THE seven decades of Sean Lemass's life were marked by political, social and economic changes in Ireland whose significance cannot even now be grasped without a major exercise of the imagination. He was born a British subject in a house on the edge of one of the worst slums to be found in any colonial city; he died a retired statesman in suburban contentment in a vibrant and self confident European capital.
What happened in between is the stuff of history - and also, inevitably, of controversy. What is unarguable, however, is that Lemass represented, to a greater extent than any other politician of his generation, the bridge between the old Ireland and the new.
All politicians must occupy, to some extent, that territory. It evokes hesitation in some, decisiveness in others. Although Lemass had no doubts about where he stood, he would be as ill served by a simplistic eulogy of his achievements as by the thesis that he delivered Ireland, defenceless, into the maw of international capitalism.
The central paradox of his career was that he wanted to use the engines of the past to drive Ireland forward into the future. It was not just that - despite what some modern historians surmise - he remained a nationalist. It was that he believed that nationalism per se was one of the most powerful driving forces in politics, and strove to harness it to objectives that were as supranational as they were domestic. And while he was fascinated by modernity, almost to the point of obsession with some of its manifestations - he used to travel to Leopardstown as a youth to watch the pioneers of Irish aviation stumble uncertainly into the air in their contraptions of canvas and wire - he also knew that the road ahead had plenty of potholes.
In a sense, the differences between Lemass and his predecessor, Eamon de Valera, were so great on a superficial level that they have been allowed to over simplify an undoubtedly complex relationship. In part this is a matter of historical fashion. Each generation has a propensity to re write its history so that the heroes of the past can be pressed into the service of the prevailing ideology. This tendency is by no means confined to politics: contrast the Jesus of the Victorian era, for example, with the Jesus of the worker priests of France in the 1950s, or the Jesus of the radical missionaries in Latin America today.
Where politics are concerned, however, there is an additional dimension, as successive generations of political leaders seek to enhance their own claims to legitimacy either by modelling themselves on past leaders or by claiming that, were those leaders alive today, they would recognise themselves in the current incumbent.
Nobody in Fianna Fail now models himself on Eamon de Valera - but Mr Haughey has latterly draped the mantle of Sean Lemass firmly around Mr Ahern's shoulders, with a deftness that underscored his own prior claim to that inheritance. Lemass's relationship with de Valera was, however, undoubtedly central to his own political growth and development, as it was to his political successes and failures.
Part of the problem faced by the biographer in analysing it is that the evidence is so scanty. De Valera quite consciously followed a policy based on his belief that anything unnecessarily committed to paper was a potential hostage to fortune. Lemass, although he wrote voluminously in a public sense - memoranda for government, speeches, drafts of legislation - left comparatively little in the way of personal papers, and almost nothing of an intimate nature.
We know that he learned, from experience, that de Valera's tactical judgment was more often right than wrong, and that he respected the older man's sureness of touch. We are left to guess at the content of what one of his cabinet colleagues once described as a "tirade" against his Taoiseach, and can only assume that it was in relation to some question of economic policy, where his impatience with de Valera's caution sometimes bubbled over.
The task of evaluation and assessment is further hampered by the reticence of contemporaries. The united front shown by de Valera's cabinets masked profound disagreements: Lemass admitted as much one day in the Dail when, from the Opposition benches, he taxed the Inter Party government with avoiding difficult decisions by setting up cabinet sub committees that never met. But Fianna Fail ministers in the 1940s and 1950s presented a granite face to the outside world, and few of them left any records to indicate either the nature or the extent of the disagreements that occurred.
It is an irony that this impressive solidarity began to slip under Lemass himself, as the younger generation he brought into cabinet began to experience, at first hand, frustrations similar to those he had encountered in the preceding decades. This was the era in which the controlled leak was born (Lemass himself was no slouch at the technique, as Taoiseach), and when new ministers realised that the media, expertly managed, could become an ally as well as a critic.
