltown Malbay are flexing in time to the beat of a cheapskate fanfare. One more low-rent function to attend. Six and a half years of this. What was that you told the guy from the Irish Times back in 1976?: "At the moment I'm going into a vacuum that's hard to explain..."  

Back in 1976 it become clear that Paddy HIllery was getting the push. His four year term as EEC Commissioner was up in January 1977 and Liarn Cosgrave had the giving of the post. And the word was that Cosgrave wanted his crony Dick Burke in the job, even though there were other members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party who thought that Burke was useless and that the job should go to Justin Keating. One way or the other the job was going to one of our lads - and Paddy was one of them. One way or the other Paddy was for the off.

At the time he was genuinely uncertain about his future. He didn't know what he wanted to do. "But certainly I do know what I don't want - and that's to get back into politics at home." He thought he'd probably run for a seat in the European Parliament when the direct elections were held in a year or two.
 
Then, on Friday October 22, the note arrived from Liam Cosgrave. Shift yourself, Paddy. And Hillery announced from Brussels that his Taoiseach had "appeared to indicate" that Hillery would not be reappointed. Paddy had two months to pack his things and move out.

But there was a second announcement that Friday. Cearbhaill 0 Dalaigh announced his resignation from the Presidency. The previous Monday the coalition Minister for Defence, Paddy Donegan, had made his "thundering disgrace" speech while opening an army cookhouse in Mullingar - condemning 0 Dalaigh for referring the Emergency Powers Bill to the Supreme Court. After four days passed and Cosgrave refused to give Donegan the push,
Dalaigh pulled the pin.

The resignation cleared the confusion about Hillery's future. Within two weeks he would be the sole nominee for the sinecure in the Park, within six weeks he would be installed in the Arus and getting used to that bloody awful musical hiccup. He was 53.

He came down the steps when the awful music stopped and hands came from here and there, touched his elbows, shoulders, sides - gently - and guided him, yes, over this way, I'd like you to meet ...

Paddy Hillery, aged 60, shook hands with John Seigne, president of TCD's Philosophical Society. The Phil took over the organisation of the garden party after the Elizabethan society folded. The gig is that every year a handful of
rigid-jawed students brighten their lives by poncing about the Provost's lawn in old clothes, eating strawberries and drinking champagne. (This year they fell short and settled for a fizzy wine.) It looks and sounds like the Ballymacslob Drama Society taking a shot at a Noel Coward effort. The affair used to have pretensions, but nowadays no one of any substance attends. Except the President of Ireland.

John Seigne looked Paddy dead in the eye and said it was a pleasure to meet him and might he show the President around the garden.
Paddy shook hands with people and everyone smiled.
Big, open, wide-eyed smiles.
"Hello", said Paddy to a woman whose hand he had shaken.
"Pleased to meet you" , she said.
They smiled. Paddy plucked at the hem of his jacket.
They smiled some more. A few seconds passed.
"I hope you're enjoying yourself' , said Paddy. "Aha, yes, aha, hmmmmnnn", she said. She smiled. Paddy smiled.
Paddy shook hands with someone else who was smiling and went through the hello-aha-yes-hmmmn routine a few times more. Two, three dozen times.
The No. 1 Army Band was swinging through MolLy Malone. The garden party, a somewhat tatty affair that couldn't rise to the hire of a band and had been piping in some recorded music, now had one of the most experienced brass bands in the country playing free, gratis.
"Hello."
"Hello, Mr President." Pluck, twitch, pluck. "Eh, nice to see you." "Aha, yes ... "

A mile or two from Milltown Malbay there's a bump in the Clare coastline where a couple of Spanish galleons came a cropper in the sixteenth century. Or so the story goes. The village there is called Spanish Point. Michael Hillery reared his family there. He was the local doctor and when the war of independence came he put his services at the disposal of the Mid-Clare Brigade of the IRA. It's said that the Black and Tans stole his car and Michael took to a motorbike. And when the Tans stole that he took to a horse. He travelled to the wounded and they came to the house in SpanIsh Point. One man died on the floor of the kitchen. Eventually the Tans burned the house down and the family fled to Nenagh.

