Politician and educationalist who never retired

Justin Keating:JUSTIN KEATING, who has died aged 79, carved out a notable career in academia, journalism and politics which was marked by dogged determination and considerable intellectual gifts. His political career was in effect terminated prematurely, however, by the disastrous coalition election of 1977, when he lost his Dáil seat.

Born in Dublin in 1930, he was son of the painter Seán Keating, and grew up in a home dominated by arts and politics. His father’s family had taken the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and, although his father never favoured physical force republicanism, something of that nationalist spirit found a home in the young Keating.

Later, it was at the root of a deep but almost private war between him and his Cabinet colleague, Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Justin Keating was educated at Sandford Park School in Dublin, UCD, and at London University, and became a lecturer in the UCD veterinary faculty in 1955, moving to Trinity College Dublin, part of that shared establishment, in 1960. He became head of agricultural programmes in RTÉ for two years (1965-67) before returning to Trinity, and his experience in television was to stand him in good stead in a political career which was then just beginning.

Initially his politics were radical – not least under the influence of his mother, the fiery May Keating – and the Communist Party of Ireland, with its combination of Marxist ideology and nationalist orientation, was a powerful attraction. More practical politics claimed him rapidly, however, and he set up a branch of the Labour Party in Rathfarnham at a time when it was not, to put it mildly, promising territory for socialism.

By the time of the 1969 election he had become one of the small but high-profile group of academics and intellectuals who had decided to make the Labour Party their permanent home, and the vehicle for their political careers: he was easily elected in the constituency of Dublin North County, and prominent in the anti-EEC campaign in the early 1970s.

By 1973, when the overwhelming referendum decision on EEC entry had managed to turn Keating, O’Brien and other former opponents into born-again Europeans, he became minister for industry and commerce in the first non-Fianna Fáil government for 16 years, and threw his considerable energies into the task of industrial development and expansion.

It was, however, the least propitious of times. The wave of price rises triggered by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) decisions on energy costs mired all government policies deep in public disfavour: at one stage, inflation was running at an annual rate of well over 20 per cent, and Keating, as the minister most closely associated with the economy and prices, was the largely helpless victim of an angry public mood. Internally, his critics in the Labour Party, led by Noel Browne, attacked his attempts to manage the development of the ore-body at Tara by co-operation between the State and major private interests, undermining his socialist credentials and almost publicly humiliating him at the Labour Party conference in Cork.

It was a debate in which his argument that a native Irish multi-national was the most effective defence against foreign predators fell on increasingly deaf ears.

In the Dáil, he was targeted relentlessly by his Fianna Fáil opposite number, Des O’Malley, whose withering attacks compounded the damage being inflicted on him within his own party. He was always deeply sensitive to allegations that he had betrayed his principles: a decade after the Tara/Bula affair, he won a substantial sum in libel damages from the Sunday Tribune for an article suggesting that he had abused his powers as minister on that occasion.

When in 1976, with the active but ineffective support of Garret FitzGerald, he tried to secure the position as Ireland’s EEC commissioner (Dick Burke, then minister for education, won), his star sank even lower. His vision of a democratic system of planning based on the Scandinavian socialist model was to a large extent still-born, although elements of it, notably a National Development Corporation, were to find their way into future Labour Party programmes in government.

His career was almost to disappear in 1977 when he lost his Dáil seat. He secured election to the Seanad in an era when Labour was kinder to its defeated ministers, and became party leader in that assembly, but his career in representative politics was effectively at an end. He made one more brief foray into the public arena when, having spent a period as a nominated member of the European Parliament, he fought and lost the election to that body in the Leinster constituency in 1984.

He was, however, never a man who depended entirely on politics for an agenda. He was a substantial farmer, owning some 250 acres in Co Kildare, and the decline of his political career saw him return to agriculture with fresh enthusiasm. He and his family also had a cottage in Connemara, where he was able to refresh his roots with a culture which had inspired his father. He remained deeply interested in the arts, as his later television series, A Sense of Excellence, and his chairmanship of the Crafts Council, testified.

In 1984 he was appointed chairman of the National Council for Educational Awards, and his interest in education and agriculture later combined in his work for the development of an innovative course in equine management at the University of Limerick.

He was a man who never really retired, and who remained active despite the occasional recurrence of serious illness contracted while working as a veterinary surgeon.

At the end of the 1990s, as president of the Irish Association of Humanists, he was combining a traditional socialist attack on the role of the institutional role of the Catholic Church in Irish society with a public apology, as part of one of the governments in the 1970s, to all those who had been affected by the failure of the governments of that time to act, or to be aware of, the instances of child abuse in institutions which were then coming to light.

His first marriage, to Loretta Wine, with whom he had three children – David, Carla and Eilís – was dissolved. He later married Barbara Hussey. They all survive him.

Justin Keating: born January 7th, 1930; died December 31st, 2009