Once depicted as an out-of-date nationalist, Dr Martin Mansergh is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important contributors to the historic rapprochement between nationalism and unionism.
His importance was always known to the Fianna Fail leadership. It was acknowledged by Fine Gael in 1994 when Mr John Bruton, newly elected Taoiseach, asked him to become his adviser on Northern Ireland. Dr Mansergh politely (he is always polite) declined, and went with his new leader, Bertie Ahern, into opposition.
The cross-party invitation signals the regard in which Dr Mansergh is now held behind the scenes in Dublin political circles. As adviser to three Fianna Fail Taoisigh, he is regarded as the consistently most influential figure over the Government's approach to securing an IRA ceasefire and conducting the subsequent negotiations.
In the 1980s Dr Mansergh was seen and depicted by Fine Gael as an ultra-green zealot, plucked from the middle ranks of the Department of Foreign Affairs by Charles Haughey.
He was a curious find among the generally more Fine Gael-leaning Foreign Affairs officials. In his autobiography, Dr Garret FitzGerald describes him as a man "whose views seemed at times to be even more rhetorically republican than those of his boss".
He was the intellectual driving force on Northern Ireland behind the Fianna Fail-led governments of Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds and now Bertie Ahern. Yet in 1994, in the middle of the peace process, a Fine Gael Taoiseach sought his services to provide continuity to Dublin's Northern Ireland policy.
He is personally steeped in the AngloIrish question and has a deep understanding and personal feel for the Irish republican tradition. This understanding is said to have been vital in the securing of the IRA ceasefire.
Dr Mansergh is understood to have made a number of important personal contacts with republicans in advance of the ceasefire, although details of his role have never been clear.
His late father, the distinguished historian Nicholas Mansergh, wrote The Irish Ques- tion, and The Unresolved Question, a study of the making and unmaking of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1920-21. Tipperary-born and reared, Nicholas Mansergh's sympathy for Irish nationalism made him unusual among academics in Britain.
Martin Mansergh, too, is not outwardly a stereotypical Irish nationalist. His accent owes more to British public school and Oxford rather than Tipperary. Born on New Year's Eve, 1946, in Woking, Surrey, he went to public school in Canterbury. He spent all his school holidays in Ireland.
He read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, and earned his doctorate for a study of 18th-century France in the pre-revolutionary period. He moved back to the family farm in Tipperary in the early 1970s - the Mansergh family have been in the county since around 1700 and he still goes to the farm regularly at weekends - and joined the Department of Foreign Affairs as a third secretary in October 1974.
To those who knew his outlook, he stood out. This was a time that saw a major change in emphasis in the State's traditional Northern Ireland policy. The Fine Gael/Labour Coalition was making a virtue of being strong in its determination to combat the IRA, and was moving away from traditional nationalist rhetoric.
Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien was questioning the whole basis of traditional nationalism. The Minister for Defence, Paddy Donegan, called President O Dalaigh a "thundering disgrace" (or something similar) for referring emergency powers legislation to the Supreme Court. The Government mobilised the State's security forces to thwart Provisional plans to hold a massive show funeral for IRA hunger striker Frank Stagg.
The reality of Northern violence was challenging old assumptions. The Department of Foreign Affairs was central to selling this revised national position abroad, and within that department Martin Mansergh was not typical. He had moved towards a strong republican position, and came to Mr Haughey's attention in the late 1970s.
IT was on his 34th birthday - December 31st, 1980 - that Charles Haughey invited him to join the Department of the Taoiseach as a Principal Officer to assist in the co-ordination and preparation of speeches. When Fianna Fail went into opposition in 1981 he became the party's head of research.
Since then he has been with Fianna Fail as chief backroom eminence on the national question. Despite his being seen as "Haughey's man", Albert Reynolds immediately asked him to stay on when he took over. He was thus a pivotal figure in the run-up to the ceasefires and in the tortuous political path since.
He married a Scottish woman, Elizabeth Young, in 1969, and they have five children.