THE WAS 67 years old, but I only knew him for the last year of his life. And yet in that year I grew to, know him as if he were a lifelong friend. A most charming, scholarly and caring man; a professional to his fingertips, who was most upset and apologetic that his radio script ran thirty seconds over time.
A man who is still fondly remembered for his Middle East dispatches of nearly fifty years ago for both Irish and British radio. A man whose broadcasting career had come full cycle in the past year, when he delivered a brilliant analysis of fifty years of the UN in the 1995 Open had guest lecture on RTE Radio, an equally brilliant overview of the last thousand years in his introductory talk to the series Millenium Minds and a warm and moving portrait of Beethoven later in the series.
The breadth of his knowledge was astounding. He became so enthusiastic about Millenium Minds (a series on the great minds of the past thousand years) that I had to restrain him gently and suggest that he would be only one of many contributors to the series (of course, I regret that restraint now. In one of several faxes to me from his new home in France, he suggested a list of 21 "minds" ranging from ibn al Haytham (the "lathe of mathematics") to Leonardo da Vinci to Eleanor Roosevelt. He felt he could make a case for them all.
There were two points he made very strongly to me. Firstly, the series should not confine itself to "our own little Judaen Christian corner of the world . . . and (second) we should be very mindful of gender balance and not write women out of the series, as historians have done over the years.
At the end of the "Open Mind" lecture on the UN a former UN colleague in the audience, paying tribute to Erskine, remembered him for giving to the UN the most brilliant one line definition of a much abused word - "development". "Development is about people," he said. "All else is technique."
Replying, Erskine in turn paid tribute to a wonderful teacher he had his own father (later President of Ireland). He recalled conversations with him on the drawingroom floor of their home where his father, who was then charged with a "reforestation" programme, would say while poring over the map: "We'll put trees here and here and there - but in the end of all, it is die people who must care for the trees. . ." "That," said Erskine Childers, "is where I learned what development is all about."
A most urbane man. A gentleman, a gentle man, a joy to work with. It is sad to think that that lovely, measured voice is no more. Sadder still to think that that lively, enthusiastic mind has been brought to such an abrupt rest. At least a small legacy remains on tape.