Tragedy and History in Death

TWO deaths have touched me to the core in recent days. One was the death near enough in his time and season of 84-year-old Paddy Hillery, the former president of Ireland.

The other was the death of Ryan Haran of Ennistymon, a relation through my first marriage. He was just over 20 and he was buried this morning.

Both men were born and reared within 20 twisty miles of each other in West Clare. Both died within the one 24 hours.

One died at the end of a long and honorable political and diplomatic road which brought him into the company of no less than five popes, the kings and emperors of Europe and the world.

The other died on twisty Station Road outside the seaside resort of Lahinch on the coast. Ryan Haran was part of our now appallingly high routine weekend road kill. I think I dandled him on my knee once when he was an infant and told his mother he was the living image of her.

In his deathbed at home on Sunday evening, before they brought him to the chapel for the later Requiem Mass and burial, the lad who had been an excellent athlete and soccer player throughout his short life looked nearer 14 years than 22 or 23. His father and uncles are slight and wiry men. So was he.

In his deathbed, his face marked by the collision that killed him, the shape was as slight as that of a child. The first cherry blossoms of the summer he will never see were blossoming in the woods around his home.

It is always sadder when the face of the corpse looks as young as that.

He was dark-haired. So too was the long hair around the face of the lithe and pretty Irish dancer I saw the late Dr. Paddy Hillery touch gently with his forefinger about five years ago.

It was framed among the photographs on the wall of his cozy apartment in Sutton in Dublin. I was there with my son Dara to do a radio interview with him about the events of his distinguished life as a politician, as a minister, as the first Irish commissioner to the new EC in Brussels, as our president for two terms totaling 14 years.

He was a lovely man. You would expect that a former president of your country would be to some degree aloof and difficult to link with. There was none of that.

He fussed around the little kitchen of the apartment where he lived with his wife Maeve as he made coffee for Dara and myself. Dara was there to do the actual recording of the interview - he was then about Ryan Haran's age - and Hillery linked as easily with him as with his father.

Maeve was shopping, we were alone, just the three of us, and the atmosphere was as lazy and aisy as it would be in a public house in his native Miltownmalbay on a summer morning.

He gently established a few ground rules around the interview. The only one that mattered was that he would not speak in any detail about a famous (infamous?) period in Irish politics when his former Fianna Fail friends led by Charlie Haughey tried to influence him in relation to the dissolution of a Fine Gael-led government headed by Garret FitzGerald.

He never talked about the detail of that pressure to anybody, though time has revealed that he preserved the integrity and standing of the presidency by refusing to bow to the pressure.

They are saying in the aftermath of his death that history will also define Paddy Hillery as one of our great presidents. That may well prove to be the case.

He reluctantly accepted the office after his predecessor O'Dalaigh resigned suddenly after being insulted by a Fine Gael minister. He told me in the interview that Jack Lynch, then taoiseach (prime minister), had to almost coerce him to come back from Brussels to accept what at that time was a dented chalice.

He also said that he reflected the hurt done to the highest office in the land by scarcely attending any public functions for the first six months he was president. In the years afterwards, though, he must have visited about every parish in Ireland. And most of the world's capitals.

They are also saying these days that the budget he had to operate upon was much smaller than that subsequently available to his successor Mary Robinson. And that much of his public work was done quietly, without the extensive PR which all his successors deploy around their work.

And it has also been discovered that this honorable man waived part of his political pensions (generous in Ireland) during the 14 years he spent as president. That, now, was a singular act.

You were talking to a historical figure when talking to him. He talked lightly about matters such as the numbers of his former constituents that he had delivered when working as a GP before being handpicked by de Valera's aides to be the chief's running mate.

And he talked about the way in which he had been little more than Dev's office boy in their shared Clare constituency in his earlier years. There were, though, occasional advices and praises from Dev as he began to develop into a formidable politician.

He was proud of his achievements when he was minister for education, laying down the framework for free second-level education and urging the government to invest heavily in education.

And I can remember him saying, when I asked about Haughey, that he believed history would be kinder to Charlie than seemed apparent at that time.

In a light way, with wry inserts and insights, we covered a lot of ground in that interview in the sunlit Sutton apartment.

It was one of the very few he gave in his retirement. He did it, he said, because it was going to be broadcast to the people of his beloved Clare.

It took place shortly before Christmas of that year, and he closed it by sending the warmest of Christmas greetings to all the people of the county. I enjoyed every minute of it, and I would like to think he did too.

And afterwards, when Dara was packing away the equipment, he showed me around all the photographs of his years in office, framed on the warm walls. And his finger passed over the images of kings and popes and emperors and queens, all the jewels and sables and style, and rested on the image of the little Irish dancer doing her hornpipe for some distinguished royal visitors to Dublin Castle.

And that dancer, he said, was his daughter that Maeve and himself

lost years earlier to illness. (I think it was meningitis). And that was the time that his voice broke and there were tears in his eyes.

Last week he was laid to rest beside his little dancer in the Sutton Cemetery. And they will be singing his praises for a long, long time to come.