Garret is 80 years young, generous to a fault and still ahead of his time

WE had a very small library in my old secondary school. Among the collection of books which students were allowed to borrow was a handful on history and politics.

The first I read was the Earl of Longford’s and TP O Neill’s official biography of Eamon de Valera. It was a heavy tome, but very acceptable reading for a young fellow from a strongly Fianna Fáil house.

The other book I remember borrowing from the library was riskier. Indeed I never dared take it out of my schoolbag at home. It was ‘Towards a New Ireland,’ a book written in 1972 by Garret FitzGerald, who by this time in the early 1980s was the leader of Fine Gael.