A More Complex Truth: Selected Writings. By Nuala O'Faolain New Island. Pp 400. €15.99

THIS COLLECTION of newspaper columns selected by Anthony Glavin serves to remind me how much Nuala O’Faolain is missed. In these days of our country’s pilgrimage through recession, joblessness, Nama land and the secret horrors of children who die in the care of the HSE, we are at the loss of her intellect and compassion.

Often, in the pages of The Irish Timesin her well-crafted prose, Nuala O'Faolain set out ideas and thoughts that were difficult to express and yet were commonly shared by the rest of us.

I am reminded of this when she describes the ability of Frank Sinatra to put shape on the “great splodges and wodges of desire and jealousy and disillusion and regret and hope” of adolescence. In her weekly columns, she put shape on the growing pains that Ireland underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. Through the turbulence she was able to articulate a way of seeing the world that was both truthful and optimistic.

She drew her inspiration from the people around her. An early RTÉ television series made in black and white and entitled Plain Taleswas based on a series of interviews she did with ordinary people. So simple an idea and yet the result was memorable.

Her newspaper columns regularly began with references to unknown friends or acquaintances, to marginalised people like Travellers, immigrants, the poor. She was fierce in asserting the primacy of the individual in the face of powerful political and religious forces but hers was not the narrow, anti-Church perspective of many liberals. She seemed to share John McGahern’s view that, deep down, Irish people are pagan in their outlook.

“For myself, I like it that people persist in mingling the everyday and the otherworldly,” she wrote. “It is an ancient and a universal practice. And although, on a public level, one would like Ireland to be run in a reasonable, pluralist, modern way, there is more to living here than being a citizen. There is a capaciousness not so much of belief as of endlessly suspended judgment, which to my mind is precious.”

Hers is a searing honesty so there are passages that are hard to read. At times in her life, that honesty had a cruel edge, not only for others, but for herself. It was absolute in its integrity and that was absolutely reassuring to those of us for whom her writings illuminated the world.

On a lighter level, sometimes it’s the zest of her writing that brings alive the past and gives a fresh slant on it. St Patrick’s Day, for example, the real one of my childhood, lives on in this collection. Nowadays we may have mime artists and Catalan acrobats and Native-Indian mask dancers in the streets of our capital city, but “it took a real Dubliner”, she reminisced, “to enjoy 25 bread vans followed by a flatbed truck with a frozen swing band on it”. I didn’t know Nuala O’Faolain. In fact the only time I saw her close up was when she was having a drink alone in a pub on a summer afternoon but, like many of my generation, I knew her through her writing.

I think the newspaper column was the form that suited her literary gift best. In the foreword, Fintan O’Toole claims that she was “one of the greatest columnists ever to inhabit the English language”. I have a more homely image of her. In accepting the tough discipline of the newspaper column, she became the warm, wise woman at whose skirts we could sit and luxuriate in the richness of her talent.

Liz McManus is a Labour TD and spokeswoman on communications, energy and natural resources.