Children and young people are lucky to catch a fleeting glimpse of heroic figures of a previous age. Growing up in Cambridge, I was taken to hear Sir Winston Churchill speak in October 1959 at a tree-planting ceremony at the site of Churchill College, writes Martin Mansergh
On July 14th, 1967, while doing a summer course at the Sorbonne, I watched, on the Champs-Elysées, the tall standing figure of President Charles de Gaulle pass by saluting in an armoured vehicle, with fighter jets overhead streaking the colours of the tricolour.
In November 1974, doing protocol duty at the funeral of President Childers, having joined the Department of Foreign Affairs, I watched a gaunt Eamon de Valera, in one of his last public appearances, being assisted into St Patrick's Cathedral.
My mother as a young woman was struck, when my grandmother pointed out to her the elderly Madame Maud Gonne MacBride dressed in black on Grafton Street.
In Ireland, the legendary figures of the last century were involved in the struggle for independence, political or cultural, and in subsequent State-building. The only one that I came to know quite well in the 1980s was Seán MacBride. It is the centenary of his birth in Paris this year.
His father, Major John MacBride, led the Irish brigade in the Boer War, probably the only occasion when the green was allied to the orange (albeit of the Orange Free State). One of his reputed descendants was Robert MacBride, sentenced to death as an ANC freedom-fighter in the late 1980s. Post-apartheid, he joined the South African foreign service and met the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and his party in Johannesburg in 2000.
According to Donal McCracken's Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo-Boer War, the fiery patriot Maud Gonne, famous as Yeats's muse, told John O'Leary that when she married John MacBride she thought she was marrying Ireland! The marriage, however construed, was not a happy one.
As Yeats noted in his famous poem 1916, MacBride, whatever the wrongs, was "transformed utterly" by being executed by the British after the Rising.
Seán MacBride's godfather was John O'Leary, the embodiment of romantic Ireland, who observed as a memorialist that the teaching power of the Fenians was greater than their revolutionary actions. It was prophesied to Maud Gonne that her infant son would one day be President of Ireland.
In 1983, when it seemed that President Hillery was reluctant to serve a second term, I tentatively enquired of Charles Haughey, then leader of the opposition, whether there was any possibility of MacBride. Seán MacBride regularly visited him on the fifth floor of Leinster House, where he was received as a republican elder statesman, with political bygones forgotten, though not by Pádraig Ó hAnnracháin down the corridor, who had been de Valera's private secretary in the 1950s. Haughey shook his head indulgently, explaining that, politically speaking, Seán MacBride was the anti-Christ for about 80 per cent of the Irish people (maybe, he meant the politically active among them).
In his last years, MacBride was writing his memoirs, which would have been fascinating, given the sinuous nature of his career. A badly-needed biographer would require access to his papers.
He held that the draft Free State Constitution of 1922, which was the basis of the Collins-de Valera pact, was the means of avoiding civil war, though defying Churchill's veto would have run the risk of renewed conflict with the British.
The 1937 Constitution was like it in excluding all references to the crown, and enabled MacBride to become a constitutional republican. All his life, he was dogged by the unfounded rumour that he was involved in the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins (the perpetrators have now been identified). He was briefly chief of staff of the IRA, prompting the celebrated quip of Conor Cruise O'Brien, who served him in external affairs, that he was the only such person to have been awarded both the Nobel and Lenin peace prizes.
Locally, he was the first recipient of the Tipperary Peace Prize in 1984, and he subsequently debated nuclear weapons there with a youthful Tory, Ann Widdecombe, as yet unelected, who argued that they were a jolly good thing. The following morning, though 80, he was on the 6.30 a.m. train from Limerick Junction, working on his papers.
An inspirational figure, not only to most republicans and the left, he campaigned for a progressive Irish foreign policy based on human rights, disarmament, neutrality and the needs of a post-colonial developing world. He had had a successful second career as UN high commissioner for Namibia.
The affirmative MacBride principles, adopted by many US state legislatures, and a catalyst for further fair employment reform, caused continuing seizures among British consuls-general across America.
MacBride's radical and meteoric republican party, Clann na Poblachta, formed of a feeling that the revolution was failing, did help provide an alternative to Fianna Fáil. It shook up the Department of Finance, which produced a first public capital programme.
Its most controversial foreign policy decisions, declaration of the republic and departure from the Commonwealth, which provoked the British guarantee to the unionists, were motivated, according to MacBride, by the fact that partition could not be discussed there. We have seen in recent days how Mauritius, as a Commonwealth member, was unable to take an action against Britain to the International Court of Justice.
The anti-partition campaign was mostly for domestic consumption, and was not a fruitful model. But the 1949 all-party declaration against partition was the classic statement of the republican case, deployed by Fianna Fáil against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. The value of Irish membership of NATO as a bargaining chip was hopelessly exaggerated. The mother and child controversy, mishandled all round, was a pyrrhic victory for the Church, a gift to unionists, and destroyed the clann. MacBride had to reinvent himself.