Joe McArdle:JOE McARDLE, who has died aged 75, was a barrister, judge, legal consultant, and a polymath broadcaster, publisher, writer and translator. His facility in several fields was prodigious.
An inveterate traveller, he worked at various times as a legal adviser to governments in a multitude of countries: Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Romania, Botswana, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Estonia, Montenegro, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Hungary, Macedonia, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Kenya.
Nowhere was he more in his element than in the meeting rooms of trans-Caspian and trans-Caucasian Central Asia, switching roles effortlessly from legal-linguistic expert to parliamentary draughtsman and ingenious and effective cultural mediator.
Joseph Ardle McArdle – the sonority of his name gave great delight – was born in Dublin in 1934, but grew up in Monaghan town. His father was the county surgeon; his mother was a Breen from Tipperary. He studied Politics and Law at UCD and was a prominent debater at the LH.
During his time as records secretary, the minutes were recorded in verse form. While at college he began his lifelong peregrinations, travelling to Paris where he worked for a while at Shakespeare Company, the celebrated bookshop on the Left Bank of the Seine.
After graduation from UCD and King's Inns in the late 1950s, McArdle settled in Kano, the chief town of northern Nigeria, where he taught at the School of Arabic Studies. His first book, How the Law Works(Allen Unwin, 1963), was an introductory textbook for west African students. He spent five years in Nigeria, serving as a magistrate for four of those years.
From 1966 to 1970 McArdle worked in London as a legal officer for the department of health and social security (DHSS). Then the itch to return to Africa prompted him to settle in the city of Kisumu in western Kenya where he was seconded to that country’s ministry of justice. Eventually he went back to London and the DHSS, chairing a number of medical tribunals.
His next port of call was Brussels, where he was one of the first senior officials to join the European Institutions when Ireland joined the EEC in 1973.
Returning to Ireland in 1979, for most of the 1980s McArdle wrote and broadcast energetically. He scripted and presented the television series Secret Languagesin the early years of the decade. His first novel, Closing Time, was published in 1982 by the burgeoning Irish Writers Co-operative. His next book, Sin Embargo(1987), is an ambitious novel of spiritual quest. An unfinished novel, Vive Modigliani, grew out of the writer's African experiences.
In 1987 McArdle started a publishing venture. The imprint Odell Adair, with the support of Poolbeg Press and Philip McDermott (another man of Monaghan) published a number of quietly impressive works of fiction in its relatively short life-span.
McArdle’s astonishing knowledge of languages – he was fluent in Irish, French, Italian and Polish and had a good conversational facility in Spanish, German, Hausa and Kiswahili – enabled him to translate with relative ease, and versions of works in French and Polish found their way into print.
He was generous to a fault, great company and a source of stories. Members of delegations from these far-flung states were welcomed regularly to his home in Monasterevin in the 1990s and in Birr in subsequent years.
He wrote three more books. In Irish Legal Anecdotes(1995) he assembled hundreds of amusing legal yarns. In Dublin: Portrait of a City(1997) his subtle and humorous text complements Peter Zoller's fine photographs. Irish Rogues and Rascals(2007) recounts the nefarious exploits of his chosen rogues gallery, including Myler McGrath, a 16th century villain who was simultaneously Catholic bishop of Down and Connor and Protestant archbishop of Cashel, and, closer to our own day, Ray Burke, Charles Haughey and Liam Lawlor.
McArdle wrote poetry (published in Cyphers), film criticism, and was a diligent and colourful reviewer for Books Ireland for more than 20 years.
Benign, generously obliging to fellow writers, and a friend of unfailingly wise counsel, McArdle was a man of deep faith, as was evident from the tributes at his funeral Mass. His friends will greatly miss his warm companionship and pawky sense of humour.
He is survived by his first wife Ewa, sons Jack and Bob, and his second wife Aideen.
Joseph Ardle McArdle: born September, 29th, 1934; died February 13th, 2010