Fergus Finlay: Men of wisdom and character who changed development of Ireland

I can still remember the sense of change and confidence, a sense I was growing up in a place worth being proud of

Economist TK Whitaker, composer Sean Ó Ríada, and poet Thomas Kinsella all had a significant impact on the second Irish revival.

I listened to Greta Thunberg being interviewed by Brendan O’Connor on Sunday, and two words stood out for me. Wisdom and character.

This is a young woman who has taken endless abuse over the years. She has been the subject of intense and detailed lobbying and misrepresentation because her ideas are dangerous to some very powerful vested interests. And she has been utterly steadfast.

She has – not single-handedly, but more than the vast majority of experts throughout the world - shown us the danger we are in through our own folly. She has been unsparing and relentless. And she has been right.

Her character is beyond doubt. I was going to say about her that she is wise beyond her years, but that’s a fatuous comment. I know far too many people (I’m probably one myself) who are years, generations even, older than Greta Thunberg, and will never reach her level of wisdom and insight.

One thing she said in the course of the interview really made me think. Brendan O’Connor asked her about neuro divergency, and why she thought people who are neurodivergent can make such a difference. (Greta has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, so she acknowledges herself as being on the autistic spectrum. She has described it in the past as her superpower.) When she was asked the question, she gave a simple and really profound answer. The reason people who are neurodivergent can often make a difference, she said, is that they are unable to pretend.

Wouldn’t it be something if our public life were full of people with wisdom, character, and an inability to pretend? Leave ourselves aside for the moment, can you imagine the last few years in the UK if its leaders had those qualities? Instead, our next-door neighbour has been misled by a succession of governments whose key figures have had precisely the opposite characteristics.

Greta Thunberg alongside fellow climate activists during a demonstration at Festival Park, Glasgow, on the first day of the Cop26 summit. Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

It would be impossible to frame a sentence that had the words “Boris Johnson” and “character” in it. I don’t know how you could even imagine Liz Truss and wisdom in the same breath. And as for an inability to pretend, heaven help us. Malignant pretence is the code they live by.

And we may be a couple of days away from the resurrection of the greatest liar and fool, the man of least character, that politics has ever seen. If the American mid-terms go the way everyone is expecting, malignant pretence will once again take centre stage in America.

I actually believe we’re lucky here, because when we’ve needed them, there have been several occasions when the right qualities have come together in our past to exert an amazing influence. Take, for instance, the Mandarin, the Musician and the Mage.

That’s the name of an extraordinary book by John Fanning, a man I’ve known for years. He easily qualifies himself as a man of great wisdom and character, although it may not be possible for someone who spent most of his life in Ireland’s advertising industry to claim an inability to pretend!

His book is about the economist and civil servant TK Whitaker, the composer Sean O’Riada, and the poet Thomas Kinsella. (Apart from being a substantial poet in his own right, Kinsella knew both of the other two and supported them in important ways. In a sense he was the glue that bound them together.) These three men, individually and collectively, had a remarkable influence in changing the course of Ireland’s development. Not just its economic or cultural development, but the country’s self-confidence and self-belief, its aspiration, its ability and determination to play a role in the world.

I was discussing the book with two of my daughters – both of them more clued in than me about a lot of stuff. But when I played them Sean O’Riada’s theme music from Mise Eire and tried to explain the impact it had back then, they were mystified. Nice stirring bit of music, they thought.

We forget, don’t we? The three men at the centre of Fanning’s book “arrived” on the scene at a moment when Ireland was at its lowest ebb. After independence, we set out to build a protective wall around ourselves. We had always been used to blaming Britain for everything that went wrong, and in de Valera’s Ireland we wanted to shut ourselves off, almost, from the rest of the world, the better to protect our traditions, our closed religion and religiosity, our fairly miserable sense of ourselves.

The result was that we shut our economy down. We didn’t trade, we didn’t attract investment. We kept our education system in the dark ages. We allowed ourselves to be ruled in most aspects of our lives by bishops and priests. And people left Ireland in their tens of thousands. As John says in the introduction to the book, “the 1950s was the lowest point in four successive decades of economic failure, a decade in which three out of every four people born between 1931 and 1941 emigrated”. Just imagine that.

Then Whitaker was appointed Secretary of the Department of Finance and shortly thereafter published the First Programme for Economic Expansion, an economic plan that turned the policy of the previous thirty years inside out and on its head. Sean O’Riada wrote the theme music for an acclaimed documentary called Mise Eire, and Irish music was never the same again. A second Irish revival, as John Fanning calls it, had begun.

Of course, there were many influences and leaders in that renewal of Irish self-confidence in the 1960s. Lemass becoming Taoiseach was key (and Fanning reminds us that Ronnie Delaney winning an unthinkable gold medal in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 sent an amazing shiver down our national spine). But Whitaker brought wisdom and O’Riada brought character. And you can’t read Kinsella’s poems without recognising someone who is unable to pretend.

I was a kid when all that started. I was probably more influenced, if the truth be known, by Roy Orbison and the Rolling Stones than by anything Sean O’Riada was doing. Looking back though, I can still remember the sense of change and confidence, a sense that I was growing up in a place worth being proud of.

After the second Irish revival, there was the terrible setback of the oil crises, then another recovery, another debt crisis, more recovery, the terrible scarring effect of the paramilitary war in Northern Ireland, the radical opening up of Irish society in the 1990s (of which the peace process was a part), the self-inflicted wounds of the Celtic tiger and our recovery from that, to the point where (so far) we’ve been able to cope with everything thrown at us.

There’ll be all sorts of people who read this and say that Ireland has failed to grapple with some of the big issues that still remain – and as long as there are hungry, scared or homeless children in Ireland they’d be right.

But it’s still fair to say that the hallmark of Ireland, since the days of the mandarin, the musician and the mage has been an amazing resilience, based on decent self-respect. They helped to build that, and that’s no small legacy.