Bill Hyland, who died last month aged 70, was professionally a statistician, with the United Nations and then with our Department of Education. He was one of the distinguished authors of the report Investment in Education, from which many of the advances in modern Irish education have sprung.
He was certainly the most intelligent man I was privileged to know well. My wife Pat and I and Aine and Bill soldiered together over many years, going back to the mid sixties when our children were at school in St Patrick's National School in Dalkey, and then on through the whole saga of the Dalkey School Project and Educate Together. Those were some of the many causes that Bill espoused throughout his life.
There are some who might have looked on his enthusiasms as lost causes, but they would have accurately be described as difficult, often unpopular or unfashionable, causes. Bill's contribution was that he made us think through exactly what we were looking for he made us formulate our aims coherently and comprehensively he made us plan our strategy and tactics - and he insisted that we understood the system we were trying to change. At the core of all his causes was an intense belief in the importance of democracy, and in making it work.
I remember once two of our respective children were playing together. The first said to the other that time honoured phrase: "Let's play Mummies (or Mammies) and Daddies." "Yes, let's," said the other, and then, glancing down at his or her wrist, added, "Oh, it's eight o'clock, we must be off to the meeting." Meetings were an enormous part of all our lives in those days.
Bill insisted that discussion was thorough, and all of us at various times fumed at him when Any Other Business ran invariably into extra time. But he also made sure that whenever we went out to argue our case we knew what we were at, we knew what we were up against - and in all probability he had put us through a rehearsal of our meeting with authority that made the real thing seem like child's play. In those role playing exercises he always liked to play the main opposition, the minister, the secretary, the bishop, the trade union chief, as the case might be.
When he was working with the Department of Education, the major body we had to deal with, he was meticulous in never breaching the confidentiality of his job, while helping us to understand the procedures, methods and mind set of the department. Bill Hyland, more than anyone else, made the Dalkey School Project the formidable body that successfully argued the case for multi denominational education in Ireland.
He gave us a steely determination an ability to cut through to the core issues, and stay with them an awareness of the importance of structures to get jobs done. At times he almost drove us all mad, as he raised yet another point of order. As chairman of many of those meetings, I had to rule against him from time to time, but I looked carefully afterwards at what he had been saying, and there was always something useful and important in his argument, whether he had won or lost.
Bill was blessed with a marvellous partner and wife in Aine, who was another of the pioneers of the Dalkey School Project and Educate Together. She, of course, is a great Irish educationist in her own right, and being the closest of all to Bill she sometimes had to bear the brunt of his persuasive enthusiasm as he struggled to make a point while she was talking: "Excuse me, Aine", and we'd all shout him down: "No, Bill, we want to hear Aine She learnt great resilience, the resilience that has her now Professor of Education in Cork. And Bill, for all his interruptions, was inordinately proud of her achievements. He was proud too of his three daughters, Fiona, Niamh and Sonja.
Finally, a brief word about Bill's fight with his cancer; he fought it all the way with bravery and determination. He never missed a chance to confront it, and talk about it. He has been in this, as in all other aspects of his life, an inspiration to many people.