Garret FitzGerald
This piece started life as a 1991 Observer review of Garret FitzGerald’s autobiography All In a Life (Macmillan).
I Have Long found Irish politics both fascinating and mystifying. From the Phoenix Park assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882 to the Easter Rising in 1916 they provided a crucial and mostly unhelpful background to the careers of my main biographical subjects, Dilke and Asquith. In my second period as Home Secretary (1974-6) terrorism of Irish origin was obtrusive, and I provided a locus classicus for the permanence of the provisional by introducing the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, which is still on the Statute Book nineteen years later.
As President of the European Commission three years later I had dealings with three Taoiseachs, paid a dozen or more visits to Ireland, and leant over backwards, as any British President should have done, to cultivate my Dublin relationships and to encourage and enjoy the Irish pleasure at leap-frogging over Britain’s semi-detachment into the mainstream of full European commitment. I did not find this difficult, for my natural prejudices, such as they are, are much more green than orange. I am a poor union ist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either.
This does not stem from any condescending view that the Irish should be left to work off their perverse provincialism on each other. Indeed, on the early occasions when I met Garret FitzGerald it was his cosmopolitanism which, together with his charm, most struck me. It was he who made me feel provincial. I remember a day in Strasbourg for the opening by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of the new European Parliament building, which in fact belonged to the Council of Europe and was merely graciously loaned to the Parliament. FitzGerald, as Irish Foreign Minister, was currently president of the Council of Europe’s ministerial group. After a Strasbourg civic banquet he responded to Mayor Pflimlin’s somewhat florid oratory with an elegance of French diction that matched the style of the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville. At the afternoon ceremony, again in French, he was the only speaker who was neither too long (like Giscard) nor too fractured (like me). There, I thought, spoke the Ireland of Joyce and Synge and the Countess Markiewicz.
Nevertheless, the Dublin political and official world is one that is very close-knit and interbred, and FitzGerald was born and brought up at the centre of it, even though his mother was an Ulster Protestant, but one so dedicated to the Nationalist cause that she took the anti-Treaty side in the great Irish split of 1922 and deprecated her husband’s participation in the first government of the Irish Free State under W. T. Cosgrave. Desmond FitzGerald, the husband and father, was half poet and half politician, with a cast of feature and cut of hair somewhat reminiscent of a less forceful Hugh Gaitskell, who as Minister of External Affairs presented the Free State’s application to join the League of Nations in 1923, but who subsequently faded as a leading politician.
He brought up Garret FitzGerald (who was the youngest of a large family) in a large but socially indeterminate house on the southern edge of Dublin, sent him to a good Jesuit school and on to University College, Dublin, which as part of the National University was by the 1940s as much the core of Dublin’s future intellectual and political life as the relatively alien Trinity College, Dublin, was its topographical core. Indeed my impression throughout these memoirs is that UCD was as effective in putting FitzGerald in the middle of a magic circle as ever Eton was in Harold Macmillan’s heyday. It was FitzGerald’s peculiar strength that while he was completely at home within this circle he never allowed himself to be bounded by it or to absorb too much of its values.
His first job was good training for not being narrowly bounded. He joined Aer Lingus and worked out the first schedules of the nascent airline. This gave him a continuing familiarity with timetables which enabled him to confound his Russian hosts on a first visit as Foreign Minister during a logistical discussion of his provincial tour by pointing out that the 4.15 for Baku would just make it possible to catch the 7.30 to Irkutsk. In the interval, however, his twelve years with Aer Lingus had been followed by a sixteen-year abstention from flying. This should not be damagingly attributed to the inside knowledge he has acquired. It was in deference to the dislike for flying machines of his wife, to whose wishes and wisdom he constantly pays deserved regard.
When he became Foreign Minister in 1973 both FitzGeralds had to change their habits. The time when Ernest Bevin could be a sea-travel-only Foreign Secretary was twenty years past, apart from the fact that it would have been particularly irritating for an Irish minister to have to go everywhere through London. The sacrifice was well worthwhile, for FitzGerald’s four years as Foreign Minister stand equal in my view to his two periods (one of nine months, the other of four years) as Taoiseach. In the higher office he tried to lay to rest more of the ghosts of Irish history than anyone for three hundred years, showed imaginative cross-border sympathy, moved the South away from the limitations of a confessional state, and after infinite patience got the limited achievement of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. But as Foreign Minister he made Ireland not merely an official but an integral part of the European Community, an honorary member of the somewhat exclusive club of the original six. His conduct of the Irish Presidency, which came within two years of joining, was a model example of triumphing over the limitations of small-power resources to exercise skilled and authoritative diplomacy. This was not the motive, but FitzGerald succeeded in making London look peripheral to Europe, while Dublin was metropolitan.