The death of our former deputy editor, Ken Gray, robs us of almost the last living link with a now almost-vanished Protestant caste in Irish life. That caste prided itself on its sobriety, punctiliousness, integrity, loyalty, industriousness and an utter transparency of intent. Ken Gray was the personification of those virtues.
He was the incorruptible rock of this newspaper: steady under pressure, unswerving in his adherence to his own principles, fierce in the defence of values which he thought this newspaper represented. He was a good man, a fine man, and this newspaper will not see his like again, for he was so quintessentially a product of his age and his caste; and both are now past.
Every newspaper needs a Ken Gray, someone who will invisibly bring the various strands of its operation together; who will listen while journalists rant about the importance of their story and their angle on it; who will stay calm while tempers rise; who will be able to take whatever is useful from the storm of passion that can easily erupt in newsrooms; and who will stay calm and calming throughout.
Quiet anger
He had a certain quiet anger that one wouldn't lightly provoke; his eyes would flicker slightly when he felt a journalistic departure from common sense was now beyond the latitudes allowed to us prima donnas in the writing trade. If you pushed him beyond those warning signs, you deserved no sympathy. For Ken was always reasonable, and even his angers were reasonable ones.
People knew that intuitively, because the most sailent feature of his character was his honest commitment to this newspaper, to its traditional values, to the principles for which it had stood for generations. Every penny he took from this newspaper was an earned penny, earned in honest endeavour and long hours, earned in wisdom and steadiness, earned in his years of experience in every part of its operation, earned in his mastery of every nut and bolt, every typeface, earned in his understanding of every legal problem which might stand in a journalist's way.
He accompanied me in a couple of libel cases which were taken against this column; and he was a wonderful colleague to have at such times. He possessed some deep, inner calm which reasssured you that no matter how badly you might perform in the witness box, his trust remained with you. His rule was simple. You were a member of the Irish Times staff; you had followed procedures, and this newspaper would stand beside you. And even if a costly settlement resulted, or you lost the case, his trust remained. It was personal and professional; and he stood like a great uncle beside those of us in adversity.
Companionable silences
When some people fall silent, it makes you uncomfortable, as if a silence is a reflection on the quality of your company. Not Ken; his silences were companionable affairs, indicating that he was thinking. He was slow with his words, and did not like to rush to judgment; but when the words were spoken and the judgment given, there was usually great wisdom in both. His silences were worth waiting for. The outcome was usually profitable.
For all those silences, he had a puckish sense of humour, dry and mischievous, and his sallies were made all the more enjoyable for the infrequency with which they came. Ours is not a charitable profession, and we seldom find one good word to say about one another if we can find 10 bad ones. Not Ken Gray. Indeed, I never heard him speak badly of anyone. Malice was absent entirely from his make-up.
Even when he retired, his presence was constantly required in this newspaper. It was always reassuring to catch sight of his burly presence ambling back into the newsroom, that slight smile playing on his lips. To see Ken was to be reminded that some people really do embody the better values, not least because they are utterly unaware of that embodiment.
For despite the strength of his judgments, and the power of his priciples, he was a startlingly modest man. No ego prompted his decisions or guided his moods. His first concern, outside his family, was this newspaper; and his modesty was such that it allowed him on occasion to be touchingly naïve. It was, for example, a matter of great pride to him that he was on the very first Late Late Show, a little boast he made to me no more than 20 or so times.
Real achievement
His real achievement lay elsewhere, in his steadfast defence of journalism and the principles which underlie it, the ones which were and are still represented by this newspaper, its staff, its culture, no matter the current misfortunes which now beset us: of intellectual integrity to our profession, of service to our country and of duty to the Irish people.
These are the values which those Irish Protestants who loved their land more than they did the Union retained after Independence, hoping to bring them to the new State. That some of them failed to live up to those high values was of course inevitable.
But as religious divisions in this Republic blur and become invisible, we might remember and celebrate those fine Protestant traditions that this newspaper, for all its failings, still represents, and which the late Ken Gray, above all others, embodied to the very last fibre of his being.