Arthur Green:Arthur Green, who has died aged 78, was a former under secretary in the Northern Ireland department of education whose distinguished career in the public service included the posts of secretary to both the Cameron commission and the Scarman tribunal in the early years of the Troubles.
Born into a Quaker family in Belfast, he was educated at Friends School, Lisburn, Leighton Park School, Reading, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he took a degree in modern history.
He also studied, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at Haverford College, Philadelphia, taking a Masters in philosophy. He later spent a year at Harvard where he was a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Affairs.
He joined the Northern Ireland civil service in 1952, and was assistant secretary in the department of finance from 1972 to 1978, and under secretary at education from 1983 to 1987. He served for a period as head of the Northern Ireland Court Service.
His lifelong interest in education, literature and politics flourished after his retirement. He served on the Council of the British Council from 1993 to 2000 and was an active member of the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations.
While never a unionist with a capital U, he saw himself as more British than Irish, and more Atlanticist than European. In the 1990s he joined the Conservative Party and was for a time active in that organisation in south Down. He was a founder member of the independent study group, the Cadogans, where his contributions on cultural identity, education and related matters were particularly valued.
His writing for publication included 19 entries in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He retained his interest in the civil service, and was a resolute defender of it against the more sweeping criticisms levelled by some historians, basing his views on detailed examination of methods of recruitment and performance.
He also found time in retirement to spend six winters in Poland teaching English to college students, and to appear on the BBC's Mastermind quiz programme where his chosen subject was John Buchan.
His combined interest in politics and literature led him at one point to visit Tom Paulin to discuss the poet's verses on Northern Ireland. The result of the encounter was several lines in Paulin's poem And Where Do You Stand on the National Question? which describe the visitor thus:
"he's civil and clever,
a flinty mandarin . . . ...
I imagine him
as the state's intelligence,
a lean man in a linen suit
who has come to question me
for picking up a pen
and taking myself a shade seriously."
Elsewhere the poem outlines the visitor's views on "the national question" in lines which summarise them with poetic accuracy:
"These islands are stepping stones
to a metropolitan home,
an archipelago that's strung
America and Europe."
Soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous, Arthur Green was a very civil and civilised public servant, never a bureaucrat; a bookman and a man of letters, not of red tape.
He is survived by his wife Rosemary, two sons and a grandson.
Arthur Green: born November 12th, 1928; died November 16th, 2006.