Martin Sheridan, who died on April 28th last, was a man of many words, born and bred. In his native Portlaoise, his father was a journalist on the staff of the Nationalist and Leinster Times. Martin's own newspaper experience included a stint as a leader writer with The Irish Times in the 1950s: he also contributed to the Nationalist and, more recently, to Anois, as a lively columnist and critic. But his life as a journalist was mainly spent in the industrial and economic sector - briefly in an advertising agency and with the retail grocers' organisation RGDATA - and, since 1957, with the export board, Coras Trachtala (now subsumed in Enterprise Ireland), in charge of information and publications. And to many this was the great paradox of Martin's career.
For, while the elegant bearing, the careful grooming, the neatly rolled umbrella might give the impression of "something in the City", his conversation suggested a very different habitat: academe, the world of the arts, the higher politics, perhaps diplomacy. Indeed, a former colleague recalls that an official discussion on some detail of export policy often turned into a cultural seminar or tutorial.
But he was far from being a pedant. His careful words, his love of language and of languages - English, Irish, German - led to a certain exactness of phrase, and a detestation of the sloppy, in print or in speech. And when he spoke, he did so not just in sentences, but in paragraphs. This did not prevent a lacing of what he had to say with a generous sprinkling of irreverent comment and cultivated bawdy.
He was a sensitive critic of literature and music - the two artistic loves of his life. His comments on politics tended to be more robust: he had few if any illusions, but was always loyal to the values of the liberal left. A graduate of the National University of Ireland (Dublin), his mentors included the late Roger McHugh, author and teacher, and the historian, Desmond Williams, and another contemporary, Patrick Lynch, one of the architects of Ireland's new economic society. So it was perhaps not so odd after all that Martin Sheridan should lend his talents to the articulation of this society on the international level. Nor was it altogether inappropriate that he should be one of a number of professional communicators invited, in the turbulent early 1970s, to present the case of the Irish Republic in the countries of the British Commonwealth. In the event, he served for some months as Press Attache in the Embassy at Canberra.
He was of a generation of Irish intellectuals who never lost their sense of humour: in Dublin one of their conventicles was O'Neill's public house in Merrion Row, where the talk, in at least two languages, was sometimes (if not always) brilliant as legend would claim. There, Martin Sheridan was a worthy contender with such luminaries as the late David Greene, Tomas de Bhaldraithe, Henry Wheeler, Maire and Liam de Paor, Tommy Woods, and others - some of whom still survive. These will remember and miss Martin for his wit and style, his unpretentious concern for the authentic, and, above all, because he was such fun to be with. Of the more private man, of his inner faith and hope, of his love and care for his family, only they - above all his wonderful wife, Patsy - can speak.
Several words, too often misused, can be very properly used to describe this man of many words: cultivated, sophisticated, urbane. Another comes to mind. In a delightful piece in the centenary edition of the Nationalist, describing his adventures as a "topographical surveyer" for the old Irish Tourist Association in the 1940s, he wrote of his native Laois as "a very sweet county". Martin Sheridan was truly a very sweet man.
S. MacR.