If Donal Foley was still alive he would be celebrating his 81st birthday this month. But of course the flame of Donal's life burned much too brightly for him ever to become an old man, and instead we realise, with some surprise, that it is 22 years since his death in 1981 at the age of 59.
Born in the Ring Gaeltacht in County Waterford in 1922, he was brought up in the poor, dockside village of Ferrybank, on the north side of the river Suir in Waterford during the Depression. He began his education there in a small national school where many of his fellow pupils had no shoes.
On leaving secondary school he found work as a postman, a flour mill labourer, a railwayman and a clerk (what he later referred to as "real jobs"), before fleeing in desperation to London where he would "commit the larceny of breaking into journalism".
Having started his working career there in the "Dickensian" conditions of a British Railways office, Donal continually submitted articles to the Irish Press, which finally employed him as a "casual daily". At last he could enjoy "the smelly world of printer's ink, deadlines, stories, scoops and speed with words".
In the 1950s he joined The Irish Times and became "the only commoner" in its London office.
Twenty years later Donal had become a legend in Irish journalism, a director and deputy editor of Ireland's leading "serious" newspaper and a satirist and social commentator whose column, Man Bites Dog, was looked forward to eagerly by thousands of readers.
What formula, what fertile environment, produced this inspiring and highly intelligent man, who felt that "as an infant, it seems, the absurdity of Ireland impressed itself on his tiny brain" - as he claimed in Man Bites Dog?
In Donal's autobiography, Three Villages, published in 1977, we find that the brilliant head teacher in Ferrybank was his father, Dan Foley, a community leader and Labour Party candidate in the election of 1932. As a teacher he was second to none and engaged in an early version of audio-visual education by heaping sand on a table and getting his young pupils to make a three-dimensional map of Europe. Memory was reinforced in the children's minds by having them place lumps of coal and other minerals where mines should be. Other objects were also used, as Donal recalled years later: "To this day I can see Italy as a leg with a shoe on it."
When classes ended his father, with equal enthusiasm, taught "the beautiful game of hurling". Dan Foley had a deep love of the Irish language and the highlight of the year for the Foley family (there were 12 children) was the annual summer holiday in the Ring Gaeltacht.
In the winter of 1936, Donal's father borrowed an overcoat from the parish priest and went to see a specialist in Dublin. He died of cancer six months later.
Donal Foley played a large part in bringing The Irish Times truly into the 20th century. On the day of his funeral many, many tributes were paid to him by his colleagues in journalism. Conor Brady started off by saying, "It was impossible to please Foley", continued that "Donal was at once the easiest and the hardest man to work for", and ended by saying: "He will be remembered. . .as the gentlest man most of us will ever know."
He was noted for giving women journalists a more prominent role in the paper; his recruits included Maeve Binchy, Mary Maher and Nell McCafferty.
Mary Maher remembered him for "his total lack of commercial guile", but also "his singular unawareness of tact". Maeve Binchy recalled his normal conversation as being perfectly cordial but his foghorn barks into the telephone being rather frightening at the receiving end.
We who never knew him get the impression that there was never a dull moment in his company, whether he was composing a Keats and Chapman story, attending a hurling match, or having a pint in Doolin. Michael O'Leary remarked: "I can pay him the highest compliment one friend can pay another: he never bored me."
Perhaps we can end with the words of Douglas Gageby: "He ran the newsroom as a family; sometimes he was the father ruling the roost, often the indulgent uncle; always a powerhouse of ideas, always demanding the best in journalistic standards."
Donal Foley's autobiography, Three Villages, is being reissued today by Ballylough Books, Callaghane, Co Waterford (051-382538).