When the British left, Michael Hillery kept to his doctoring. He had a strong republican record, untainted by the Civil War, and both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in their time sounded him out about standing for the Dail. Michael Hillery remained a village doctor, raising his family in comfortable middle class circumstances and adding to his already fine reputation as a doctor and as a person. His son Paddy, born in 1923, entered medicine and there was a fine practice waiting for him. When he was 28 Fianna Fail got to him.

Clare was Dev's turf and in 1951 Hillery entered the Dail on the Chiefs coat-tails.
There were five French women hanging around under a tree and someone brought them the President of Ireland to shake hands with. Everyone smiled. The Army No. 1 Band had played a couple of tunes and then split. Raindrops were falling.
"Hello", said Paddy.
"Ello", said the French women.
Everyone stood there for a while, smiling. "What part of France are you from?" "Uh?"
Everyone smiled some more. Dom-de-doo-de-doo. "You're missing the riots!" "Aha, hmmmn, uh?"
"The riots, you're missing them." Smile, smile, aha, hmmmn?
"Medical students, law students, wasn't it?" "Uh?"
"Rioting".
"Uh?"
Eventually Paddy - and for some reason he seems reluctant to do this - breaks into fluent French and tells them they're missing the Paris riots and they go aha, yes, aha, hmmmn in French.
If he didn't have the French he wouldn't have been much use mucking around the world from 1969 onwards. Throughout the fifties Paddy Hillery had kept himself busy doctoring in Clare, tending to his constituency, marrying Maeve Finnegan and fathering a son. In 1959 Sean Lemass became Taoiseach, the civil war generation was fading, the young turks like Haughey, Colley, Leniha and Lynch were emerging, there was a conscious drive towards an industrialised, urban society.
Lemass had a high opinion of Hillery's intelligence but had doubts about his stamina. He appointed him Minister for Education. Hillery began the plodding work of refroming the education system to meet the demands of the new society and started the process from which the flamboyant and doomed Donogh O'Malley would later gain great kudos.Teachers found him distant and uncommunicative.
After a short period in Industry and Commerce, where his only significant achievement was the creation of the Department of Labour, he moved on to head the new Department. In the turbulent sixties his job was to insittutionalise the conflict between labour and capital, both newly self-confident. He wasn't terribly popular. A few hours before he was appointed to External Affairs in 1969 the ICTU conference in Bundoran passed a resolution of no confidence in Hillery because of his breach of a promise made three years earlier on trade union legislation.

In External (later Foreign) Affairs he clocked up the mileage. Ostensibly he had some role to play in the northern conflict but in reality the Blaney-Haughey axis was taking care of business there until Jack Lynch had a sudden burst of confidence in April 1970 and precipitated the Arms Crisis. In July of that year Hillery caused a row by doing a ninety-minute toddle around the Falls without clearing it with London. Lynch called it "an initiative for peace", but it was in reality an attempt to undermine the burgeoning Provos by showing that the southern government cared and was on the job.

So far, so what. An unremarkable career.

His rather placid and boring persona was torn back just once - at the 1971 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, where he screeched at the republican wing that they could have Kevin Boland or they could have Fianna Fail but they couldn't have both.

Hillery's main interest was in an orderly progress towards membership of the EEC. Patiently, painstakingly, he hopped from conference to seminar to summit, filing away at the obstacles and sewing things up where possible. More than any other individual he was responsible for Ireland's entry to the EEC. In the process he became enamoured of the European scene. He would later describe his EEC work as "a time of total absorbtion. You came to think of Ireland as the part of the Community you knew best". There was no one else half as qualified for the post of EEC Commissioner.

