Over recent years, while being dragged screaming into the seemingly featureless plains of undesired middle age, Patsy McGarry often lamented the lack of heroes in his life.
Then, at a private function in the week before Christmas, I met, unexpectedly, an 86-year-old man in whose presence I felt as incoherent as my six-year-old self had been when first introduced to Santa. I encountered for the first time Dr Ken Whitaker, the economic architect of my life.
Eventually, relaxed by good company and wine, I offered, in that skewed way of the ever-distancing Irishman: "You were a great hero of my father." He was. But what I really wanted to say was that he is a great hero of mine. He has been since I became aware of his role as a driving force behind the First Programme for Economic Expansion introduced by Seán Lemass in 1957.
It revolutionised my life and that of my family and neighbours. It precipitated our move to Ballaghaderreen on December 7th, 1962 - 40 years ago. Almost 40 years to the day since the Treaty was signed.
On that wet day in 1962 we traversed the greatest journey of our lives, albeit just seven miles north-west through the Roscommon countryside. We moved from a world unchanged in the main since medieval times to the early decades of the 20th century at least.
Even the day of the week chosen for our journey betrayed the pre-Christian origins of the world we were leaving behind in the townland of Mullen, with its brown rushes and brown bushes beckoning to the bog. It was a Friday, and it was believed lucky to move house on a Friday.
My family had lived in Mullen since before folk memory. Shortly after the Famine, my great-grandfather built the house near the crossroads in which I grew up. It was a thatched, whitewashed, three-roomed - one subdivided - traditional country cottage with no electricity, no running water, no bathroom.
It had a big open fire where my mother did all the cooking and baking and boiled all the water necessary to wash and to bathe a family of [at that time\] six children in a house also occupied by my father and grandfather. She drew water from two separate wells: one for drinking, the other for washing.
It was hardly a surprise then that we were swept up by the Whitaker/Lemass programme with its promise of a better life and freedoms undreamt of. Our bounded little world was opened up. Old protectionisms in trade and values were swept away. A wind blew through the soul of old Ireland, ventilating places previously undisturbed. Like Mullen.
We became part of the flight away from de Valera's rural idyll with its handsome youths and comely maidens dancing at the crossroads. They never danced for us. All that ever gathered at our crossroads were small children, young mothers, and old people for the bonfire on St John's Eve, June 23rd, every year. My father adored de Valera, the air he breathed, the water he walked on. But with a young family whose needs grew daily, even he had to abandon that ideal.
And still I remember them, those we left behind. Those people black from poverty who lived rough lives in often derelict houses with collapsing thatch - places as dark as the cabins inhabited by our ancestors not so long before in those same lonely off-beat spots where the only abundance was sky.
I would see them every Sunday through my childish fears as they came from Mass, or staggered past our house on Fridays under the influence of a few bottles of stout after collecting their pensions. I remembered how everyone in Mullen stopped drinking from the well when word spread that old Kate Callaghan had fallen in going home with her pension to that smoky house in the bog.
As the 60s advanced, new houses for such as Kate were built by the State, although she had passed on. And electricity and running water arrived in Mullen, too.
In Ballaghaderreen, we were already four or five light years away. By then, too, there was a growing national consensus that as a people we had lost the run of ourselves. We had succumbed to "material values".We had lost our "soul".
Women were going to pubs. Girls wore shameless mini-skirts. Young men couldn't be stopped from beating the living daylights out of one another outside dancehalls.
And then there was The Late Late Show. We had gone to the dogs. Brian Lenihan, our local TD, described these manifestations as "the problems of affluence".
In 1967, free education was introduced by Donogh O'Malley, and not only was going to secondary school soon the norm, but going to university became part of the expectation even among my own peers.
I was the first member of my family in all our generations to go from secondary school to university, and I didn't lose my soul. On the contrary, it was the richest experience of my life. Previously in our family only my uncle had ever received a secondary education. And he cycled a round-trip of 14 miles a day for five years to do so.
So forgive me, Dr Whitaker, for fumbling my sentiments when we met on December 18th. I wasn't prepared. But, really, I just don't know how to thank you.