Kathy Sheridan tries to keep up with the number-crunching, ever-busy former taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Garret FitzGerald, as he turns 80 next week. She finds a devoted family man whose boundless energy is fuelled by lemon juice and an inability to say 'no'.
It's 10.15am in Dublin 6. Check elderly tape recorder again. The nightmare is that it will choose this morning to expire. Testing, testing . . . Dáil reporters still blanch at the memory of trying to keep pace with Garret FitzGerald in full spate.
People slow down when they reach 80 . . . don't they? Last week, this particular near-80-year-old was bounding between Tanzania, Belfast and Cork, while planning enough 80th birthday parties to rival the queen of England.
"Friday is the only sane day here, because he has to write his Irish Times column," says his personal assistant, Sharon Kelly. "If the column is detached, he goes into Atticus Finch [the lawyer played by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird] mode, or George Bailey [hero of It's a Wonderful Life] if there's more passion. For the other six days of the week, it's like working for Indiana Jones."
Or Billy Bunter on wheels. He has a tendency to make sudden decisions, such as agreeing to the Tanzanian trip the weekend before departure. This calls for research, speeches, charts, slides, flights, visas and vaccinations, all shrieking "urgent".
Plus, he had flu.
The night before departure, he worked late on his presentation. Next morning he donned his chancellor-of-NUI hat for a three-and-a-half-hour meeting, boarded the 2.30pm flight to Dar es Salaam, arriving at 8.30pm local time to a full-blown airport reception of ministers and speeches, followed by a 90-minute jeep ride on a rickety road into the African night.
"Every time I called [him] that night," says Sharon, "the prime minister or some kind of minister was sitting on his bed."
When he left a few days later, headed for Belfast to launch the restoration of a house in which his mother was raised, the connection time between flights and Heathrow terminals was so short that the computer system couldn't handle it, and Sharon reluctantly, overrode it by making a separate reservation.
"You worry too much," he chortled, as he was ferried across Belfast by his PSNI escort on time for the lamb dinner promised by his hostess.
His adventures in recent years have taken him - with his pocket-sized Penguin detective stories and what Sharon calls "a little shopping-trolley thing" - from Kazakhstan to Vietnam, Canada to New Zealand, Tahiti to South Africa, across the American west, east and Deep South, via aircraft, train and Greyhound bus, sometimes pursuing his mission to rediscover long-lost emigrant relatives while lecturing in universities. He observes in passing that in the 13 North American universities he visited, post-Iraq, "I didn't meet one member of the faculty or administration who was pro-Bush . . . It's totally divided between the educated and the non-educated, east coast and west versus the middle".
In 2004 alone, he concludes with boyish glee, he delivered 21 lectures in 12 countries on four continents. The count is not done boastfully. He has been counting everything since he was aged nought, as he might say himself. When the tapes - inevitably - run out, we discuss the interviewer's chances of keeping up with him, armed with a feeble biro. He grins.
"In the Dáil, people speak between 90 and 125 words a minute, average 110," he says. "My slow rate was 145, under pressure I did 200, and I once clocked 295 for a short stretch."
Let the record show that there is absolutely no sign of a slowdown. The hardest part, says Sharon, is convincing him to say no.
"I think he is too generous with his time," she says. "When I was a first-year undergraduate it would never have crossed my mind to ring a former taoiseach and say 'can I meet you?' or 'write my thesis for me' (because they'll give him something really shoddy and he will start rewriting it for them)." But one of his great joys is engaging with students at debates and after lectures. "He loves hanging around, answering questions, and he'll come back on a high."
He exudes bonhomie and well-being.
"I take a lot of pills for my health," he says. "And I take one to two pints of lemon juice with water every day." Baffled pause. "I can't understand why people don't drink lemon juice."
So what's the recipe if they want to start? "Two lemons make up three to six ounces of juice, then you fill up a pint glass with water and put in lots of sugar substitute . . ."
The sugar substitute is a bow to his diabetes. The pills he takes are for his heart, arthritis and diabetes. On Indiana Jones days, medication and eating regimes tend to get sidelined. All of his children, plus his Garda drivers, get a copy of his weekly schedule, mainly to ensure that he is where he should be and to allow the family to catch up with him or to pencil in family events.
For his daughter, Mary, it's also with an eye to keeping track of his insulin and eating times. Keeping tabs on him is a worry for all of them, but also palpably a labour of love. The arrangement by which he bought the house next to Mary's and moved into it in 1999 after the death of his beloved wife, Joan, is a model of civilised, inter-generational living - with doors knocked through upstairs and downstairs, and his dining-room extended to create a fine, light-filled communal dining space - although by no means a first for the family.
