`We have never really had a tradition of publishing memoirs, particularly from civil servants or politicians, and although those we have tend to be self-serving we are better off with them than without them." Thus John Horgan, professor of journalism at DCU, as he launched My Parents and Other Rebels by Michael Kevin O'Doherty at the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin on Wednesday. He said he hoped some people would find a discreet way of bypassing the Official Secrets Act when the contents were no longer matters of controversy.
Horgan came across O'Doherty when he was researching his biography of Sean Lemass, to whom O'Doherty was private secretary for an almost unprecedented 10 years from 1934. Seamus and Kitty O'Doherty, the author's parents, were up to their necks in the War of Independance and its aftermath. His mother acted as a republican courier during the Civil War and there was a time in America on Sinn Fein business. Amid all the family anecdotes and reminiscences of rebels and statesmen, the book reproduces a letter from Charles Haughey to the author dated 1984 and thanking him for the present of a portrait of Dan Breen. He is very pleased to be displaying such an interesting piece of Irish history in Abbeville, Haughey writes. Should Justice Moriarty be told?