On 8 January 1973 Hillery went to the Palais de Justice in Luxembourg to be sworn in. Same day, same place, Cearbhaill 0 Dalaigh was sworn in as a member of the European Court.
The rain was getting serious now and John Seigne asked someone for an umbrella and held it above Paddy Hillery's head. The garden party continued, what there was of it. It was still mostly aha-ahem-yes-hmmmnn. Leo Buckley tapped John Seigne on the arm. Sorry, no can do. Thank you but I'll look after that. He took the umbrella from Seigne and stood behind the President, arm aloft, keeping the Presiden tial head dry. That's my job. Leo Buckley is a Colonel in the Irish army. He's got medal-ribbons on his chest and a whole rake of scrambled egg decorations on his uniform. He is the President's aide-de-camp. It's not any old Joe Soap can be trusted to keep the Presidential head dry. A full colonel in the army is employed for that.
Colonel Rory Henderson arrived at the European Commission office in Merrion Square shortly before lunchtime on 9 November 1976, carrying the official notification of Paddy Hillery's election to the Presidency Nominations had closed at noon and returning officer Gerry O'Doherty had received just the one. Colonel Henderson became the new President's aide-de-camp.
On the evening of 0 Dalaigh's resignation, Friday October 22, Paddy Hillery had flown home from Brussels for a routine visit. At the airport he made routine noises when he was asked if he was available for the Presidency. He even said that "a week is a long time in politics". It was that kind of night.

In April 1973 Hillery had been canvassed for the job and he just three months in his new post in Brussels. He said no, even then he was committed to stay away from domestic politics and stick with the more interesting business in Europe. Again in 1974, when Erskine Childers died there were requests that Hillery be an agreed candidate. Nope. He was too young for retirement.

Now, in 1976, the pressure was on. The Coalition were brazening out the Donegan scandal (John Kelly defended Donegan and Liam Cosgrave described the insult to 0 Dalaigh as "excessive verbal exuberance") but they didn't fancy the slap in the face that a Presidential election was likely to bring. Jack Lynch wanted Hillery for the job.

After the weekend at home Hillery flew out having mumbled that he didn't want the job but if he was requested ... great honour ... duty ... the party ....
Usually that kind of language is code for yes, gimme, I want the job. But it appeared that Hillery genuinely didn't want the thing. The Presidency is a non-event. Hillery was in his element in Europe. He had had a liberal streak in the
past, being admiring of Noel Browne and open-minded on contraception, and in Europe he was an admirer of Willy Brandt's social democracy. With the brief of Social Affairs, much of his work involved him with issues which
provided scope for exercising some form of humanity - legislation for the protection of migrant workers, for increasing holidays, for women's equality.

It was that last which had got him into trouble with the Coalition. There was an attempt by the Irish government to derogate from the directive on equal pay. Hillery chose to side with his fellow Commissioners and against the government - as Commissioners are supposed to do in such situations. He drew the wrath of Richie Ryan, who jeeringly referred to "the Fianna Fail Commissioner".

In the corridors of bureaucracy and in the bars and lounges of power there was general agreement that Hillery was right, both technically and in principle. Further, his fellow Commissioners came to his support and there was particular agreement that Richie Ryan was an insulting little corner boy. Hillery, however, had dirtied his bib and there was no doubt that Cosgrave would take his revenge and dump him. So, it would have to be a seat in the European Parliament when the direct elections came around.

This was the scene. To give it up just to go to the Park with the American ambassador and the urang utang ....

Charlie Haughey didn't want Hillery. He wanted a lesser name, someone the Coalition couldn't resist challenging, someone they daren't give a walkover to without severe embarrassment. He knew Fianna Fail could win and he believed they should take the chance to bloody the Coalition's nose. True, keeping Hillery out of the Park would keep him in the reckoning for the Fianna Fail leadership but maybe that wasn't a bad thing. Maybe Hillery would be more of a handicap to George Colley than to Charlie ...

Ray MacSharry and Flor Crowley, Charlie's mates, nominated Joe Brennan. In a vote of the Parliamentary Party on 2 November Hillery won 55-17. Lynch had been on the phone - yes, Hillery agreed, he'd take the job. He'd go back and be the fairy on top of the Christmas tree.
Every plane seemed to bring another heavy from the tits-n-bums-n-bingo end of Fleet Street. Foot-in-the-door merchants with visions of that rare and radiant headline: Top Paddy In Love Nest Shock. It was the week the Pope left Ireland. His presence had been what the Catholic church calls an occasion of scandal. For some time previously rumours about Paddy Hillery's personal life had been floating around the incestuous politicomedia cliques. Such rumours are common currency at all times and if all of the rumours about, for instance, Charlie Haughey were true the man would deserve to be pickled and put on display in Clery's window. (There are rumours about that, too.)

