RIP

Garret FitzGerald

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 2 Comments

Some years ago, when Ciaran Lawlor was auditor of the Literary & Historical Society, I was asked if I’d like to deliver a paper to the society. I, of course, said yes and used the opportunity to speak pretty forcefully (there are those who will say crazily) about the need for the EU to be an active (military) force for good in the world, because no-one else would do it.

One of the respondents, the one who cut me right down to size, was Garret FitzGerald (who served as a vice-president of the society) who very sadly passed away this week.

Garret may have destroyed many of my arguments with considerable eloquence but he was also the one who before and after I delivered the paper was full of amazing stories and funny lines about his various adventures, and when he spoke of them, they did sound like adventures. He had no sense of superiority about him and engaged with everyone as equals.

I felt honoured then and I feel even more honoured now. More than that though I feel lucky, lucky that I have lived in a state that was home to such a man, that I had the fortune to meet and speak with him and had the opportunity to experience a firm intellectual drubbing (good for the soul) from him. I feel lucky to have lived in a time when his leadership was a force for such good in the country.

There’s just no replacing Garret FitzGerald. We are, as a nation, impoverished by his passing.

A Note on Peter Hart And A Link To Mike Cosgrave's Thoughts

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

A very fair note on Peter Hart who died at the very young age of 46 this week.

Having dealt with Peter while working at Mercier, I have to say I found him very professional and exceptionally courteous.  While I didn’t always agree with his perspective and felt he had serious questions to answer on a number of points, I nonetheless thought he also raised some valid and searching questions about our history that warranted answering.

One less questioning voice in Irish History.

The problem of his ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the War of Independence in Cork still rouses amateur historians to fury. Ireland being a small country, many of his critics are related to the men whose motivation Hart criticised. Sometimes, I think his critics protest too much� – just or not, the War of Independence was a nasty and unpleasant terrorist war in which men on both sides were shot down in night and died in the cold wet ditches.� Hart’s interpretation may have swung too far, but there are still many people in Ireland who are not comfortable admitting how our state was born. Dealing with our past – and in the case of Northern Ireland, our recent past – is part of the contribution we can make to understanding and resolving conflict in the world.

via Peter Hart « Mike Cosgrave.