POLITICS: Deaglán de Bréadún reviews Patrick Hillery: The Official Biographyby John Walsh, New Island, 609 pp. €29.95
THE LATE PADDY HILLERY was first elected to the Dáil in 1951 and retired from public life in 1990. In the course of a career lasting almost 40 years he held four cabinet posts: Education, Industry and Commerce, Labour and External (later Foreign) Affairs. He became the first Irish member of the European Commission, where he was appointed vice-president as well as having responsibility for Social Affairs. He succeeded Cearbhall Ó Dalaigh as president of Ireland in 1976 without a contest, serving two seven-year terms, and lived out a contented retirement until his death last April, just prior to his 85th birthday.
Had he remained in national politics instead of going to Brussels in 1973, Hillery might have succeeded Jack Lynch as leader of Fianna Fáil. Admirers would say he was the best taoiseach we never had. His critics would accuse him of falling short on energy and dynamism when he was head of state.
Dr John Walsh is an historian with Trinity College Dublin and his book is based in large part on in-depth interviews with his subject as well as access to the former president's papers, including transcripts of tapes Dr Hillery recorded between 1969 and 1982.
It's fascinating to discover that Tony Benn is not the only top politician to have kept an oral record of his activities, and Walsh writes: "This material took the form of a diary, although it does not form a continuous narrative; the records begin following the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and essentially conclude before the end of his second term as president".
Although he held important positions and high office, Hillery was a reticent and even shy man. Partly this was official discretion of a kind that seems a little old-fashioned in today's world of 24/7 media and instant memoirs. But there was also a strong element of personal reserve and a wish to retain his own and his family's privacy.
It must have been all the more distressing for him, therefore, when elements of the vast media army which accompanied pope John Paul II on his visit to Ireland in the autumn of 1979 became seized with the notion that the Irish president was having an affair and keeping a mistress - or maybe two - at his official residence in Áras an Uachtaráin and that his wife Maeve was taking a case for legal separation.
The author provides a whole chapter on the episode, giving us Hillery's perspective. The great strength of this book is that we receive the testimony of someone who was, in media terms, a largely silent partner in the process of government for nearly 40 years. Walsh is a very sympathetic narrator who also writes exceptionally well.
Taken aback by the strength and persistence of the rumours, despite the lack of evidence to back them up, Hillery called in the editors of three daily newspapers - including The Irish Times - and the head of news at RTÉ and read a statement to them. But they insisted that he hold a press conference with the political correspondents. His efforts to confine the story to a simple denial that he was about to resign were undermined and the allegations about his marriage became a full-scale media event. But the story began to die away gradually after that.
Walsh reveals that, right to the end of his life, Hillery remained bitter because the editors refused to cooperate and he said in an interview with the author two years ago: "The editors were a miserable lot, they took no responsibility. I have nothing but contempt for them still, they wouldn't take it on themselves to believe me. Ah, they said, you'll have to talk to the journalists."
Hillery believed it was Charles Haughey who had circulated the rumours. He based this, in part, on remarks Haughey made when receiving his seal of office as taoiseach on December 11th, 1979. When Hillery asked him to approve funding for a press officer at the Áras, partly to deal with any future rumours, Haughey replied: "It is all over now."
Without a hint of irony, Haughey said that he had himself been the subject of unfounded rumours about his finances. But it is still unclear that Haughey was the guilty party and one wonders why Hillery apparently never confronted him on the issue.
There is much else in this book that makes it essential reading for anyone interested in modern Irish politics. The North erupted some six weeks after Hillery became Minister for External Affairs in 1969 and, at the time of the Arms Crisis the following year, he advocated sending commando units across the Border to protect vulnerable Catholic areas, providing back-up to the British Army. We are told he was denounced as excessively moderate by no less a person than defence minister Jim Gibbons who reportedly said: "You are accepting the Border."
FROM THE INTERVIEWS and his trawl of the papers and tapes, Walsh gives us a wealth of absorbing background detail to different aspects of Hillery's career, such as the stormy 1971 ardfheis when he stood by Jack Lynch against the Kevin Boland faction with the immortal line: "Ye can have Boland, but ye can't have Fianna Fáil." (The author changes it to "You" but "Ye" is how I remember it.)
The episode which, in the public mind, probably reflects most credit on Hillery, was his refusal to take calls on the night of January 27th, 1982 from Haughey, Brian Lenihan and their associates.
The Fine Gael-led coalition had just lost a key budget vote over its proposed tax on children's shoes and Fianna Fáil was trying to persuade the president to exercise his constitutional prerogative by refusing to dissolve the Dáil and allow Haughey to form a government without a general election.
We are told that Haughey had already mentioned this to Hillery when he "sidled up" to him at the National Concert Hall some months earlier and said: "Did you know that the president can refuse an election?"
Hillery replied that he was well aware of it. In fact, he had discussed the issue in the past with Éamon de Valera who advised that, "it would be a very foolish president who would do that".
But Hillery wasn't solely motivated by principle, he had also done the numbers and calculated that, having refused to support the incumbent coalition, the Limerick Socialist Jim Kemmy would not back Haughey either. He told the author: "If the Dáil cannot produce a taoiseach, where are we?" He said that when Haughey proposed calling to the Áras in person, "I told them bar the gates." In the end, the Dáil was dissolved and Haughey came back as taoiseach after the general election for a brief period of nine months.
But these events came back to haunt Fianna Fáil during the 1990 presidential-election campaign when the party's candidate, Brian Lenihan, tried to deny having contacted the Áras that night. Haughey appealed to the president for help and was told: "Don't come near me."
The book is full of similar vignettes but it also provides much useful background on Hillery's entry to politics and the different phases of his varied career.
Mysteries remain: why did he agree to a second term as president when he clearly hated the job? How could someone so reluctant to enter politics end up being so successful at the game? But puzzling over such issues is part of the pleasure of reading what is definitely the political book of the season and a must-buy for the current-affairs anorak in your life.
• Deaglán de Bréadún is Political Correspondent with The Irish Timesand author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, published by Collins Press (2nd Edition, 2008)