The Hillery rumours concerned an impending divorce, an Italian girlfriend, a Spanish boyfriend, a Spanish girlfriend, a baby born clandestinely in Brussels, a baby about to be born quite brazenly in Dublin, and sexual shenanigans on a boat off the Isle of Man. There was no point in trying to verify such rumours as if they were true nothing would be printed and if they were untrue some good pub gossip would be ruined.

Some thought the source of the original rumours was the Haughey wing of Fianna Fail, others thought it was the Gardai. Most likely, the sparks that began it all were the photos that some foreign picture agencies were offering for sale, which showed Hillery in the company of various women - such photos of prominent politicians being not at all rare. It didn't much matter until the Pope came.

The army of journalists following the Pope mingled with the homegrown hacks and gossip was exchanged. The signs were that before the Pope finished sucking his boiled sweet on his departing flight the stories would break in the foreign press. Then, Hibernia was said to be preparing a shocker for the following Thursday.

On the Wednesday Paddy Hillery asked the editors of the three national dailies and the RTE news editor to visit him in the Park. There have been almost as many rumours about that little get together as there were about Hillery in the first place.

The visit, which lasted about an hour, complete with drinks, very informal, was what one participant described as a "look, fellas" meeting. Hillery asked for help. His problem, he said, was that he had no problem. The rumours were untrue, but they were growing, the phone was lepping off the hook with journalists asking impertinent questions.

There were varied reactions. To Tim Pat Coogan of the Irish Press what you had here was a nice guy in a spot of bother and let's see what we can do to help. Douglas Gageby of the Irish Times had somewhat the same view. He didn't usually attend such off-the-record briefings but an invitation from the President was something else. Aidan Pender of the Independent was interested in horticulture. He asked Hillery how the trees and flowers were doing,

Hillery invited him to come back up some time and have a look at them. Pender claimed later to have been unaware of any rumours before he went to the Arus that day. However, the Independent hacks had been rooting around the maternity hospitals along with the best of them.

Coogan suggested that Hillery issue a statement to clear the air - get the political correspondents up to the Park, tell them your story. Hillery would have preferred to confine things to the editors and he jibbed at explicitly denying a relationship with a woman - he preferred to confine the statement to a blanket denial of unspecified rumours.
He was persuaded that this would merely fan the rumours.

The political correspondents arrived a couple of hours later and Hillery made a statement. The pol corrs were somewhat taken aback. Hillery told them he wasn't involved with any "other woman". They nodded. Someone asked why he was coming out with this, why not just keep his mouth shut. He expressed fears about the reaction to the expected story in Hibernia the following day. He also said that he had been advised by Jack Lynch's government to clear the air, make a denial.

The stories produced by the pol corrs were cautious, bland and incomplete. Taken aback by the semmingly unnecessary revelation that there was nothing to reveal, and some of them feeling that the buck had been passed to them by their editors, the journalists wrote the kind of story that Hillery had earlier proposed to the editors one which didn't mention any woman and merely denied unspecified rumours. It appears that Coogan and Gageby discussed the story on the phone that night and agreed that their papers' stories should contain explicit denials of a relationship with "another woman". This was added to the pol corrs' stories.

By then it hardly mattered. RTE's Sean Duignan had left the Park early and dashed across town for the Nine O'Clock News. He sat in front of the camera and said that the President had just told him that he was not involved with another woman. The collective whaaatt!???!!! that echoed around the nation that night indicated the gap between the nudge-nudge wink-wink politico-media circles and the general public, to whom this was a shock.

What rumours???!!?

Hibernia appeared next day with a rather soft story. The rumour that they had been about to publish revelations of impending divorce seems to have been a nice piece of promotion. The Hibernia reporters knew the same rumours as everyone else and had tried to track them down, with no luck. When the paper got in touch with Arus an Uachtarain that Wednesday and asked for a comment, Hillery panicked and called in the national editors. If he'd kept his cool Hibernia's maybe-there's-a-story story would have come and gone without a fraction of the fuss.

The rumours persist. As does the failure to substantiate them. Paddy and Maeve Hillery live the lives of two mature and independent adults, not living in each other's ear but not heading for a divorce court, either. There was no public outcry. The Irish people don't seem half as interested in regulating the sex lives of its politicians as the politicians are in regulating ours.

