This column appeared on December 4th, 2004, marking the 50th anniversary of Garret FitzGerald's first contribution to The Irish Times.
BACK IN the 1930s, when I was eight or nine, I seem to recall helping my next brother, Fergus, to write one or two paragraphs for the “Irishman’s Diary” miscellany, which I think in those days paid 3 shillings and 6 pence for any paragraph published.
And in 1945 as a law student I wrote two letters to The Irish Times'scorrespondence column on the role of the king in the domestic affairs of our State.
But it was much later, on December 4th, 1954, (which, like today, was a Saturday), that my first article was published by The Irish Times. Since then I have written some 1,700 articles for this paper totalling about 2,250,000 words.
Even before joining the staff of Aer Lingus at the start of 1947 I had ventured into journalism. In early 1948, just married, and bored with being confined to bed with chickenpox, I wrote an article about the February general election and sent it to papers in several Commonwealth countries.
Somewhat to my surprise, the Sunday Timesof Johannesburg and the Sunday Expressof Bombay published my article, and sent me a few very welcome guineas. In those days payments to freelance journalists were often made in guineas.
That experience emboldened me to offer my services as Irish correspondent to all those English-speaking papers outside these islands the names and address of which I could track down, as well as to all English provincial papers, and also to some papers on the Continent – in the latter case without success. (I recall that when I wrote to an Austrian paper, the name of which sounded to me quite respectable, the Oestereichischer Zeitung, I received a fairly brusque response from what turned out to be the newspaper of the Red Army in Austria).
Within a year or two I was writing for 10 papers in seven countries of the Commonwealth, including weekly for Hong Kong, fortnightly for Canada, and monthly for Kenya, as well as for four in Britain. And in 1949 I started writing also on foreign affairs for the Irish Independent.
These and other activities were soon adding some 65 per cent to my Aer Lingus salary, which was then equivalent to about €18,000 in today’s money.
Towards the end of 1954, in recognition of the fact that, as part of my Aer Lingus duties, I was supplying the Central Statistics Office with details of traffic on the company’s routes, I received from a contact in that office a copy of the only volume of University Statistics they ever published – which I still have and which I gather may now be the only copy in existence.
This led me to write and send to the Independent an article on trends in university studies, which since the late 1930s had experienced a two-thirds decline in the numbers taking degrees in Irish: by 1952 these numbers had fallen as low as the number taking degrees in Spanish or German. At the same time I wrote and sent to that paper three articles on trends in tourism, a matter with which as an Aer Lingus official I had had to concern myself.
At this distance in time my memory of what happened next is a little hazy, but I seem to recall that the Independentturned down my university statistics article on the grounds that what it revealed about the decline in the number of degrees in Irish was too controversial; it also rejected the articles on tourism as too dull and around the same time terminated my contributions on international affairs to its "World Spotlight" column.
It was in these circumstances that at the end of November 1954 I wrote to Jack White, features editor of The Irish Times,offering my services.
He responded immediately, accepting my university statistics article, which he published 50 years ago today, as well as the series on tourism.
He went on to suggest, in the light of my article on university degrees, that I write a series of articles on university finances. These were published seven weeks later: they showed that in relation to our population there was even then a 20 per cent higher level of indigenous university students in Ireland than in Britain.
That done, Jack White suggested that if I could write in such detail about university finances, I should be able do the same for the government’s finances.
In vain I protested that, although I had a degree in history, French and Spanish, and held other qualifications in law and transport, I had no qualification whatever in economics. My protest was dismissed out of hand. So, I set about mastering such matters as budget deficits and exchequer accounts. To avoid possible embarrassment for my employer, Aer Lingus, I had by then started using a pseudonym, “Analyst” – making sure, however, that the identity of that columnist was known to as many people as possible.
Next Jack White required me to explain to Irish Timesreaders something called the national accounts, of which at that time I knew nothing.
And so it went on: Jack was the initiator of my entire education in national economics – to the point where within two years I felt able to publish in the quarterly journal Studies the first ever detailed comparison of the economies of Northern Ireland and the Republic.
By 1958 my economic education through The Irish Timeswas indeed sufficiently advanced for me to be able to leave Aer Lingus to become an economic consultant and lecturer – spending an initial year in TCD, undertaking research into Irish industry with the particular objective of preparing to help this sector to adjust to impending free trade. The European Community had just been established and negotiations were under way at that time within the OECD to establish a European Free Trade Area.
A year later or two, following the replacement of Eamon de Valera as taoiseach by Seán Lemass, preparations for Irish EC membership were starting, and by 1961, as I had envisaged since 1958, I had become part-time economic consultant to the Federation of Irish Industries.
By 1959 my frequent but irregular Irish Times articles had turned into a weekly column and I had also joined the staff of the political economy department in UCD, where a decade later I was to secure a PhD in economics.
Of course, when I was appointed minister for foreign affairs in March 1973 I had to interrupt my stint as an Irish Timescolumnist, to which, however, I returned in September 1991, having first completed work on my autobiography All In A Life. So, thank you, The Irish Times,for having introduced me to economics.