Most people are decent and good. But there are some people about whom the very first thing one would say is: "He is a good man." Eoin Ryan, who died a week ago, was one of those people. He had a legal and business career, and also chose to serve the public interest through politics. In all three spheres, everything he did was marked by integrity. To him, politics was a career of public service. That was the way in which and he and other children of the leaders of the national movement were brought up.
Largely, I suppose, because his father and mine had differed about the status our State was offered by the articles of agreement signed 80 years ago in Downing Street - familiarly known as "The Treaty" - Eoin and I were on different sides in politics. But to our generation that difference was personally unimportant, for what we held in common transcended party politics - viz. the ethos of the Sinn FΘin of 80 years ago, within which our parents had served together from 1916 onwards.
Sadly, because of the way the name "Sinn FΘin" came to be abused by others, it no longer resonates as it used to do. Quite the contrary. Indeed, we are often shy of using that name today to describe the motivating force of the National Movement - a movement which, in any event, it has become fashionable to denigrate.
The struggle for Irish independence led by Sinn FΘin is often presented nowadays as having been unnecessary - and even unacceptable, because it did not confine itself to purely peaceful means. That view depends, inter alia, upon applying certain contemporary criteria to a world far removed from ours; a world which at that time was dominated by imperial powers, locked in violent military conflict at the cost of many millions of lives. And such a view would also have to rest upon some flimsy assumptions about where we would be now had we been content to settle for Home Rule.
What such modern critics seem to miss entirely is the passionate, idealistic commitment of that generation to a vision of freedom for their country - a vision for which they were willing to sacrifice themselves. Of course, some of the things that were done at that time cannot be defended - still less can some of what was done on either side during the Civil War that followed. Nevertheless, on both sides in that terrible civil struggle the leaders were people of integrity, motivated by ideals, whether that of preserving the Republic declared in Easter week, or that of saving the new State from anarchy.
And, however much those who emerged from these events to lead our first two governments may have disagreed on a range of issues, both groups succeeded in preserving their integrity throughout the early decades of the new State.
For, the members of both those governments were dedicated to the public interest as they saw it. They continued throughout their lives to be inspired by a sense of public service, and they had nothing but contempt for the idea of seeking benefits for themselves. By contrast, in other lands where nationalist revolutionaries have come to power, a quite different picture has often emerged.
And it was in this spirit that they brought up their children. So, when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, those of their children who were of an age to do so joined the army together at once, abandoning their studies in mid-stream, if they were still at that stage of their lives: Vivion de Valera, Liam Cosgrave, Eoin Ryan, my brother Fergus FitzGerald, Joe McCullough, and very many others.
Few vestiges of Civil War bitterness had infected that second generation as they had grown up, for many of the leaders on both sides had gone to great trouble to ensure that this would not be the case. Some of these leaders had, indeed, actively encouraged their children to become friends - and several had themselves remained close friends. Seβn and Margaret McEntee and my parents were examples of this, as must be evident from the fact that when I was born three years after the Civil War my parents asked the McEntees to be my godparents.
It would not have been easy to grow up in a post-revolutionary Sinn FΘin family on either side of the political divide without being influenced by the parental ethos of public service. However, in some cases there was an effort by parents to discourage second-generation political engagement. This was partly because of consciousness of the heavy strains of such a career, or even in certain cases because of an element of political disillusionment. But it was also out of a fear that it might be thought that a son (daughters were not then seen as potential politicians) was "cashing in" on a father's political prominence.
I was discouraged from politics in this way - with the rider, however, that if I was determined enter politics, I should not alone wait until my father was dead (which he soon was, at the early age of 59), but also wait until I had made my own way in life to the point where I might be seen to have something to offer in my own right.
Unhappily, although better-preserved in our political system than many cynical outsiders will allow, that political tradition of dedication to the public interest did not survive intact into the fifth and later decades of independence. From the late 1950s onward, a small minority of Dβil entrants had, at best, mixed agendas - not that they were without a sense of public service, but some also had a taste for power in its own right, and a few turned out to be prepared to abuse that power for their own benefit.
In Fianna Fβil, as in the other parties, this malign development was viewed with deep concern by the survivors of our first generation of politicians. From personal contacts, direct or indirect, I know how deeply distressed were men such as Seβn McEntee, Jim Ryan, Frank Aiken (who threatened to refuse to stand again for the Dβil on that account), and also Erskine Childers of the second generation, at the emergence within their party's Dβil membership of a few differently motivated people whose actions, they believed, would eventually damage grievously the State and the party.
These concerns were shared by many younger Fianna Fβil deputies, such as George Colley, Paddy Hillery, and - a later arrival on the scene - Des O'Malley, as well as by Senators such as Eoin Ryan.
Today, even if we cannot, perhaps, expect to recover the intense idealistic commitment of those who gave us our independence, one may at least hope that our national political system will henceforth be free from the kind of evils that unhappily came to infect it for a period during the closing decades of the 20th century. And in time, one may hope, the damage that was then done to the reputation of Irish politics may dissipate.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie