AN APPRECIATION:NUALA O'FAOLAIN'S great gift as a journalist was that she could write as Everywoman. More specifically, she could express herself as Everywoman in an Ireland that was emerging out of certainties that had been entrenched since the Famine and that was now stumbling its way towards new values and the 21st century.
She was, without doubt, one of the most eloquent and compelling writers in that college of voices that filled the opinion columns of The Irish Timesin the years in which I was privileged to be editor.
For a time, certainly, she was the most influential writer in the newspaper; not perhaps in regard to politics or public affairs but in the manner in which she touched upon and influenced the lives of ordinary men and women up and down the country.
Some days I would walk through the old newsroom, overlooking Fleet Street, as the post-boys would deliver the mail to the various desks. Most people got a few letters. But Nuala's mail came, literally, by the sackful. There were tales of sorrow and joy from people she had never met or known. There were Mass cards and holy medals, pictures of dogs and budgies, children's drawings, proposals of marriage and, inevitably, of course, occasional threats and abuse.
I had known her very slightly when she lectured at UCD in the 1960s. But it was in the mid-1980s, as I recall, that I found myself watching a short-lived series on RTÉ television in which she interviewed ordinary Irish women about their lives: a country housewife, a dry-cleaner from Ranelagh, a young widow. Her collaborators, as I recall, were Marian Finucane, Hilary Orpen and Betty Purcell. The programme was fascinating for the sheer simplicity of her narrative and the calm and respectful dignity with which she addressed her subjects.
She accepted an invitation to meet and talk over coffee one morning at the Merrion Inn. I was an assistant editor, running the opinion sections of The Irish Times, and I offered her a weekly column for an initial three-month trial period. Her first instinct was of uncertainty. "How do I know I can write?" she asked.
For all of her sophistication and intellectual strength, she was, as I came to understand, a woman racked with self-doubt. But this was at once her vulnerability as well as the thing that enabled her to use her great gifts to the full. She was often nervous of meeting people and she worried about the approval of her colleagues. Yet these were the qualities that enabled her to empathise with ordinary people's fears and hopes, their joys and successes, and the bittersweet experience of ups and downs that is everyday life for most of us.
Her column swiftly developed from a broadly feminist commentary to a narrative that spanned all aspects of the human condition. She wrote about communities under stress and in celebration; about the terrors of illness and violence and the institutionalised cruelty of indifferent bureaucracy. She wrote about the limitless ability of human beings to love and to forgive. She wrote about the hurt inflicted by arrogant people without principle or conscience. She wrote about the positive influence and the healing capacity of good people - good teachers, good guards, good religious, good families, good friends.
She wanted to prove that she could operate across that dividing line that good news journalists like to emphasise between comment and factual reportage. She did so brilliantly. Her reports from east Clare in the aftermath of the terrible murders of Imelda Riney, her young son, Liam and Fr Joe Walsh were extraordinarily compelling and forensically accurate. Her despatches from inside Iran were classic foreign correspondent quality. When I assigned her to Belfast as the peace process advanced, she brought all of her wonderful narrative and descriptive powers to bear in telling readers how life was changing on the ground.
It was a measure of her eclectic, sensitive and generous persona that even at the peak of her international fame and celebrity, she never ceased to focus on the everyday, human transactions that fill the lives of ordinary people.
We are all very much the poorer for the passing of her caring, demanding and questioning soul.
Conor Brady was editor ofThe Irish Times from 1986 to 2002