Their impatience with the revolutionary generation was, more than we suspected at the time, reciprocated. Even towards the end of Lemass's era as Taoiseach, in April 1966, Backbencher in The Irish Times warned him that, like Harold Wilson, he had to look to danger within his own party.
"The Old Guard, so long regarded as the Old Faithful, is being very much the Old Guard minus the Old Faithful bit. For a year they have lain in impatient silence, nursing their trench coated desire to get at the young men in the mohair suits."
Lemass's strength - or, some might say, his weakness - was that he was intergenerational. He was 17 years younger than de Valera, 14 years younger than Gerry Boland, a decade younger than MacEntee, and eight years younger than Jim Ryan. Aiken, who was his contemporary, seemed older in almost every way. While his comparative youth made him immediately acceptable to the coming generation, he never quite inherited the older man's unquestioned control over the party as a whole.
Perhaps it was inevitable: when a disciplinarian headmaster retires, his successor acquires, not only the office, but years of suppressed problems and unresolved arguments which become finally impossible to contain.
At the other end of the scale, a quarter century or more separated Lemass from people like Colley, Haughey, Lenihan and O'Malley, whose careers he actively promoted and encouraged. Much more than de Valera, he was conscious of the party's desperate need to regenerate itself in human terms. Vision alone would no longer do - although Lemass was by no means short of that commodity. It had to be supplemented by new, young blood. And it is undeniable that the Fianna Fail party today, in many of its aspects, owes much to his shaping vision of the 1960s, and is at a cross roads now, just as it was when de Valera went to the Park in 1959.
THE task of assessing Sean Lemass today has two aspects: the public and the private. As far as the public is concerned, the fact that he left so much on the record - including candid admissions of his own failures and mistakes - is a refreshing counterweight to the Bourbon tendency in much contemporary politics. He would not have expected or welcomed any attempt by those who analyse him today to airbrush the inconsistencies and contradictions in his career.
He put the best face possible on them at the time: that is every politician's entitlement. But the long view is what counts, and the long view shows a politician who was prepared to punch every button on the console, green, red or blue, in his search for the one which would deliver the economic growth and sense of national purpose which were central to his aspirations.
The private Sean Lemass was hidden so deeply that few people outside his immediate family ever witnessed it. A few relationships were absolutely critical, not least those with his older brother Noel, and with his wife Kathleen. His private life was serene, but this did not mean that personal and political emotions did not run deep. When they showed, they betrayed an almost volcanic intensity which was suppressed, managed and controlled to a degree, and with a sense of purpose, that those of us who have never experienced the horrors of a civil war can only guess at.
What was also hidden - behind a sense of the dignity of office as much as anything else - was a warm, witty, essentially Dublin personality, and the ability to make understatement into an art form. One winter at the end of the second World War, he found himself sitting in front of a small fire of damp sods of, turf in a waiting room in Waterford, whiling away the time before a meeting of the local Chamber of Commerce, and paying close attention to the only reading matter at hand, a copy of the local newspaper. Eventually he broke a long silence and turned to his companion, drawing his attention to a report of the annual general meeting of the local boxing club.
"They have elected a doctor as president," Lemass pointed out, "a priest as vice president, and an undertaker as secretary. I'd say they got their priorities right - would, you agree?"
History will record that he never quite found the key to unlock the door to unambiguous national prosperity. Although his achievements during his period as Taoiseach, particularly in the early years, were considerable, he had much more bad luck than he deserved. The electorate denied him an overall majority in his only full Dail term as Taoiseach. External circumstances, as ever, interfered with his best laid plans. The foundations for the Lynch era were established, but there was, in the end, no golden Lemassian age, just as there had been no rural de Valerian idyll.
His most lasting legacy will be his changes in Northern policy, his way of doing things, his rejection of the beal bocht, and his decisive abandonment of narrow self sufficiency in favour of a vision of Ireland as an integral part of a wider economic and political unit. But the European horse, which had so much of his and our money on its back, fell at the Anglo French fence, and wasn't fit for a canter for almost another decade.
He was not even to live long enough to see, much less negotiate, our accession to the EEC, and this was perhaps his - and our - greatest loss.