Jack Lynch, who died on October 20th, aged 82, was not a Fianna Fail man, in the eyes of those who saw themselves as the heart and soul of the party.
Too young to belong to the revolutionary generation of his predecessors, de Valera and Lemass, he failed to meet the standards set by his zealous contemporaries.
His was not a Fianna Fail family, they said. The Lynchs were nationalists, of course, but none of them had been "out in the Troubles": they had played no part in the War of Independence or the Civil War.
Jack Lynch's father, Dan, was a tailor who left a small farm at Baurgorm near Bantry to live and work in Cork city. He married Nora O'Donoghue, a seamstress from Glaunthane, and they lived, worked and reared their family in Blackpool, within earshot of Shandon bells. Jack Lynch was four years old when the War of Independence began. At school, and as a young man in the public service, he had shown more interest in hurling and a legal career than in politics or the party.
By the time he addressed his first public meeting in Blackpool in the mid-1940s, he had been invited to join another political party, Clann na Poblachta.
Clann was a coalition of disillusioned republicans, radicals of the left and national teachers, then in bitter disagreement with the Fianna Fail government.
Some of his friends in the GAA were among the new party's organisers and, in the Teachers' Club after a match in 1946, they assured him that, as one of the finest hurlers in the country, he'd make an ideal candidate.
Jack Lynch, who had been called to the Bar in 1945, turned down the offer and went back to his legal work in Cork. Two years later, with the encouragement of the great Cork trainer, Jim Barry, he agreed to stand for Fianna Fail.
He won a seat, but the party lost the 1948 election; it took him several years to decide to become a full-time politician. In the meantime he served an apprenticeship under de Valera and Lemass, as parliamentary secretary and member of the Cabinet.
He was a minister without ostentation, unlike his mohair-suited colleagues, Donogh O'Malley, Charlie Haughey and Brian Lenihan.
They liked to show off in a style of which de Valera disapproved and Lemass found barely tolerable. If Jack Lynch hoped to lead the party, he showed no sign of it - though he may have confided the ambition to his wife, Mair in (nee O'Connor). He certainly consulted her before agreeing to stand when it came to a contest in 1966; she was always his closest adviser.
The notion that he was a reluctant leader was supported by a modest aside that he came to regret: he called himself a compromise candidate, introduced to avoid all-out war between the factions supporting Charles Haughey, Neil Blaney and George Colley.
The Haughey and Colley factions divided along lines of policy and style: modernisers with their brash associates in business versus the followers of an orthodox, almost old-fashioned, nationalist tradition.
Blaney, coming from Donegal, was a more robust nationalist than Colley, had at least as many business connections as Haughey in the 1960s, and paid more attention than either Haughey or Colley to fund-raising and party organisation.
To any new leader, their presence at the Cabinet table would have been a challenge. An outsider - in the eyes of zealous contemporaries - must have found it intimidating. And Jack Lynch also had two of the old guard, Kevin Boland and Micheal O Morain, to contend with.
His conciliatory attitudes and diffident style were never going to be a match for the public rhetoric and private manoeuvring of his critics. Colley and Dr Paddy Hillery were his only reliable allies.
But the electorate was getting tired of rhetoric and viewed the manoeuvring as a spectator sport. Diffidence and an absence of fanaticism - suspect qualities in the party - proved a powerful attraction outside.
It was the paradox of one of the most highly successful - and constantly vulnerable - careers in modern Irish politics. Because he was not, in the strictly limited sense, a Fianna Fail man, he often appeared more popular outside the party than in it.
Neither Eamon de Valera nor Sean Lemass could reach beyond their strictly partisan constituency, though Lemass might have fared better had he become leader earlier and stayed longer. And none of Jack Lynch's successors came within shouting distance of an overall majority.
Largely as a result of a single-minded tour of the country, he won his first general election against all expectations in 1969. And, in 1977, he had popular and parliamentary majorities unequalled at any time by any party leader of any persuasion.
He and Dr Hillery negotiated Ireland's entry to the European Community.
He was later to lead the negotiations which ended with membership of the European Monetary System and the break with sterling.
He convinced a stubborn Edward Heath that the Republic had a legitimate interest in the affairs of Northern Ireland, arguing that policies which ignored nationalist grievances could lead to disaster, North and South.
At the same time he persuaded the party and the electorate in the Republic that negotiation, not intervention, was the way to resolve the Northern conflict and, before being defeated in 1973, he and his battered government had charted the route to Sunningdale and a power-sharing executive.
But his name was air-brushed from the party's records - barely mentioned in leaders' speeches or at official functions - for more than a decade after his resignation in 1979.
Audiences were thus reminded that, in the 13 years of his leadership, he had faced criticism and suspicion from within which would have been unthinkable while de Valera and Lemass held office.
Was it diffidence or a sense of loyalty to the party which convinced him to allow Micheal O Morain to remain as Minister for Justice while the Arms Crisis developed around him?
O Morain was unwilling or unable to act on the information being given to him by the secretary of the department, Peter Berry. He neither passed it to Jack Lynch nor set up further investigations.
By the time Jack Lynch accepted his resignation on grounds of ill health, the damage had been done: Haughey and Blaney dismissed and accused, with others, of conspiracy to import arms; Boland and O Morain resigned; the party heading for defeat in 1973.
The case against Blaney was dismissed in the District Court; the other defendants were found not guilty by a jury in the High Court and acquitted. But that was not the end of the affair.
Outside the Four Courts, Haughey addressed his supporters as "fellow patriots" and challenged those who were responsible "for this debacle" to do the honourable thing: it was a clear call for Jack Lynch's resignation.
The irony was that Haughey had claimed in court that he had not taken part in an attempt to import arms.
But from the moment of his discharge, and for many years afterwards, he campaigned as if he had - and the "fellow patriots" knew it.
In the circumstances, Jack Lynch's decision to appoint him to the front bench in 1975 was all but inexplicable. The excuse that Haughey had served his time in the wilderness was threadbare. The prize for the campaign among "fellow patriots" was in sight. Loyalty to a colleague and supporter probably explained his most serious economic error: support for the party's election manifesto in 1977.
The manifesto was largely inspired by his adviser, Martin O'Donoghue, to whom - as Minister for Economic Planning and Development - he then entrusted its implementation.
The manifesto was rightly criticised as a bargain basement approach to the electorate. It was a set of promises which should not have been made and should certainly not have been kept.
The argument was that the package, which included the abolition of domestic rates and tax on cars, would stimulate the economy and create demand for Irish goods and services.
It was, instead, the beginning of a slide which the governments of the 1980s tried to arrest with a growing sense of desperation as inflation rose and imports increased.
But the campaign against Jack Lynch inside the party had less to do with the 1977 manifesto than with his conciliatory attitude to Northern affairs and a feeling among his opponents that, for them, time was running out.
It is now becoming clearer that events in the late 1970s were influenced at least as much (if not more) by the state of Haughey's personal finances than by the state of the party or the country.
Jack Lynch will be remembered as a modernising, but moderate, leader who laid a steadying hand on both party and country when security and stability, if not survival, were under threat.
When he retired, one of his opponents, Liam Cosgrave, said he was the most popular leader since Daniel O'Connell.
The comparison is worth repeating: both contributed with courage and insight to the development of constitutional politics; neither set out to satisfy the zealots.
Jack Lynch is survived by his wife Mairin, brother and sisters.
Jack Lynch: born 1917; died October, 1999