Roy McFadden, the poet, who died in Belfast on September 15th, aged 77, embodied many of the civic principles and virtues of northern protestantism which were eclipsed by the sights and sounds of sectarian rancour and cultural attrition.
Born in 1921, his life approximated to the birth and unfolding history of Northern Ireland.
As he himself wrote: "I was born in Belfast, during the Troubles of the 1920s; and I have lived there or thereabouts throughout my life.
"But behind the northern Irish dimension a northern English connection exists through my mother, who came to Belfast at the age of 11, with a pinafore and a Durham accent. The Jarrow Hunger marches have claimed equal access to my streets step by step with the annual orange and green parades".
Roy McFadden's mother's father was a Scot who moved to Belfast in the heyday of the shipbuilding industry and it was in one of those yards that he became chief draughtsman.
His father's people hailed from Downpatrick, Co Down and were craftsmen. Before he was even one year old, the McFadden family was evicted in Belfast by what he termed "militants" while 20 years later, his east Belfast family home was wrecked in the devastating air-raids of the blitz in 1941.
Precious wonder that somewhat later the young 24-year-old young man was described by his friend and fellow-poet, John Hewitt, as "the grave lad with the disconcerting smile".
Roy McFadden's sense of house, home and family, the private world of the writer, surfaces constantly through a writing life of more than 50 years.
During the 1940s, he established his reputation as a poet with Swords and Ploughshares (1943), Flowers for a Lady (1947) and, perhaps, consummately, with The Heart's Townland (1947). He was active in the literary and cultural issues of the time (what would be called today "northsouth" relations), as well as publishing in Dublin and England, engaged by what he described as the "political anarchism" of Herbert Read and Alex Comfort, and debating the pros and cons of the emerging arguments on "regionalism". In a letter to Roy McFadden, Hewitt sees both poets struggling in "this Sahara of the arts".
As co-editor of various anthologies and the magazine Rann (1948-53), the significance of his cultural contribution should not be overlooked.
His scepticism about "regionalism" was to anticipate much of the media-lit debates of the late 1960s, 1970s and indeed pre-dates so much of the hotly contested intellectual arguments surrounding, for instance, the achievement of Field Day in the 1980s.
There is "a danger", he was to remark, "of prescribed narrow boundaries fostering a reactive mini-nationalism".
Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, however, Roy McFadden's practical life was devoted to earning a living and rearing a family and for almost 25 years during this time he published little, even though he kept writing.
His relatively late return to print in 1971 was at the age of 50 with a collection the title of which few poets would have chanced at the time, or since: The Garryowen is named after what he called "a gambit famous in Irish rugby", the up and under giving time "for a maverick assault".
From this period on, Roy McFadden published regularly, albeit contentiously insisting that his then Belfast publisher withdraw from circulation A Watching Brief (1978) because of his displeasure with the cover illustration.
He developed a reputation for being forthright: a no-nonsense approach which paid homage to what he called "the less knowing times" of his early writing life in Belfast as much as to his professional life as a solicitor.
His generation, which would include northern writers such as John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, W.R. Rodgers, Sam Hanna Bell, Joseph Tomelty, John Boyd, Richard Rowley, Denis Ireland (alongside visiting figures such as John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and indeed Micheal MacLiammoir) is very much out of critical favour.
Yet anyone who seeks a clearer and more complex understanding of what constitutes the inner history of Irish poetry this century would need to engage with Roy McFadden and the imaginative contact he maintained with cultural ideals other than the much-vaunted northern "regionalism".
His sense of southern Irish society, his understanding of writers such as Peadar O'Donnell and, perhaps much more importantly, his own modesty and self deprecation bear the clear strains of a refreshingly critical and stoical presence, wholly independent of fashionable expectations; values he summarised in a personal recollection of John Hewitt published in 1991: "Towards the end, with the poems published and his standing established he [Hewitt] said to me, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight: `Having children is best'. Talking of death and its aftermath, I said that once round was enough. He nodded."
An achieved poet by any standards, Roy McFadden's Collected Poems appeared in 1996.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and five children, Mairead, Stephen, Grania, Owen and Conor.
Roy McFadden: born 1921; died September, 1999