DURING HIS time as professor of politics at University College Dublin, Brian Farrell often made the point in his lectures that Ireland's constitutional stability is actually quite remarkable.
Many of the new states which gained independence just before or after Ireland have since experienced great social and constitutional instability.
When one considers that our 20th century nation state was born out of a violent struggle and baptised in a civil war, it is indeed amazing that our political system survived at all. The obstacles facing our fledgling State were great in scale and number.
The economic challenges alone were immense in circumstances where Ireland had no natural resources, no industrial base to speak of and an almost completely agrarian economic base. Farrell's observation was designed to provoke us as students to explore what and indeed who was responsible for maintaining our constitutional stability.
The strong democratic parliamentary and legal tradition we inherited from our former masters, Britain, was certainly a factor.
The fact that the issue of land redistribution had been addressed in Ireland in the late 19th century before we attained independence removed one key issue from the social landscape which could otherwise have created conflict and political instability.
The availability of emigration as an economic safety valve, albeit at appalling human cost, was also a factor in maintaining stability. We were also blessed with the quality of our Civil Service and its strong tradition of independence.
We were fortunate too in the quality of our political leadership. WT Cosgrave and his colleagues deserve recognition for establishing the primacy of politics over violent opposition in the first decade of the State's existence.
Recognition is also owed to politicians of the de Valera and Lemass generation who, from the other side of the political divide, eventually managed to assert control over the opposition to the Free State, establish Fianna Fáil and then make the smooth transition to government from where they ran and remoulded the political system for much of the following decades.
The greatest challenge to constitutional stability faced by our State since those early formative years was that presented by the outbreak of the Troubles north of the Border in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The intensity of the passions aroused here by the explosive situation in Northern Ireland are not truly appreciated by those of us of a later generation.
The divisions and tensions engendered by the Northern crisis - or what in hindsight can be seen as the first phase of the Northern crisis - were reflected particularly acutely within Fianna Fáil. The struggle within the party, and indeed the struggle for control of the party and for control of its policy on Northern Ireland, culminated in those dramatic exchanges between Paddy Hillery and supporters of Kevin Boland at the 1971 ardfheis, the iconic television footage of which has had much airplay in recent days in the various reports and programmes marking Hillery's passing.
This week I realised my dad was among the large attendance at that 1971 ardfheis. He recalls it as one of the first ardfheiseanna held at the RDS rather than the Mansion House and says this particular incident occurred during the Saturday afternoon proceedings when supporters of Boland endeavoured to force their way to the delegate speakers' podium.
Hillery's robust intervention from the platform was cathartic and offered reassurance to the majority of the party that Lynch and his colleagues had the strength and determination to face down the challenge to their authority. It was a challenge which threatened to otherwise split the party wide open in terms of what its response to the Northern situation should be, and thereby destabilise the party and indeed the entire political system.
"What if" history is, by its very nature, speculative, but it is frightening to contemplate the consequences for our political system if the outcome of that struggle within Fianna Fáil had been different.
Later, in Brussels, Paddy Hillery did much to enable Ireland to take her place among the nations, and later still in Áras an Uachtaráin he did much to bring stability to our highest constitutional office.
However, the robust performance from this quiet man during those noisy exchanges at the 1971 ardfheis will stand in both television and political history as a defining moment in securing this country's constitutional stability.