At a cabinet meeting held in Áras an Uachtaráin after members of the national coalition Government had received their seals of office from President Hillery on the evening of March 14th, 1973, Ministers learned that the British cabinet would be meeting the next morning and would probably then approve a White Paper on the future government of Northern Ireland.
A subcommittee of the cabinet was at once appointed to prepare a note for approval by the Government at 11am the next day, to be transmitted to the British cabinet during the course of their meeting.
I prepared a draft when I returned home at 2.30am. The subcommittee met at 9.30am and the Government approved the note when it met at 11am. The text reached Downing Street at 11.45am.
The Government also decided that I should meet the British prime minister and foreign secretary in Downing Street that evening so as to develop our views further, before I continued to Brussels for my first EC ministerial meeting.
One of the issues then under discussion in London was how best to protect human rights in Northern Ireland. There had been a suggestion that this might best be done by a committee of MPs.
In the course of our meeting I suggested to Ted Heath and Sir Alec Douglas-Home that such rights might best be protected through the judicial system: this had been the situation in Ireland since the foundation of our State, and in Northern Ireland the high court also had the power, albeit never exercised, of declaring ultra vires discrimination against the minority there.
Ted Heath greeted this suggestion by exclaiming, "What! Her Majesty's judges overruling Her Majesty in Parliament? Constitutionally impossible!"
That wasn't the last occasion that I learned about the unexpected rigidities in the unwritten British constitution!
Nine months later Ted Heath chaired the Sunningdale conference on Northern Ireland, which was to last two days but in fact continued for four. He was an excellent chairman who showed total commitment to the exercise - so much so that when the Italian prime minister arrived at Chequers for a meeting with him on the third day, I heard him instruct his staff to send the prime minister to bed, adding that he would see him for afternoon tea.
What was particularly striking about Ted Heath, however, was his obvious awkwardness and shyness, as a result of which during conference coffee and tea breaks he tended to stand on his own, beside the urns, radiating discomfort. On a number of occasions I joined him, but found that he was not adept at small talk. On the other hand, he could on occasion be very amusing - and his shoulders would heave up and down at his own witticisms.
Unhappily for Northern Ireland, and I think for Britain, in the snap election that he called a month later to face down the miners' strike, he was defeated.
As I then suspected, and as we now know, the new prime minister, Harold Wilson, for a period contemplated withdrawal from Northern Ireland. And, faced with the Ulster workers' strike in May, his weak secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, caved in to pressure from the British army that they would not be forced to intervene to end the strike, with the result that the power-sharing executive collapsed.
Ted Heath subsequently made it clear that had he remained in office, he would have instructed the army to remove the barricades at the outset. I believe he would have done so, and probably with success.
Five years ago I attended a dinner in London in honour of Ted Heath's parliamentary golden jubilee. At the table were Lord Carrington (who proposed the toast to Ted Heath), Margaret Thatcher, and William Hague, then Tory party leader, with their spouses, and also Norma Major (John Major was lecturing in the US) and Mary Soames, Churchill's surviving daughter.
During the meal Ted Heath sat there glumly, failing consistently to respond to attempts by Norma Major and Mary Soames to engage him in conversation. Clearly he was preoccupied with his response to the after-dinner toast, but when his turn came to speak his remarks were, in fact, witty and to the point; he even managed a complimentary sentence about Margaret Thatcher.
Early last year, when my book Reflections on the Irish State was launched in London by former foreign secretary Lord Howe, Ted Heath and Peter Carrington both turned up for the occasion. That was the last time I saw one of Britain's strangest prime ministers - a man whose great achievement, of course, was securing the British parliament's approval for UK accession to the European Community.
That cleared the way for Irish accession. It had been the almost universal view here that the disruption to our economy that would be caused by the application of the EC Common External Tariff to our imports from Britain precluded Irish accession without Britain.
But, curiously, when a year or so later Wilson's government sought to renegotiate British membership, raising the possibility of Britain leaving the Community, there was agreement here that in that event we would remain a member. We just seemed to have shifted psychologically from being British- oriented to becoming European.