It is hard to believe that John Boland is dead at the cruelly young age of 55. It is harder still to recall that it is all of 11 years since he was last a member of Dail Eireann, and that he left politics at the age of 44 - by which time he had achieved more in his career than most of us will hope to achieve in a lifetime.
In a real rather than rhetorical sense John Boland was a politician who did make a difference. He made things happen. He revelled in a challenge and he insisted on change.
His biggest impact was undoubtedly in the Public Service. It is important to recall that the Public Service in those days was deeply conservative, living in a climate where staying out of trouble was the one guarantee of eventual promotion before the safe pension. It was a Civil Service which all too often regarded the public as an enemy to be kept in ignorance, where no mistake could ever be admitted and where politicians came and went but the Civil Service and its ethos went on forever.
It was this ethos John Boland challenged. First of all he got rid of the concept of "Buggin's turn" as far as the filling of top jobs was concerned. Fixed terms were set, outsiders were invited to apply and serving your time was no longer a guarantee of automatic promotion.
Today all of that is taken for granted. But at the time it was resisted, sometimes openly, more usually through subtle obstruction by those who felt they had most to lose.
John Boland also believed the public had a right to know the names of the civil servants with whom they were dealing. It may seem like ages ago, but the then culture of the Civil Service put a great store on protecting the anonymity of its officials. In practice, this meant that the public could be shifted from pillar to post, with no one responsible and ultimately with no one to take the blame when things did not get done or when shabby treatment had been meted out.
It was a charter for inefficiency and unaccountability. It gave lazy civil servants a shield behind which they could hide and short-changed the public who had a right to better service. Nor was it any better for TDs and senators who were often utterly frustrated in pursuit of the legitimate inquiries on behalf of their constituents. Many of us remember the illegible squiggles at the end of official letters, the refusal of officials to be identified on phone calls and the refusal indeed on many occasions even to take a call.
Many people, including some top civil servants, knew this to be the situation and knew that unless personal accountability by civil servants to individual members of the public was established, no genuine Civil Service reform could take place.
But it was John Boland who tackled the issue head on - and once again met with ferocious resistance. It was as if a God-given right was being challenged, but Boland ploughed on, not always with tact, but always with determination.
But the biggest change of all was the establishment of the Ombudsman. It is easy to forget that the first parliamentary attempt to establish an Ombudsman was contained in a Private Members' Bill brought in by Fergus O'Brien, John Boland's closest political friend, back in the 1970s. It failed then, but Boland took up the running a few years later and made it a reality.
John Boland did two other things which were crucial. He ensured that the new office had adequate funding to get it up and running.
He knew there was no great love for the new institution in many parts of the Civil Service and that it would not take too much persuasion for funding to be cut should there be a need for the tightening of belts in the future.
But second and most important was the naming of Michael Mills as our first Ombudsman. Michael Mills was the most respected political correspondent of the day, a man of huge integrity and seen to be independent of all parties. More than that he was an outsider, beholden to nobody, a natural communicator and somebody who gave the new office an identifiable and acceptable public face - in short, somebody with whom the public could identify and in whom they could have full confidence.
In much of what he did as a minister, John Boland was often cast as anti-Civil Service. He was anything but. He wanted a strong, efficient and innovative public service, but to get such he knew that feathers had to be ruffled, established groups taken on and bitter battles fought. It was the true measure of John Boland that he knew this and never shirked a battle.
Nobody could accuse John Boland of being an easy taskmaster. On the contrary, he could strike fear and trembling all round as he drove his colleagues to greater efforts. This was as true of the way in which he treated his parliamentary colleagues, his colleagues around the Cabinet table, as it was of the way he treated his Civil Servants. Bruising encounters were the order of the day. But for the most part people survived and survived with a healthy respect for their minister.
John Boland would have been amused at some of the softer things written about him this week. He did not set out to be liked. He was shy and could be awkward. He had a short temper and could say rough and brutal things to those who fell short of his expectations - or at times even to those who annoyed him. And there were times when that was not a difficult thing to do.
But he could also be great company. He would cut through hypocrisy or pretence, had a razor sharp wit, an eye for the absurd and was not given to taking hostages. He was old-fashioned in his sense of camaraderie and collegiality and he believed politics to be a worthwhile and a good profession.
He had cut his own political teeth in local government and never forgot the lessons he learned there or underestimated the importance of local issues, or indeed the importance of the individual voter. He had little time, it has to be said, for some of the new breed of politicians who came into Fine Gael in the early 1980s, many of whom had no local government background, and he could be abrupt with those he regarded as being in too much of a hurry. He could sometimes be wrong about people, more often than not he was right.
Drapier would like to extend his sympathy to Kay, John and Grace on the death of somebody who genuinely did make a difference.