CHARLES J. Haughey might not go down in history quite the way he might have wanted - the man who united Ireland, turned the country into an Irish speaking industrial giant and a regional power with an ocean going fleet and an Army before which the nations of the world (the Brits especially) trembled.
But he might well be remembered as the man who seriously endangered the bat in Dublin.
This is not criticism. Charles Haughey was the man responsible for the revitalisation of Dublin City. No other Taoiseach we have had would have had the energy or the vision or the willpower to bring about the regeneration of the Temple Bar area, and the creation of the special tax zones which caused such huge capital sums to be invested in parts of the city which had seen no useful economic activity in a generation or more.
When CJH became Taoiseach some 16 years ago, there was barely a restaurant in the city centre worth eating in. When a good restaurant opened in Powerscourt Townhouse in the early 1980s, it closed because there simply was not a market for high quality food in the city centre.
It looked as if the old city of Dublin was doomed. The entire focus of social and economic activity was shifting southwards towards Dun Laoghaire.
Sense of Despair
Worse than the simple movement of capital and social activity towards the southern suburbs was the sense of despair which gripped the city and those who lived there; no hope, no rescue, the future seemed evident. Large tracts of land and old brickwork were becoming the home of buddleia and fern and crime.
What CJH achieved as Taoiseach was to reverse that trend in its entirety. And the beneficiaries have not just been in Temple Bar; the regeneration of the central northside area is well under way.
No doubt there are criticisms - most people who have looked at some of the flats which have been built might regret building regulations were not more emphatic about minimum sizes; and there are real fears that many of the apartment complexes are simply ready made tenements.
But a more certain criticism is that the reconstruction of such vast amounts of central Dublin has destroyed old roofs; and old tiled roofs are what bats love as nesting places.
I should declare a special interest here. I do not like hats; I love them. They were invented by the Lord on his most perfect day they are animal perfection.
Some people have had the good fortune to have had a bat trapped in their hair; would that that great good fortune might one day come my way. I know of people who have had a bat land on their faces while they slept.
Such bliss! To wake up being kissed by a bat is infinitely superior to waking up being kissed by Naomi Campbell or Julia Roberts.
Close to Paradise
No doubt bat conversation is limited in variety, largely consisting of squeaks and indignant trills. To our ears, this means little; but to bat ears it is pure Mozart. And even for those who do not speak bat, an evening watching bats hunt is an evening spent close to paradise.
No bird can manage the startling changes of direction a bat can manage, turning a sharp right angle on a point at speed, as if a nail had been hammered into a bat wingtip.
I once saw a bat being taken on the wing by a sparrowhawk in north central Dublin; it was an astonishing sight - only the sparrow hawk's huge velocity enabled it to catch the bat as it turned to evade its hunter.
Of course that night I mourned the batkins in their little roost, waiting for their parent to come back with a feed of scrumptious moth mousse and a few score mosquitoes. Maybe the batkins died. That is nature; meanwhile a brood of baby sparrowhawks were tasting their first bat stew, neatly vomited up by mum or dad.
But it is highly unusual for a sparrowhawk to catch a bat, their time ranges barely touch, and it is a rare hawk and an unlucky bat which come to the conclusion that I saw.
For the most part bats are without predators in the air; though in their homes, cats find them quite tasty, and will feast on batkins at Christmas - stuffed with chestnut and lightly grilled in garlic butter, they are surprisingly agreeable. Their bones are delicate and perfectly digestible.
Yet it is not as foodstuff that I hail the bat. It is as entertainer and air cleanser that the bat comes into its own; it is a joy and a wonder to watch the bat patrolling the skies, taking insects which might just view your neck as a dinner plate.
People say that bats are blind, but that is mere envy. Bats are not in the least blind; in addition to having their audio range finding and detection equipment, bats are perfectly capable of threading a needle. We are uneasy in the presence of such talent, such intelligence.
Rewarding Kindness
Certain bat enthusiasts have trained bats as domestic pets - their droppings are perfect, compact little pellets which are clean and easy to clear up, and are quite good as roof insulation, though it would take quite a while for one bat to produce the volume of droppings required to keep a house warm.
A small perch will suffice once you have domesticated your bat. It will feed on grubs obtainable from an angling shop, and will reward your kindness by gobbling any mosquitoes which enter your living room, turning them within 24 hours into roof insulation.
If you are squeamish about handling bats, your wife will no doubt oblige you and if you are really worried about how it spends the night, she will let it roost in her hair while she sleeps.
But the obliging wives of the capital will not provide the entire bat population of Dublin with homes. Might not Dublin Corporation, or the developers who after all are making so much money from the tax free zones, establish batteries on the tops of all new buildings in the city?
The bats of Dublin are one of the city's greatest joys. We should take their future seriously.