THE honour of paying a tribute to Colm O hEocha is one I approach with great diffidence, for Colm was a public man who was also very much a private man. And while I can claim to have known the private Colm a little close up, O Eocha the public figure I could only observe at a distance.
Not that he was one ever to create such a distance; but it belonged somehow, I think, to the quiet integrity of his approach to the task in hand. And what a variety of tasks they were! A scientist and a teacher of science, he was also an imaginative administrator with a clear vision of what the academy, in the humanities as in the sciences, needed to realise its potential, and above all of its potential of service to the community.
He was also, in his public persona, seen by many as a political neutral. He was certainly trusted by political leaders, often more than they trusted each other. They entrusted him with several commissions of delicacy and importance in areas where the sciences and the arts touch the public arena, notably when, in the early 1980s, he presided over the New Ireland Forum.
To these I might add another taste: he often re resented his university internationally, not least in Europe. He was indeed a man of Europe and a man of the world in the truest sense. To pay adequate tribute to his work and achievements one would need to be as many sided and multi talented as Colm himself or else to draw on the witness of those who served with him on many fields over the past 30 years. Enough to say bent meruit de patria.
Colm was a man of commitment - a word which sometimes dangerously suggests strong but narrow and exclusivist loyalty. There was none of that in Colm. I have little hesitation in saying that with him commitment found its root in love: a love of his duchas, of the people and places with whom and for whom he worked, a love of the past - not as a static obsession but as a dynamic leading to future action.
His commitment to the Irish language, to science, to the university and the city of Galway where it lives and has its being - none of these was closed or self sufficient. His love of science was coupled with a very real love of literature and the arts; his regard for old wisdom and tradition led to a passionate faith in the potential of the young; and he always saw the university as a nursery of enlightened service to the wider community.
At the heart of all this was his loving commitment to his wife Daiden and his children; to them he gave much and gained much of strength and happiness.
Another of Colm's great human qualities, and one of the most valuable to himself and others was his great sense of fun. Colm loved to recall the inscription he saw on the coat of arms of a Canadian university: it was from the first verse of the 121st psalm inscribed in Scottish Gaelic: Mo shula togalm suas - I lift up my eyes.
Colm's eyes were always raised to the new horizon, and beyond. Go raibh an solas a gile fos ag soilsiu na sul aige anois.