An Irishman's Diary

We were a blessed generation. A great majority of us would never have seen the inside of a university but for the culture created by the free education schemes introduced by Donogh O'Malley in 1967.

Education was always a passion in rural and small-town Ireland, but few could afford it beyond primary level. By the time we came along, secondary schooling was free and the numbers going on to third level from our small town had risen from an average of about two a year to double figures.

It was the early 1970s and, fully aware of the privilege, we took to university life with gusto. It helped that few of our parents had been to university so they generally assumed we were always bent over books in the library.

Ballaghaderreen had a very active drama society, and I was hooked. So, arriving at UCG (now NUIG), I joined Dramsoc. Other new members that year included Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen. Over the following years we would eat, drink, sleep and - so frequently - row over theatre. The fights were mainly between Garry and myself - she the true artist, I the would-be acknowledged legislator. And always in between, lovely Marie was trying to keep the peace.

Garry was born in Ballaghaderreen where her father Oliver was headmaster at the vocational school. Her mother Carmel is from the town and both parents had an active interest in the drama society.

Marie came from a farm near Ballymote and we got to know her through auditions that first October. Indeed, there is the story I would tell when asked what my credentials were to be a theatre critic - as I was at the Irish Press for five years until its demise in 1995.

Garry and I were persuaded to direct. She chose Brian Friel's The Loves of Cass Maguire - her first production. I chose the awful medieval morality play Everyman, which I co-directed with Triona Glacken, now school principal in Walkinstown. Everyman had a cast of 17 and lasted 20 minutes.

Marie was among the first we auditioned for those 17 roles. I turned her down. She went next door and Garry cast her as Cass Maguire. The rest, as they say, is history.

In just one of those heady years - by then all three of us were on the Dramsoc committee - we staged five full-length plays and eight one-acts. We spent an inordinate amount of time in Hynes's living room. Oliver, then chief executive of Galway VEC, and Carmel were wonderful to us, always, and we throve under their kindly eye.

During last term each year we crammed for exams there. After one marathon session I left that house at 4am. Next day I fell asleep during a second history paper, but survived.

It was on those visits to the Hynes's home that I first got to know Jerome, then a lively teenager full of intelligence, enthusiasm, and always, always in good humour. He was hugely interested in our theatrical activities.

And, truly, he never became to us, in the way of some teenagers to those not much older, Garry's pesky baby brother. He was, as he would always be, charming, positive, endearing. He was at secondary school then.

Not long afterwards he played a pivotal role in Garry's and the Druid Theatre company's early career. He allowed her genius (and Marie's and Mick Lally's and Sean McGinley's, as so many others) to flourish while he looked after administration. Besides, he was such a great brother. As is well known he went from Druid to the Wexford Festival Opera and became a major figure in so many other areas of arts life in Ireland.

He is dead now and chasms of grief have cracked open all over the place.

It is a decent custom to speak well of the dead, but where Jerome is concerned what has been written and what has been said is all true. He was truly an exceptional man, both publicly and privately. I wish I had actively valued him more to his face when he was alive, but I suppose I always thought there would be time for that. I had genuinely intended accepting his endlessly repeated invitations to attend the Wexford Opera Festival, even if I know little about opera, even if something always seems to happen in my line of work at that time of year.

Generally we met in Dublin at functions. In Lent 2003 I was invited to speak in St Iberius's Church in Wexford. First in the pews offering moral support were Jerome and his wife Alma. It was typical and I was not surprised, but I never found out how they knew I would be there.

His death, at 45, is such a tragedy, and so soon after his father's death too. Oliver, who was 84 and whom Jerome resembled so much in personality, passed away just a year ago.

The day Jerome was buried his eldest son Conor spoke, bravely, at the graveside of how just the week before his father showed him how to shake hands properly - "not too tight, not too loose". Conor commented that in the previous 24 hours he had had plenty of practice.

Trying to make sense of it all, he concluded that Jerome had been taken because God didn't simply want a good man, he wanted a great one. Well, he has that now surely.