I didn't work for Douglas Gageby and didn't know him well, but I got to hear a lot about him from his great friend John Healy, also a friend of mine.
One time, Healy told me that Gageby had liked an article of mine, and wanted to meet me. I found him at his desk in The Irish Times newsroom.
We talked for an hour, but I was unclear as to the purpose of our meeting and answered non-committally when he asked what I planned to do with my life. I had, for only a short time, been editor of In Dublin magazine and said I wanted to give that a few more years.
Afterwards, Healy rang. "Hey bucko, what the hell happened with Gageby?" I said we'd had a very interesting conversation. "Why'd you not take the job?" he demanded. "He never mentioned any job," I said. "Ah Jesus, Stock, why else d'ya think he wanted to see you?" Gageby left The Irish Times within a few months.
I ran into him from time to time when later I joined The Irish Times.
The last time was a few years back in a Dublin bookshop, when he grinned at me from across a bookcase and said: "You've joined the piss 'n' vinegar brigade" - a Healyism for a particularly vituperative breed of opinion columnist. I think he was joking, but you couldn't be sure.
As we know, Gageby was a central figure in Irish journalism in our times, and arguably the doyen of liberalism in what we call "modern Ieland".
But there was, I believe, in the tributes following his death, an element of unwarranted self-congratulation with which I doubt he would have identified. It was said that he was committed to the nurturing in Ireland of a tolerant and liberal society: I believe his vision of these qualities was more sophisticated than what we now have.
He passed away a week before the launch, with tremendous fanfare, of the Luas, a half-century after the trams disappeared from Dublin's streets.
I think he would have got a laugh out of what that tells us about the ludicrousness of the idea of continuous progress - in one era, progress is epitomised by abolishing trams, and in the next by bringing them back.
This belies our conventional notion of progress as a chronological forward course, which brings us willy-nilly through the stages of enlightenment, preordained and primed for our arrival. In this worldview, the "truth" about progress is that it exists in one quintessential and linear form, and any deviation from this is error.
What we call liberalism is a commentary on this, measuring our adherence to or distance from the prescribed template and constantly admonishing failure to adhere.
Douglas Gageby's liberalism, as I understand it, was unlike that, holding that people, as long as they treat each other properly, should be left to think and do as they please. It just so happened that when Gageby was at the height of his editorial powers, the social climate required liberalism to adopt a certain demeanour.
That is why he took such a deep interest in the events in the North of Ireland and championed the cause of women in public life, both issues of tremendous currency at the time. But these, I believe, were the contemporary expression of his liberalism rather than its quintessence.
Gageby, in his life and work, sought out the Other. He was drawn to things he did not know, not just out of curiosity but because he believed that what he did not know should be valued precisely because he did not know it.
That's what drew him to Healy, the chalk to his cheese.
In this respect he was, as an editor, the embodiment of John Stuart Mill's idea that the condition most dangerous to freedom is one of certainty about what is believed. Only by constantly allowing beliefs to be challenged do we ensure the quality of freedom.
Gageby knew this, and also that it demands that young people, who are naturally more suspicious of assumptions, be encouraged to take ownership of their society. It has been recalled that he introduced a new wave of women journalists to Irish life, the usual inference being that he helped bring us to the state of enlightenment at which we are now delighted to have arrived.
But Gageby did not simply bring young women into journalism - he gave them permission to use journalism for whatever end they desired.
Today, having allegedly moved into the Promised Land of liberalism heralded by the journalism of that time, we have attained near-perfect satisfaction with our own progress.
Young people coming into journalism nowadays are rarely told, as they were by Douglas Gageby: "There's the paper - write it". More often, they are vetted for correctness and placed under middle-manager apparatchiks for a period of training in appropriate thinking, and then sent out to affirm "truths" we already "know".