Nation has suffered the death of a giant
The timing of former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald's death, coming as it did during Queen Elizabeth's state visit to Ireland, highlighted his enormous contribution to the development of modern Ireland.
When Garret, as he was universally known, first became Taoiseach in 1981, the notion of a state visit to this country by the British monarch would have been unthinkable. The Troubles had dragged on year after bloody year for more than a decade and the H-Block hunger strikes were approaching their awful climax. Only two years before, in an appalling violation of the Irish tradition of hospitality, the IRA had murdered Earl Mountbatten, an uncle of the queen's husband the Duke of Edinburgh.
The fact that both governments now judge it to be an appropriate time for Her Majesty to visit this country, the first time a reigning British monarch has been to what is now the Republic of Ireland in a century, shows just how far we have come in the past three decades.
For anyone who doesn't remember the 1970s and 1980s, the transformation that has been wrought to Anglo-Irish relations since then is truly extraordinary. That transformation didn't happen by accident but was the result of years of patient, and at the time largely unrewarded, work by scores of politicians, diplomats, churchmen and others on both sides of the border.
Chief among those was Garret FitzGerald. First as Minister for Foreign Affairs and later as Taoiseach, he worked tirelessly to bring peace to the North. Along with his 1970s cabinet colleague Conor Cruise O'Brien, he toiled ceaselessly at persuading public opinion in the South to accept the reality that Irish unity could only be achieved, and was only worth having, by consent.
When he moved to repair Anglo-Irish relations following Britain's catastrophic mishandling of the hunger strikes and the Charles Haughey government's daft decision to implicitly support Argentina during the 1982 Falklands war, Garret's task seemed an impossible one. In the South his attempts to bring about Anglo-Irish and North-South rapprochement were bitterly opposed by Haughey's Fianna Fail, in the North the IRA was still pursuing its bloody fantasy that Irish unification could be achieved at gunpoint while the unionists were still wedded to "not an inch" and in Britain the Thatcher government refused to countenance the notion that the Irish government should even be accorded a consultative role in the affairs of the North.
Faced with such apparently unpromising conditions most people would have been discouraged from even making the effort. But not Garret, for behind the absent-minded professor exterior lay a steel-hard core. After becoming Taoiseach for the second time in December 1982 he devoted an inordinate proportion of his time and energy to finding ways of extricating the North from the bloody rut in which it was seemingly permanently stuck.
After years of patient effort Garret's efforts were finally rewarded by the December 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Although it was widely criticised at the time by both republicans and loyalists, the Anglo-Irish Agreement is now widely acknowledged to have laid the ground for the subsequent peace process, the IRA ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement and finally the DUP's 2007 decision to share power with Sinn Fein.
Though he would never say so publicly, former IRA chief of staff Martin McGuinness would not now be the North's deputy first minister if it hadn't been for Garret's Trojan efforts in the 1980s.
Ironically, despite his training as an economist, Garret's handling of the economy was far less impressive. However, his achievement in laying the foundations for the peace process and the long-overdue normalisation of Anglo-Irish relations is more than sufficient to mark him out as one of the giants of late 20th century Irish history.
Ar dheis De go raibh a hanam.
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