A letter from Mayo

Dear Charles,

That picture of you on the island that The Irish Times dug out last week revived some powerful memories. That's just where I sat, on a rock above the bracken, looking out to Inis Tiaracht across the tip of Inis na Bro, to start the One Decent Painting I was going to bring back from Inishvickillane: a tempera, if you don't mind, including all the birds - puffins, guillemots, petrels and whatever.

It didn't get very far, even in three weeks of solitude. After 32 years, it still reproaches me from a bottom drawer, still brings back some of the sounds of the birds and the pulse of the ocean; the tent flapping. Oh lord, my youth!

There are other, journalistic, memories from around that time, the mid-1960s. John Healy taking me aside to say you were looking for a full-time speechwriter, paid from your own pocket, and would I be interested? You were in Agriculture, then, which sounded far too dull, but I have wondered from time to time where that might have led.

And then, during one of the early paroxysms of newspaper interest in your wealth, I said brashly to my editor: "Give me an accountant and a solicitor for six months!" - but he, shrewdly enough, thought The Irish Times should save its money.

When you bought "my" island I felt very sore for a long time, and even though you have been so generous as to urge me to visit, helicopter-trip and all, I cannot bring myself to do it. Nothing to do with - you know, all the other stuff - but one should leave certain bits of soul-shaping carefully un-revised. The island I knew may not have had red deer or sea eagles, just sheep and rabbits, but it was wild in a way that no place with a house and easy chairs and a wine cellar could ever be. It was my first total exposure to nature, the one that really connected.

The last time I wrote to you in this way was 10 years ago, when you had just got back into power as Taoiseach. "What are you going to do about nature?" I coaxed. "You're the only Fianna Fail politician who ever impressed me as caring a damn about landscape or wildlife. And you've no idea how many people - not just among the Greens, but the professionals - biologists, ecologists and so on - are cherishing hopes of your, so to speak, secret self."

"You once decided," I went on, "that we needed more writers and artists and you made one small change in the tax code, launching a virtual renaissance overnight. It wasn't so much the money that did the trick, but the official imprimatur for creativity. The arts became respectable occupations, not just pastimes for layabouts and boozers. What nature needs today is the same sort of nod from the throne."

The "secret self" bit might be a bit unfortunate in present circumstances but the rest of it holds up. Younger people today, surrounded by writers and painters, small-town galleries, Temple Bar, and so on, can have no conception of the transformation that can be traced, quite substantially, to your own aspirations to "culture", to the style of an Andre Malraux. It was, no doubt, outrageous to spend - £17 million, was it? - on creating the new Government Buildings but who can doubt, seeing it all lit up behind Charlie Bird, or looking at the Irish craftsmanship inside, that this was one piece of quality we needed?

And who else in your party - in any party - would have been simply interested enough to give the boost to Irish archaeology that you did - this without much public fuss at all? The Discovery Programme, launched and funded on your personal say-so, was the best thing to happen in archaeology since the Harvard visitation of the 1930s: the work is still rolling in. And without you to say "do it!" to the OPW, that fantastic Stone Age marvel, the Ceide Fields, would still be waiting for its pyramid.

I saw a video of you speaking - no notes - in the local hotel on that occasion, promising £1.3 million from EU Structural Funds (dread sum!). You were obviously fascinated with Ceide's "illumination of antiquity", really turned on by the idea of 5,000 years of Irish settlement. "We don't have to stand in awe, looking at the pyramids, the Roman Forum or the Parthenon in Athens, or any of these things." If that was really Anthony Cronin, you had it off by heart.

And then the EU presidency, the greenest Taoiseach of them all, your own environmental adviser down the corridor. You had the Green 2000 group, with people like Emer Colleran and Palmer Newbould to gee up the civil servants: two years to review "key issues facing the natural environment". Great report, nearly 400 pages, but the desk it thumped on to, finally, had Albert sitting behind it; pity about that.

All this, I just thought somebody should say, belongs in the Haughey balance sheet. For once, we had a political leader with open aspirations to culture, some sense of what composed it and what its national value could be. So you had some dreadful pretensions and hung on to too many bad portraits of yourself; we can all find some personal echo of that.

What I regret, apart from the obvious, civic, things, is that your fall gives a hostage to the party philistines. I fear we are now in for another spell of macho mercantilism, a plodding populism quite devoid of grace. You may have dwelt too far inside your own imagination, but at least you had some.

I think, if I were you, I'd want to feck off to the island for a long while. Perhaps the sea eagle will turn up to share a crag with you - hunched up, minus a few feathers. It's that time of year.

Regards anyway, M.