Jack Lynch led his party and this State through some of their most difficult years and lost neither his dignity nor his decency in the struggle. He was naturally diffident, which sometimes led critics to suspect that he lacked confidence and an appetite for hard work. But it took a cool head and a core of steel to surmount the challenges he met.
It is sometimes forgotten that in the early 1970s, when he was under greatest pressure inside Fianna Fail - forced to dismiss two ministers and to accept the resignations of two others within a week - he was also engaged in a deeply frustrating and equally strenuous campaign to have Britain recognise the Republic's interest in Northern affairs.
He secured the stability of the party and a significant change in British policy, but his governments' handling of the economy must be more harshly judged. The 1977 Fianna Fail manifesto will be remembered as one of the most damaging programmes to have been put to the electorate. Ironically, it was followed by the party's most spectacular electoral success.
His achievements in the European Community have been less widely discussed. But it was Mr Lynch and his Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Paddy Hillery, who negotiated Ireland's membership of the Common Market during 1972; and, as Taoiseach once more after 1977, he conducted the negotiations which led to Ireland's membership of the European Monetary System and the pound's historic break with sterling.
Lynch's was not a conventional political background and he was sometimes tempted to see this as a handicap in a party and a country where tradition counted for so much. He had more important strengths: he was rooted in his time and place and, without having to work at it, never forgot either the city of his youth or how it was in the 1930s.
Many politicians of his time made much of their sporting associations, most often their attachment to the GAA. Jack Lynch didn't have to: his skill and success at hurling and Gaelic football would have been enough to earn fame and affection wherever he went, if he had never entered the Dail. As it was, he made little distinction between those who supported his politics and admired his sport; and none at all between the social classes.
He was said to have been a reluctant leader of Fianna Fail, but many who watched him closely were convinced that the reluctance was often attributed to him by those who nurtured ambitions of their own and would have been happier if he had never succeeded Eamon De Valera and Sean Lemass.
But he fitted naturally into the line of succession which passed logically from De Valera to Lemass. Jack Lynch was a modern leader, who believed the farther Ireland moved from Civil War and sectarian politics the better; it was some of his successors who reverted to a style of leadership more appropriate to the 1930s than to the last quarter of the century.
It is no exaggeration to say that respect and affection for Jack Lynch transcended party boundaries to a degree unique among political leaders in the history of this State. In the many tributes which have been paid, the voices of ordinary people who knew him as a friend have been most eloquent. He was a committed, farseeing and practical patriot. And he was a warm, honourable and generous man.