For much of their married lives, Garret and Joan shared a house with some or other of their adult, married children, mainly for financial reasons (politics had a decidedly deleterious effect on the FitzGerald household budget). His description in his 1991 autobiography of the cramped, two-roomed accommodation, complete with corridor kitchen and rising damp, that comprised his and Joan's quarters in a large Palmerston Road house during his years as taoiseach makes salutary reading for anyone with a fixed view of grasping politicians.
The modest red-brick houses he lives among now may be worth a fortune in terms of location, but fall a long way short of Gandon mansions in scale and status. Then again, the social assurance that comes with being the issue of generations of an educated, if occasionally financially embarrassed elite, probably obviates the need for such showy accessories.
WHEN THE FAMILY album shows your father as an Imagist poet in Ezra Pound's circle, chatting easily to French artists in Brittany, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Michael Collins or stepping out as the first minister for external affairs of the new independent Irish Free State; when the family archive throws up letters such as the one written by your mother, the daughter of a wealthy Belfast unionist, to her old employer, George Bernard Shaw, attempting to recruit him to the nationalist cause, social status need never be an abiding concern.
Shaw's wickedly entertaining reply to the socialist and suffragette, Mabel, painting her as a kind of early 20th-century Marie Antoinette, is worth repeating: "Ireland is your plaything at present, because you are an educated woman trying to live the life of a peasant. You have put yourself out of the reach of Beethoven and the orchestra; so I suppose you must have something to play with. But you shan't play with me, madam."
Fast forward to Dublin 6, in the early 21st century, and there may be latter-day courtiers to Mabel's son, but here they are welcomed into a small front room, made rich by a roaring log fire. The walls are lined with books on history and biography and with Mary's paintings, which sing with light and colour. There is elegant, comfortable furniture, including polished side-tables, and fresh coffee with hot milk from little scalloped cups. Occasionally, piano, violin and flute music comes wafting through the walls as Mary's accomplished daughters practise.
"We have breakfast in Mary's kitchen, and lunch and dinner in my dining-room, every day. If you're a widower, what you want is a daughter who will feed you . . ." he laughs. "But yes, we're a very close family. Always have been."
It seems idyllic and probably is. The grandfather, who is "very much at the heart of the whole family", according to a friend, is merely reaping what he sowed as a loving husband and father.
Joan was the love of his life, the "very lively, very popular, very busy, sought-after" girl who married him despite his tendency to recite airline timetables to her on long train journeys. He gives her the credit for raising their children: John, Mary and Mark.
"She was a wonderful mother, a natural mother," he says. "Which I suppose is why I married her, in a sense, because I was always instinctively looking for a mother for my children."
He now has 10 grandchildren, among them an economist at Harvard, a third secretary in Addis Ababa, a postgraduate medical student at Oxford . . . All are in the warp and weft of his and each other's lives, their milestones and celebrations given priority in his diary, ready to slot into his foreign adventures.
Joan was 76 when she died in 1999, after more than 20 years of accelerating health problems. By the end of 1995, she was confined to bed.
"But we were lucky, you see," FitzGerald says. "Because she needed 24-hour care and I was able to earn enough doing different things and had my pension and was able to have her at home . . . So the bedroom was living room, bedroom - both beds, dining-room, office for me. And we had provision for a drip, because she was very ill and it became a hospital bedroom as well. So we would have dinner around the bed, the whole family would have tables around the bed, and not only that, friends would come in."
His profound loss is borne with outward stoicism. There was an adjustment period of course, he concedes, "but it was a gradual process, you see. It didn't happen suddenly, overnight".
THE OTHER TOKEN of a successful life is the circle of friends, young and old, with whom FitzGerald has always surrounded himself. Every summer from 1973 until Joan's death, they rented a house in France for three weeks, to which troupes of friends, family and children gravitated. For the past five years, he has rented a large house with a big swimming-pool a few miles from St Tropez, and the tradition continues. Everyone takes a turn at the cooking and shopping, and no one has to do it more than twice. Terms and conditions are agreeably clear: "The three weeks are divided into two periods of 10 to 11 days, costs are divided and accounts done every second day, one unit per adult, half a unit for a child or non-earning student. Starting rate at the moment is €40 per bed-night." It's fully booked.
Most of his friendships pre-date his political life, which didn't begin until he was 38 because his father wasn't happy with the younger generation running for election on the strength of the family name.
"My life was already established before I went into politics," he says. "Politics was an added dimension."
Those he admires hail from across the political spectrum. Former Labour leader Dick Spring gets a special nod: "We got on very well together. He's a good man. Don't see a lot of him because he never comes out of Kerry."
Eyebrows were raised when he chose Brian Cowen to launch his last book, and witnesses report that the glow of mutual admiration was blinding.
"He's very able," FitzGerald says, fondly producing a picture of them together, emerging from a bookie's shop in Tullamore during one of the Nice referendum campaigns. "He was a very good minister for foreign affairs and, as far as I can see, he's a very good Minister for Finance."
