Andrew Ward, who died on September 4th, was the longest serving Secretary of the Department of Justice since the establishment of that department on independence. Having been appointed at the end of 1970, he took up his duties as Secretary early in 1971 on the retirement of Peter Berry, and served until shortly after his sixtieth birthday, in 1986.
His length of service as secretary of a department was unusual, and certainly his length of service in a difficult department at a difficult time is probably unique in the history of the Irish public service. Senior Irish public servants of even the highest distinction tend to be less celebrated after their retirement than is the case in other countries. Their instinctive anonymity and desire for privacy usually rolls over into their retirement. They rarely seek and rarely receive the rewards and recognition that their equivalents in other countries would have had heaped upon them.
In so far as the public over the years has come to recognise outstanding public servants, the best known tend to be names like Moynihan, Whittaker, Brennan, McElligott, Leyden and others. Those with a Finance background were perhaps more readily recognised because many of them went on to become Governors of the Central Bank. Even if the public did not, and do not, recognise the name of Andrew Ward, he ranks with the foremost of all Irish public servants, and the country owes him an extraordinary debt which it will never fully appreciate.
At the time of his appointment, just after the Arms Trial, the country was in a disturbed state. The North was out of control. Anglo-Irish relations were very bad. The Department of Justice itself had serious internal difficulties and had acquired a siege mentality, in part due to a lack of mobility into and out of the department at the time. Andy Ward's appointment led to a calming of the situation internally, even if it did not lead to a lessening of the attacks on the department from different organisations and from the media.
The early 1970s was not a spin doctor era. Having seen what he saw in the late 1960s and in 1970, Ward came to the conclusion that reason was unlikely to prevail in public debate, and that he would not take part. Always a private man, he retreated as a matter of policy into absolute anonymity. At times he went to unusual, even abnormal, lengths to preserve that anonymity. He succeeded.
A year after his appointment as Secretary, few in the country could say who the Secretary of the Department of Justice was. That remained the case right throughout his long tenure of office. That was what he wanted.
Apart from feeling that this was necessary in order that he could get on with his work, Andy Ward also felt that it was necessary for the protection of his family. At the time of his appointment he was only 44 years of age, which would then have made him one of the youngest Secretaries ever, and his children were very young. While they could hardly be oblivious to the office he held, it was a measure of his success that they were not affected by the strain and burden that he had to carry.
His work output was prodigious. The great volume of work that he had to do did not affect the quality, which always remained exceptional. During his term as Secretary, the scope of the Department of Justice expanded greatly. As Anglo-Irish and North-South relations improved and co-operation became more feasible, Andy Ward made a major contribution to the work that led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. His ability to draft and re-draft was legendary. He contributed to those negotiations with an extraordinary level of skill and sensitivity, and without his input, the Departments of the Taoiseach and of Foreign Affairs could never have achieved the successes they did. He brought about marked improvements in one of the most important Departments of State, and left it in a far healthier state than he had inherited it. He earned the profound respect and gratitude of the relatively small number of key people who had the privilege of working closely with him. When Ministers and others were liable to panic at the succession of crises that hit them, Andy Ward remained unflappable. He sat down, tackled the problem and made the best of a lot of bad situations. Even before his appointment as Secretary, when he worked as Deputy Secretary under Peter Berry, he was very heavily relied upon, and his brilliance and dependability marked him out as something special at an early age.
Born in Tourard, Co Cork, in 1925, he was probably one of the last of the generations in rural Ireland that gave their very best people to the public service. The burden and intricacy of his work was so great that it might have overwhelmed lesser men but he had a great ability to switch off and to enjoy his family and his music.
He died last week just short of his 74th birthday, aware for the past year that he had a serious illness, but calm, cheerful and optimistic to the end.
He is survived by his wife Benvon, his daughters, Ann and Mary, and his son, Eoin. Andrew Ward: born 1925; died September, 1999