MEMOIR: The brilliant statesman loved hosting holidays in France with children, relatives and friends
JUST GARRET.There was something perfect about the title of Garret FitzGerald's last volume of autobiography, published by Liberties Press last year.
There was the entirely appropriate allusion to the Just Williambooks by Richmal Crompton about a mischievous English schoolboy because, even as a world statesman and towering intellectual, Garret remained a boy at heart. But the title was remarkable in another way because there was nothing "just" about Garret in the sense of ordinariness that that word implies. He was a person who was uniquely himself in every way.
We were, like other friends of the family, in the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday night at Crash Ensemble's concert performance of Gerald Barry's opera The Intelligence Park, libretto by Garret's son-in-law Vincent Deane. But Vincent wasn't there. Word filtered through that Garret was in what turned out to be his final hours, lovingly cared for as always by his family as he always cared for them.
The old Box Brownie-type snaps of his own childhood in the 19th-century house Fairy Hill, outside Bray, where he grew up, the youngest of a band of brothers, give the key to why family was the lifeblood that fuelled him – and it wasn’t just his own family. It was the families of his friends and the friends of his children, John, Mary and Mark too – and he even brought the whole crew on holidays.
The first one I went on was to Croix-de-Vie in the Vendée in France the summer after the Junior Cert. Arriving by train to a nearby station late at night with a friend of John’s slightly older than myself, William Earley, with whom I’d travelled from Dublin, we were met by Garret and his wife Joan with flasks of soup – two flavours – to warm us up .
There were days in Schull and, in recent years, various houses in the south of France, especially the one in Cogolin in the hills above St Tropez. Most likely the waiter who took the order for the 20 or so members of the household on a trip to St Tropez – everyone ordering various coffees and patisseries, with Garret orchestrating the order – is still talking about what hit him.
The south of France conjures up glamour – and for sure there was style on those holidays. But what really characterised them were loads of children, everyone having shopping, cooking and wine-buying duties, and making sure there were enough episodes of The West Wing. One abiding memory of Garret is standing in the kitchen in Cogolin as we set in to do the washing-up and Garret looking around and saying "How is it that you can never find a dishcloth when you need one?"
If people were leaving to make a ferry in Cherbourg, or heading to the Chunnel, and Garret thought they were being over-cautious about how long it would take, the map would be out and all routes explored. “Sure you could easily stay another night’’ – and people often did.
Garret’s love of being at the heart of a big household in France probably dated back to his French exchanges in the 1930s in Le Bercail, home of the boisterous family of a Madame Camus, a widow with 12 children, members of which he stayed in touch with all his life.
At home there were the picnics in Wicklow, often at Powerscourt Waterfall.When he was taoiseach at the height of the Troubles, the security detail came too. Once when Garret and the family came to our terraced house in Ranelagh for supper in the 1980s, our small son Matt spent the entire evening running from the front of the house to the back, fascinated by the armed Special Branch officers.
When Garret called to the house one night when a school project on the Berlin airlift was under way, he happily got stuck in, all the while eating Arrowroot biscuits spread with butter. We could all have done a PhD on the subject by the time he left.
His interest when our daughter Alice was doing her masters in economic history on the Whitaker/Lemass years was typical. Not content with giving her a lengthy interview himself, he rang his pal TK Whitaker, central player of the era, and got him to give her an interview as well. No wonder rafts of young people loved him.
With a flotilla of grandchildren from Doireann, the eldest, through Iseult, Aoife, Réachbha, Sorcha, Ciara, Garret, Erinne, Laoise down to Méadhbh – and on to his great-grandson – there were endless opportunities for parties, which Garret loved.
The questions at the childrens’ parties in the 1960s when the family lived on Eglinton Road would leave you scratching your head with the pencil provided. How many stones in the pyramids wasn’t a statistic most of us carried around in our heads – and that was before Google. But it was the fun of it all: Garret, ringmaster of the mixer dance, the Paul Jones, where changing partners when the music stopped sometimes brought you face to face with your heart’s desire – and sometimes not.
On top of the boundless enthusiasm, the innate generosity of spirit and the sheer lovability, there was a profound practicality. When Joan died in June 1999, I wrote the paper’s obituary and Garret amazed us by writing his column about her too.
His logic was impeccable: who knew Joan better than him? And he was a journalist, after all, well able to turn out 1,000 words instantly.
With typical warmth, he rang the house early the next morning, delighted that two big tributes to Joan graced that Saturday’s Irish Times.
And he could be so funny too, writing in that piece on Joan: “I am not sure that she ever actually rang me as often as 28 times in one day, as has been suggested, but on occasion it may have come close to that.’’
Realising now fully the great luck of knowing Garret for 50 years, I’m grateful to my mother Mary Lavin as it was through their friendship this gift came. My lifelong friendship with his daughter Mary was another great consequence.
Once, after yet another teenage party at the FitzGeralds’, when I boldly didn’t go straight home but on to the home of another guest for a coffee, Mother, then a widow, rang Garret who got out of bed and came over at once. The two of them began touring all potential locations until they found me and I got into the back of the car, as if en route to the scaffold. Mother said I’d be packed off to boarding school in the morning.
“Ah now Mary, that’s too harsh . . .” said Garret and, with one bound, I knew I was free.
When in 1982 I was sent as a reporter to Kinsealy to interview Maureen Haughey, speaking loyally about her husband she gave out about the way in the media it was always “Garret is good. Garret has a halo.”
And that’s just it. We loved Garret because he was good – and he made us want to try to be good too. It’s the best legacy any human being could leave another.
Caroline Walsh is Literary Editor of The Irish Times