And perhaps a good taoiseach some day? Pause. "Yes. Sometime . . ." Pause. "Hence!" he finishes emphatically.
"I'd like to see a change of Government," he continues mildly. "It's not necessarily political . . . It's because a government can't do much in four years but is beginning to do less after eight."
Has he regrets?
"Not overall," he says. "There are things I could have done better. I had three great careers, with Aer Lingus, UCD, and as foreign minister - but it was downhill after that."
He admits to making a mistake on the abortion referendum, which led to 20 years of bitter divisiveness, "although opposing it wouldn't have made any difference. We changed the wording to ensure we wouldn't have a mess, but the bishops thought they knew more than the attorney general. I always felt that the fact that they wouldn't talk to me was because they knew they wouldn't be able to challenge my reasoning".
He remembers the "truly worrying period" in 1974-75 when, amid hunger strikes, riots in Dublin and the "financial situation", Britain was threatening to withdraw from Northern Ireland "under what they called a negotiated independence. We hadn't the capacity to deal with that . . . "
But being in government with no money to spend "was the worst". He recalls coming into office in 1981, and discovering on the way back from the Áras, "before I even formed a government, that the country was virtually bankrupt. The rate of borrowing for the next year, unless we tackled it, would be over 21 per cent of GNP, which was about seven times what it ought to be. And we inherited that mess from Fianna Fáil".
"We knew things weren't good, but had no idea it was as bad as that because they had not told us the truth. They just changed the figures, which has never been done before or since. It was terrible, it really was. The figures were phoney."
Far from pursuing the social reforms begun in the 1970s, the new coalition's only option was to cut ever deeper.
"Making cuts wasn't my forte. I should be a great prime minister now, with all the money," he says a little wistfully. What would he do with it? "I would concentrate on the social area, social disadvantage."
FOR ALL THAT, he believes he has been "extraordinarily lucky in life . . . I feel a bit guilty about that". At 80, he has achieved a place of honour in Irish life, rare in a politician. He is a source of national pride who has devoted much of his life to public service and to the happiness of others, at some personal cost. He is an honourable man, a national sage, and in the words of the late François Mitterrand, "un homme cultive".
His sense of the ridiculous is evident in the invitation to one of his three big birthday parties, featuring an illustration of a party whistle and "140 years" - his own 80 years added to Nick Robinson's 60 - for a big, joint bash for a few hundred family and friends in UCD's O'Reilly Hall.
Appropriately for a man who has always put children at the centre of life, the first party next week, on his actual birthday (Thursday, February 9th), is shared with another birthday boy, his great grand-nephew, Max, aged three, in a day devoted to grandchildren, nieces, nephews, at least 100 of them.
As the morning moves towards lunchtime and The Irish Times prepares to leave the former taoiseach, two journalists from the China Times can be seen hovering around the gate.
They're at least an hour early. While researching different reports and pieces about Irish life for a proposed 20,000-word story, they were jotting down names and were bemused to find that all Irish people seemed to be called Garret FitzGerald. The Irish Embassy assured them that it was 10 people in one.
He moves to greet them. He's going to be talking for at least four hours, reckons Sharon - "and no lunch", she sighs.
1946 Joins Aer Lingus. A few years later, at the age of 26, assumes responsibility for its economic planning, scheduling, rates and fares
1954 Becomes a columnist for The Irish Times
1958 Leaves Aer Lingus. Becomes economic consultant to the Federation of Irish Industries, among many others, assisting firms in relation to European Community (EC) membership
1959 Appointed lecturer in economics at UCD, specialising in the economics of transport, statistical sources and EEC affairs
1965 Elected to Seanad for Fine Gael
1973 Becomes minister for foreign affairs in the new coalition government
1975 Leads what is seen as a highly successful first Irish presidency of the EEC Council of Ministers
1977 Appointed leader of Fine Gael after coalition election defeat and pursues a liberal agenda
1981 Forms a coalition government with Labour, which lasts nine months
1982 After a third election in 18 months, wins a four-and-a-quarter-year term as taoiseach, during which his government eliminates a huge external payments deficit and reduces inflation from more than 20 per cent to 3 per cent. Also negotiates the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher, giving the State a role in protecting the interests of the Northern nationalist community
1987 Resigns as leader of Fine Gael after election defeat of coalition government
1992 Retires from the Dáil
As well as publishing numerous books, book contributions, memorial lectures and papers, Dr FitzGerald is a member of the Council of State, chancellor of the National University of Ireland, chairman of the Future of Europe Committee at the Institute of European Affairs (and president of the institute), and a member of the International Affairs Committee of the Royal Irish Academy.
He is also a director of Age Action Ireland, Transparency Ireland, and the Greater Europe Fund, and an adviser to Integrity Interactive, a US company that works on compliance with legal and ethical conditions requirements by large companies.