What a life

MEMOIR: Just Garret: Tales from the Political Front LineBy Garret FitzGerald Liberties Press, 430pp. €27.99

IT WAS SOMEWHERE in Tipperary during the 1981 election campaign. The Fine Gael adviser Senator Alexis FitzGerald gazed from the election bus to where the would-be taoiseach had hunkered down in the square with a noisy gang of local children. “Good old Garret,” sighed Alexis. “Getting his priorities right. Tying down the under-six vote.”

Garret likes being with children because there’s a big part of him that remained a six-year-old: sitting out on the plinth at Leinster House licking an ice-cream cone; delighting in the details of picnics and party games; wanting you to like him. And sometimes he had all the mad stubborness of a six-year-old too. There’s an anecdote in this latest book that captures all that. In the 1950s Garret was doing some research in the old CSO offices in Dublin Castle. He was working late, and then he and his wife, Joan, were driving to a dinner up in Co Meath. When he went to leave he found that all the gates were locked and the only way out was down a flight of six steps. So he drove his Morris Minor down the steps. Naturally it got stuck on the first step, so he had to get out and lift the rear to ease it down, whereupon the front got stuck on the bottom step, so he had to lift that up while trying not to let the car run over him. “I thus discovered,” he confides, “why people rarely drive cars down steps!”

Anybody who’s read Garret’s autobiography and his books of essays will be familiar with much of the material here. What’s new are some more personal insights and a more detailed description of the childhood that made him the enthusiastic, uncynical 84-year-old he is.

He was the youngest, and perhaps the luckiest, of five brothers. His parents had disagreed over the Treaty; obviously, by the time Garret was born, in 1926, differences had been ironed out. His mother used a small inheritance to rent Fairy Hill, south of Bray, the house where Garret lived from the age of two and every detail of which remains in his head like some sort of lost Paradise. It had several acres of gardens and lawns, tennis courts, stables and outhouses, with fields and woods around it and through the gap in the trees a view of the sea at Dalkey, six kilometres away. His mother's inheritance allowed her to give him the sort of Victorian chidhood she herself had enjoyed, with nannies and governesses, and his early childhood reading reflects a Victorian or at least Edwardian bent: Dora's Doll's House; Helen's Babies and Other People's Children; Little Lord Fauntleroy.His father, who used to read Dickens to him, had grown up in London – indeed his party piece was to sing London music-hall favourites in a perfect Cockney accent. He ordered for Garret early editions of his own childhood favourite, The Boy's Own Paper, infused, as Garret puts it , with "the authentic aura of late-19th-century British imperialism".

It was a strange diet for the son of two Irish revolutionaries. Yet in creating for him an ease with British people and British politicians of a certain background it may have helped him in the great achievement of his political career: a new era of trust and institutionalised co-operation between Irish and British governments so that neither could be held hostage by its own extremists. He worked hard at his relationship with British politicians. When Margaret Thatcher was an untried opposition leader he treated her with the respect due a future prime minister, and she didn’t forget it. She trusted him. But did he like her? “Well,” as he told Marian Finucane coolly, revealing the calculation behind all that woolly charm, “what was more important was that she liked me.”

In the 1970s he had worked on Jim Callaghan, a holiday neighbour in west Cork, to ensure, ironically, that the British would stay in Northern Ireland. The Labour leader Harold Wilson, whom Garret obviously didn’t trust, had shown alarming tendencies towards a precipitate withdrawal with little appreciation of the dangers it would pose for the minority nationalist community. The problem with Labour was withdrawal; the problem with the Conservatives was to keep them committed to power-sharing. He worked successfully to achieve both.

All former politicians write to polish up their record in office, and Garret is no exception. It would have been refreshing to see an apology for the record unemployment and emigration that Ireland suffered during the 1980s, but you won’t find it here. There is a respected body of economic opinion that believes that if Garret had cut expenditure earlier in the 1980s, as Ray MacSharry did in 1987, Ireland could have recovered earlier. Garret argues that his Labour colleagues would not have stood for such sharp cuts and his government would have collapsed before important progress in Northern Ireland had been made and before Fianna Fáil had converted to fiscal rectitude. But how tough a line did Garret take with Labour if, as we all know, he was often more in sympathy with them than many in his own party?

Garret has not been well served by the editing on this book. There are inexcusable examples of incomplete sentences and chunks of text repeated. For all that, however, the book reflects a man who did the State, and all of us, some service, a man who took a child’s delight in the important things life offers: friends and family. You didn’t need to know Joan and Garret FitzGerald well to know how in love they remained. He describes here how, when Joan was ill down in west Cork, friends took her bed out on to the lawn, where she could enjoy the glorious sunshine of that summer and drink in the sea view. Garret climbed into bed too, and, shaded by a huge parasol, they spent the days out there until the sun sank into the Atlantic, drinking in the summer light, glowing in one another’s company. What a memory. What a life.

Olivia O'Leary is a journalist and broadcaster. Two collections of her regular political columns for RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetimehave been published by the O'Brien Press. She also presents BBC Radio 4's Between Ourselves