Jack Lynch was a very unusual politician. He was genuinely very modest about his abilities, to the point of greatly undervaluing himself: an uncommon enough characteristic in political life. The first time I met him was at lunch shortly after his appointment as Minister for Industry and Commerce in 1961, when I was a university lecturer and consultant.
I was quite disconcerted to be told by him at this first encounter how unqualified he was for his position, an appointment which he attributed to a shortage of talent in politics at that time.
When, in November 1966, he was elected leader of Fianna Fail and Taoiseach, this was the first time in 44 years as an independent State that our Government was led by someone who did not belong to the revolutionary generation.
In his subsequent cautious but determined attempts as leader to detoxify his party's traditional rhetorical nationalism, Jack Lynch followed closely in the path of his predecessor, Sean Lemass.
But his was a far more difficult role.
As a 1916 participant, an active republican during the Civil War, and the principal organiser of Fianna Fail during the late 1920s, Sean Lemass as Taoiseach had commanded all the necessary moral authority to set about modernising that party's outdated stances.
In following his own instinct to pursue similar modernising and more outward-looking policies which were better attuned to the aspirations and interests of a generation that was by then far removed from the revolutionary period, Jack Lynch was hugely fortified by his predecessor's initiatives.
Although these radical attitudes ran against the tide of hard-core Fianna Fail instincts, the after-effects of the "softening-up" process of the Lemass years, combined with Jack Lynch's own personal charisma, enabled him to succeed in carrying through a conciliatory modernisation process.
In fact, until tensions were aroused in our State by the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland, Jack Lynch's popularity with the electorate had made him invulnerable to those within his party who either disagreed with his approach or who, for reasons of personal ambition, aspired to displace him.
However, neither he nor his party - nor, for that matter, any other leader or political party in the State - was adequately prepared for the traumatic events of August 1969. During the nine months that followed that outburst of violence in the North, he was visibly unable to contain tensions within his Cabinet on Northern Ireland policy, and found himself engaged in something like a public debate with a powerful member of his government, Neil Blaney, on this issue.
The truth - of which he was clearly very conscious - was that he lacked the kind of deep roots in Fianna Fail possessed by such people as Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, who did not hide their resentment at his unexpected primacy within the party. As a result, he was not well-placed to control such colleagues when the North erupted.
During that extraordinary winter of 1969-70, he must have felt intensely vulnerable to the tide of republican emotion within his party. While he did his best to calm the situation - as in the Tralee speech in September 1969 - he may well have felt that precipitate action against troublemakers could have sparked off a revolt that he might not have been able to contain.
For my own part, I believe that once Jack Lynch became aware of a plot by senior ministers to import arms for the nascent Provisional IRA, with assistance from elements in Army intelligence, he was determined to act to crush this conspiracy.
But how best to carry this through successfully posed a problem for him. He could not know with certainty how many members of his government, still less how many members of his party, he could trust to support him in such action. And the involvement of Army intelligence in this affair must have been an additional source of worry.
Were there, he must have wondered, others in the Army involved in the plot?
Even to consult members of his government whom he believed to be loyal to him carried great dangers. First, there was the danger of misjudging where their real loyalty lay - the failure of his Minister for Justice, Micheal O Morain, to give a directive to the Garda on this matter, which eventually led Jack Lynch to dismiss O Morain on May 5th, must have deeply alarmed him. At the time he may also have been worried about the extent to which the Minister for Defence, Jim Gibbons, had kept him informed about the Army intelligence role.
And, even if Ministers he might decide to consult proved loyal, would they be discreet? A premature leak could be fatal.
He is thought to have said that for a time there was no one he could be certain of except his wife, Mairin.
This was a terrifying situation in which to find himself and, as he agonised as to precisely how and when it would be best to move, Liam Cosgrave's actions on the day of O Morain's "resignation" must have come as a relief, for it settled the issue of when to act: it had to be at once.
Next morning, having successfully secured an adjournment of the Dail from just before noon until 10 p.m., Jack Lynch rallied his forces within the party and secured from a party meeting in late afternoon the support necessary to enable him to advise President de Valera to dismiss Blaney and Haughey, following their refusal to resign when requested by him to do so.
His skilful leadership on that day made it possible for him to emerge a week later, after three dramatic Dail debates, in full command of the situation - well-positioned to lead his party and the country skilfully away from the brink of disaster.
In the third of those debates, on a no-confidence motion, he told the House that the funds for the arms importation had not come from the Secret Service vote, and that no money was missing from the Department of Defence.
As the penultimate Fine Gael speaker, I pointed out, "The likely place is the Department of Finance . . . there is no denial about that."
In his reply to the debate a couple of hours later, Jack Lynch assured the House that, having made specific inquiries as to whether any monies could have been voted or could have been paid out of Exchequer funds, or out of any public funds in respect of a consignment of arms of the size in question, he "was assured that there was not and could not have been" any such payments.
In the event this turned out to be quite incorrect. The money had in fact come from a Red Cross vote controlled by the Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, who had doled it out through an Army intelligence officer to be applied for the financial support of men "on active service" in Belfast, and for a republican propaganda newspaper.
All this emerged much later, when in the following autumn the Public Accounts Committee started to investigate this matter. As a member of that committee I was, however, able to establish that Jack Lynch's statement to the Dail that public funds could not have been involved had been based upon, and was fully justified by, totally erroneous advice given to him by a civil servant.
Rather curiously and, I feel, regrettably, an Official Secrets Order by the new Minister for Finance, George Colley, prevented the Public Accounts Committee from disclosing in its report the circumstances that had surrounded the misleading of Jack Lynch, and the Dail.
Whatever controversy may exist about Jack Lynch's approach to the Arms affair prior to May 6th, 1970, our State and its people owe a great debt to the skilful and tough manner in which he then handled the subsequent crisis.
Many people were, however, disturbed when, five years later, he re-admitted Charles Haughey to his front bench and, in 1977, to his last Cabinet.
We don't know why he took this action, which had fateful consequences for our country during the years that followed, but I suspect that the explanation recently suggested may well be correct - his innate decency made him feel that Charles Haughey deserved another chance.
ON THE day after Jack Lynch's resignation on Wednesday, December 5th, 1979, three Fianna Fail TDs separately told Fine Gael deputies that they feared they would be unable to vote freely in the party leadership election the following day because Haugheyites would look over their shoulders as they marked their ballot papers.
I communicated with a Fianna Fail TD who had some responsibility in the matter, and later that night he assured me this problem had been dealt with: people would vote in booths at either end of the party room.
But shortly afterwards another Fianna Fail TD told me that this procedure had not secured its objective. The ballot box was in the middle of the room and nervous voters, some of them intimidated by threatening phone calls to their homes during the preceding 24 hours, had been warned that they would be marked down as enemies if they did not show their votes to Haugheyites as they walked from polling booth to ballot box.
Charles Haughey secured a majority of six over George Colley. Thus four votes decided the outcome. Were four members influenced by this tactic? We shall never know.
Jack Lynch's unhappiness with the outcome of that leadership election was not in doubt. He had hoped, and expected, that the high standards in high places which had marked the 10 years of his premiership would have been maintained under George Colley. But that was not to be.
Garret FitzGerald can be contacted at gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie