Despite a controversial first encounter, a long friendship soon developed with Roy Jenkins, writes Garret FitzGerald
My first encounter with Roy Jenkins arose in controversial circumstances. He was Home Secretary in early 1976 when the IRA hunger striker, Frank Stagg, died in prison in Britain.
Stagg's wife had asked us to ensure that she would have custody of his body - and had also sought police protection in England against threats from the IRA, who were anxious to use his funeral in Britain and in Ireland for a propaganda demonstration.
However, the British authorities appeared willing to divert the body to them rather than to his wife, on the basis of what seemed to have been an agreement that the IRA demonstrations would not start until the body arrived in Ireland.
As Minister for Foreign Affairs I sent a message to Roy Jenkins that unless within three hours his wife was given custody of his body, so that she could make whatever funeral arrangements she wished, I would call a press conference to expose the collaboration of the British authorities - at whatever level, local or national, these might be - with the IRA. The threat worked.
A few months later he asked me to lunch in London to discuss his proposed nomination as President of the European Commission, and from then onwards we became good friends. His fascination with British political history in the 19th and 20th centuries inevitably extended to Irish affairs, which had dominated British politics for much of the period between the 1880's and the 1920's. He particularly enjoyed teasing out aspects of the Anglo-Irish relationship during that period, and discussing the way different British politicians had handled - or mishandled - Irish affairs.
A decade or so ago he asked me to help him launch in Dublin his book on Gladstone, of which he sent me a proof copy. (For the fun of it I returned it to him with several hundred corrections - the need for most if not all of which, his proof readers would of course have detected in any event).
His puckish sense of humour was well-reflected in a footnote to that work in which he told how Gladstone in his 80's was knocked down by a mad cow while on a walk near his home in Cheshire. The cow was shot, but its head was mounted in a local pub, over a legend stating: "This cow died in the campaign against Home Rule in Ireland."
Early last year he came here to discuss his last book, on cities that he had visited, which included Dublin, and he clearly enjoyed dining with some people I invited to meet him who had special knowledge of our city. The last time I saw him was at lunch in his country home outside London on an idyllic summer day six months ago. Politics, of course, is a chancy profession. Roy himself might have become - and would very much have liked to have become - a successor to the many prime ministers about whom he wrote so brilliantly, but luck was against him.
I always thought that was a pity: he would have been a distinguished holder of that office, with a greater empathy with Irish affairs than some others. However, his subsequent period in Europe enabled him to lay one of the foundation stones of European integration - the establishment of the European Monetary System in 1979, which was the forerunner of the euro.
Britain did not join it until 1990 but through adherence to it in 1979 Ireland belatedly established its monetary independence of Britain, 57 years after the achievement of political independence. I think that must have tickled Roy's sense of history.