Looking back on his long and active 90 years I think the majors lesson is how he used his abundant energy. It was this creative active approach to his life that led him to have three distinctive careers, any one of which would have been considered a sufficiency in a normal person's working life. He said that the only time he used outside help to further his career was when his father got him his first job as a cub reporter on the Enniscorthy Echo. He later worked for the Irish Press in Dublin, and then became a chief reporter for The Irish Times. In his time there he was their motoring and aviation correspondent, and later published a number of issues of a specialist magazine, Aviation, The National Air Magazine of Ireland.
I remember him telling me, when, as a prominent reporter for The Irish Times, he was covering a case for that newspaper in one of Dublin's courts, and, watching a defending lawyer in action, looked and thought I would like to be in that place. Now, many of us may look at professions and think - I would like to do that, but for him the answer was to do, and so he took the long way of night classes, and eventually qualified and practised successfully for many years as a senior counsel at the Bar. His careers overlapped, too, for he never gave up journalism, and for very many years when I was young he was the editor of the Garda Review, the monthly in house magazine of the Garda Representative Association and only in this past year had an article published in The Irish Times.
Around this time he was recognising a need for himself to understand his native country at a deeper level, which took him to become involved with that westernmost point of Ireland, the Aran Islands, where he taught himself Irish to the fluency of a native speaker, and gained immense respect from the islanders. I can remember childhood summer holidays spent camping on the Aran Islands, and an elderly woman there recently told me that we were the first tourists to camp on the islands, back in the 1950s, and when we first arrived they thought we were travellers. He then put his enthusiasm for Irish to further use, starting an Irish night school in Dublin, and I can recall the big old Phillips recording machines with their large spools where he set up himself what I believe was the first audio system of teaching language in Dublin.
Fundraising for his school, he ran carnivals, and once put on a stage show starring Siobhan McKenna, Joe Lynch and a young Niall Tobin. He was fervently against the compulsive requirement of taking Irish in schools, feeling that the language and culture could only be promoted through enthusiasm and self desire.
Around this time he turned his attention to politics, becoming, like his father before him, involved with the Labour movement, and once stood for Labour, in de Valera's old constituency in Clare.
His third career came out of his involvement with the Aran Islands, coming out of, as he put it, "a dedication to an ideal". He approached the newly formed Irish Export Board with the concept of making the Aran sweater an international garment. He pioneered the big sales boom in these garments of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, and later, again before anyone else, pioneered the same garment into the Japanese market.
In between all this he managed to raise a family of five children, became an excellent golfer and wrote numerous books concerning law, the Aran Islands, and his later spiritual interest in ancient Celtic pre history. He was a year round swimmer at the 40 foot; flew solo aircraft out of Weston and gliders out of Baldonnel.
What stands out for me in all this history of his life is his courage, never settling for what had been done, but always looking to the next, and, even if this did take him into some ventures which backfired, he would remain undaunted in his enthusiasm. He possessed an ever willingness to develop, change and renew himself, ready and wanting to take on new challenges as his life developed and changed in turn.
I will miss him. Gra o mo chroi