APPRECIATION:I GOT a rather privileged start in golf. In the summers of 1953 and 1954 I was tutored by a current Irish international and a future president of Ireland, writes DESMOND O'MALLEY.
We went to Spanish Point for a month or two each year. Paddy Hillery was the local dispensary doctor. He finished work about 5.30pm each day and came to Spanish Point with his friend Paddy Leyden who owned a garage in Miltown Malbay, was capped for Ireland many times and was the South of Ireland champion at Lahinch.
Leyden had a plus handicap but Hillery who was minus 3 or 4 was nearly as good as him. They played nine holes with five balls each.
Golf was not particularly popular then. There was no one else on the course. I played the 11th ball to each hole. They told me what I was doing wrong.
When I last met Paddy Hillery a few months ago in his 85th year he was still essentially the same man I knew in Clare 55 years earlier - a quiet, decent, honourable, helpful man who was partial to a bit of fun and was an acute observer of what went on around him.
Privately, but rarely publicly, he would express a shrewd observation on some of the posturing he saw.
In 1969 Hillery was amused that the callow youth whom he had instructed in the sandhills 15 years earlier was in the cabinet with him. In 1970 I really came to appreciate Paddy Hillery's qualities. He did a great deal to sustain Jack Lynch at a dangerous time.
As Hillery saw it he was not just sustaining Lynch in a personal or political way but he was sustaining the representative democracy that Lynch represented and which was under threat.
I was often quite beleaguered in the Department of Justice in those days because of my opposition to the two IRAs and to Saor Éire. Hillery encouraged me constantly right up to the time he resigned towards the end of 1972. There were many times during those bleak years that I had reason to be grateful to him.
One of his most remarkable achievements was his leadership of the Irish negotiation for EEC entry. He had to spend a great deal of time in Brussels and at the same time keep an eye on the post Arms Trial difficulties at home and the horrors in the North.
The negotiations were largely complete by the end of 1971, apart from the difficulty with fisheries. The existing Six were adamant on access to community waters and Hillery could not prevail.
Apart from that Ireland was incredibly successful in its entry terms and we reaped the benefits of the work of Hillery and his team for several decades afterwards.
His appointment as European commissioner was beneficial for the community and for Ireland but was a great loss to Irish political life. If he had stayed events at the end of 1979 might well have been different. He had a toughness that some of us lacked.
I doubt if he ever really enjoyed the presidency but he saw it as a public duty and particularly his undertaking a second term when he well knew what he was letting himself in for.
He always maintained a splendid but simple dignity. He enjoyed the practice of his first profession and carried forward his sense of public service from that to his second profession. He practised in the days when money was a secondary aspect of medicine.
A lot of us have reason to be grateful to Paddy Hillery. Some of us know why; a lot more never will. May he now have peaceful rest and may he have a birdie on the first on his new course today.
Desmond O'Malley is a former tánaiste and was founding leader of the Progressive Democrats