First there was an Italian madrigal. Then there was another Italian madrigal. Then a French madrigal. And so on. Paddy Hillery was perched on the lawn in the TCD's Provost's garden, pretending to listen to four singers. After the first madrigal he applauded. After the second he kept his hands clasped and then - suddenly, remembering his duty - he held his left hand out and hit it once with his right hand. Clap.

As the singing continued he rubbed his fingers together, steepled them, clasped them, intertwined them, put them behind his back and used them to pluck the hem of his jacket.

It began raining again and it was time for Paddy Hillery to go back indoors to the Provost's house. The highly-paid President and his highly-paid umbrella carrier left the garden party.
Paddy Hillery is on £41,027 a year.
Plus £15,000 expenses.
He gets a free house. Free travel, in style. A personal secretary, a guy to carry his umbrella, a driver, free post, free trips abroad and other odds and sods that this year will cost about £159,000.
He gets a pension from his time as EEC Commissioner.
This works out at around £11,000. He gets a pension of £6,995 for his service as a minister. He gets another pension for his service as a TD, and that's £7,246 a year. That's a grand total of £66,268 a year. £1,274 and small change per week.
All found.
Lahinch golf course is a few miles up the road from Spanish Point. Paddy Hillery was made Captain in 1963.Three months after he went to the Park Hillery went back to his home village with the press in tow. He played a few shots on the links at Lahinch. Someone.told him he was looking well. "It's the clean living.", he said.

A month later he was back to Lahinch, without the press, without the security people. He didn't want to be seen. He went to Lahinch and played a 3 over par 75. He said that people sometimes misunderstand about golf. "If they see you photographed with a club they think you do nothing all day except play golf."
 
Two months later he played in the pro-am Kerrygold International with Tony Jacklin. Had a lousy game. Out of bounds, then hit the wrong ball in the rough. His handicap then, in June 1977, was 8. Back in the early sixties it had been six. With all the bother he had getting Ireland into the EEC, not to mention the war in the North, his handicap went up to 10 by the beginning of the seventies.

By August 1977 he'd improved enough to shoot a 2 under par 69 in the Lahinch Open, coming second best before he had to pull out and do a gig at the RDS with the Aga Khan show. He was so good that they cut his handicap to 7.

There's a discrepancy after this. In August 1980 he won the Golflinks Hotel Cup with a 4 under par 68. He'd tied for this a few years before but lost the play-off. Problem was - his handicap in August 1980 was again 8 and when he won it was cut to 7 - for the second time. Either it went back up from 7 to 8 between 1977 and 1980 or what we have here is the basis for yet another rumour.

One way or the other, with a handicap of 7 the President of Ireland has the lowest handicap of any European head of state. So the past six and a half years haven't been entirely wasted.

The job involves elobarote rituals every now and then when Ambassadors "present their credentials". Such rituals are a hangover from the days when Ambassadors travelled by ship and coach and donkey, up mountains and down valleys for several months to get to their destinations and when they did there was a feeling that they should have a big ceremony and generally make a day of it.

The job also involves heading off, as Hillery has done since 1977, to West Germany, Rome, Luxembourg, Tanzania, Athens (24 hours), Beirut (75 minutes), Bahrain, Yugoslavia, and India (two weeks). There you get made a fuss of.

There are Tidy Towns competitions, garden parties and the like.

There are supposedly serious bits, like dissolving the government, appointing ministers, signing legislation - but If you act with any more intelligence than a rubber stamp you get a kick in the Arus. ( 0 Dalaigh had the moral victory - Cosgrave and Donegan got their legislation through and got rid of 0 Dalaigh.)

The last time Paddy Hillery was elected to anything was 1969 - and then there was a drastic fall in his Dail vote, from 71 % of the Fianna Fail first preferences to 39%. The last time a President was elected was 1973.

The first President, Douglas Hyde, was useful because he was a Protestant and his election (unopposed) showed that the South was not sectarian. In things that didn't matter. Like the Presidency.

Sean T. O'Kelly looked nice in a top hat. De Valera was great at impressing Americans and was something of a tourist attraction. Childers campaigned against the rounds system. 0 Dalaigh provoked an interesting row with the Coalition. Hillery has got his golf handicap back in shape.