Back in Dublin, I found it was extremely good for my confidence that I had passed beyond trainee status and was regarded as someone who had done well to get what looked like an interesting job in a prestigious institution.

I found I could live comfortably at home, enjoying particularly my contact with my brother John’s experience as an undergraduate in business studies at Trinity College. By way of spare time activity I decided to join the Irish Film Society and to see what was involved in becoming a member of Fianna Fáil, the party of government which, under the pragmatic leadership of Seán Lemass, seemed to be both achieving significant economic progress and opening up the prospect of practical cooperation with Northern Ireland. (Lemass visited Belfast to meet the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, in January 1965.)

I launched myself into my job at the Institute with optimism and enthusiasm. My role was a new one for the IPA, which was going through a period of rapid expansion, adding to its established pattern of training courses, a graduate-level School of Public Administration and a consultancy unit. The IPA’s publishing effort was also being developed. In addition to its quarterly journal “Administration”, it was planning a lighter newsletter “Léargas”, aimed at members and potential members.

Tom Barrington believed that the public service, throughout the country, particularly local authorities, represented both an important potential source of revenue from membership subscriptions and a challenging landscape to be shaped by educational and other initiatives led by the Institute and promoted on a regional basis by IPA branches.

I had been recruited to pioneer this regional thrust, concentrating initially on membership presentation and using “Léargas” as a vehicle of information and communication.

All this projected activity was bringing into the Institute a variety of carefully selected young men and women. The pace of adaptation of the accommodation on Lansdowne Road barely coped with the expansion.

My office was a corner of one of the large front rooms flanking the hallway at first floor level in the grey detached house destined to become the School of Public Administration. Secretarial assistance was shared and furniture and facilities were at first spartan, with the house’s residential storage heating completely unsuited to its new role. It was nevertheless an exceptionally pleasant and stimulating place to work.

I came to work either by train or in my Mini, proudly parking my relatively flashy vehicle in one of the places provided within the Institute’s railings. The mid-morning coffee break in the basement area of the central house was an important and valued part of IPA life. It brought together the whole team, all ranks rubbing shoulders equally and with the top management team of Tom Barrington and Des Roche, Head of the School, almost always in good form and full of laughter and stories.

Mrs Mary Morrisey, the Institute’s housekeeper, had followed Tom Barrington since she lit the fires and cleaned his office when he was a senior official in the Department of Local Government in the splendid Custom House building on the Liffey. She had all the best characteristics of those Dublin families which provided the city with its office cleaners, Trinity College skips, and so on, and followed with a motherly eye the intermingling of the staff. As soon as she found out that I was a member of Fianna Fáil she took a particularly proprietorial interest in me, making it clear that she and her family were “republicans”.

One of the great difficulties in writing intelligently about Irish politics is that party names, whether in Irish or English, are doubtful indicators as to political philosophy or positioning on the traditional left/right scale. “Fianna Fáil”, or in English “Soldiers of Destiny”, also calls itself “The Republican Party”.

Given that it was, in 1965, a sort of catch-all, left of centre, populist party, drawing its core support from the ranks of small farmers and small businessmen, it bore little resemblance to the world’s best known Republican Party, one of the twin giants of American politics.

Given too that the Party’s best-known achievement was the 1937 Irish Constitution, it might seem odd that the party’s leader and Prime Minister (Taoiseach in Irish), Seán Lemass, had once described Fianna Fáil as “a slightly constitutional party”. I understood this cryptic remark to mean that while Fianna Fáil was totally opposed to the unconstitutional and illegally-armed protagonists of a united Ireland found in the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and other terrorist groups, it was nevertheless dedicated to the achievement of a united Ireland, an aspiration enshrined in the constitution, but which would almost certainly require constitutional change.

Where joining Fianna Fáil was concerned, I literally began at the beginning, writing to the party headquarters in Dublin’s Lower Mount Street, asking how I might become a member. There was no reply, but some weeks later a small man in a cap and gaberdine raincoat presented himself at Sprucefield in Ard Mhuire Park asking for me. This was Peadar Mc Grane, bus conductor, and secretary of the Dalkey Cumann, a branch of Fianna Fáil, who was following up the letter sent to Mount Street.

He explained that you became a member of the party through joining a Cumann and that I would be welcome to attend the next meeting. Meetings were held regularly in the upstairs room of a small house on Church Road in the centre of Dalkey that I had always assumed to be derelict.

It turned out that the ground floor with the bricked-up windows provided the showers and changing facilities for the Dalkey United football club and that the single large upstairs room was the then Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown constituency headquarters of Fianna Fáil.

I went to the next meeting and was hooked. I found there, for the first time in my native land, direct contact with that real cross section of society I had met for the first time when reporting local news and politics in the North of England. In addition to Peadar, there was a retired bus driver, an electrician, an oil-company clerk, a street-sweeper, a national school teacher, and a well-known Senior Counsel. They all seemed to enjoy equal esteem and everyone had a voice in discussion. I felt immediately that I would be welcomed as a member and that my views would get a fair hearing. At human level I never found any reason to question the validity of that initial impression and I soon came to rate the electrician and retired bus driver as friends and to value the advice and encouragement of the Senior Counsel, who would later become a High Court Judge.

The Irish Film Society also offered friendly contact with a rather different spectrum of national life. The Society’s main activity then was the programme of Saturday afternoon film screenings for members in the oddly named State Cinema at Phibsboro on the city’s North side. These showings, which, as private screenings, were not subject to official censorship or tied to the main distribution circuits, made available to film buffs a wide range of interesting films, often in foreign languages, and drawn from the international art and festival circuit.

At each showing there would usually be a short and a main feature with introductory notes giving background information on the films handed out at the door. In the crowd in the cinema foyer I often recognised well-known academics and broadcasters and personalities, then very few in number, associated with film-making in Ireland. I was glad to be there to overhear, on one crowded afternoon, a voice speculating as to the irreversible damage to Irish cultural and intellectual life should a bomb ever be planted at a Film Society screening.

What brought me from the passive participation of sitting as just another member of the Saturday afternoon audience to direct contact with the programme organisers and active enthusiasts, was the effort I made to go on Monday evenings to the Society’s offices on North Earl Street, near the General Post Office, where there would be a discussion of the previous Saturday’s programmes.

While there would rarely be more than a dozen people present in the dingy clubroom, with perhaps no more than five regulars, I usually found them an interesting and agreeable bunch and I learnt from them a great deal about the history of cinema and the technical side of film-making. The film buffs with whom I became most friendly were notably different to my political friends. I warmed particularly to a research biologist, the curate of an inner-city Catholic parish, and a librarian/writer on his way to becoming Director of the National Library and author of a most original novella.

While both politics and the Film Society provided valued social contacts, the main focus of my continuing search for a definitive heterosexual relationship was inevitably my workplace, the Institute. While Anne Moran had immediately made an impression on me when I came for interview, in her role as secretary to the School of Public Administration she seemed somewhat severe, a little older than I was, and a smoker.

Yet she was probably the most stylish of the Institute staff, wearing suits and twin sets, shoes with sufficient heels to shape her legs nicely, her broad shoulders carrying either a well-cut green leather or tailored tweed coat. She came to work in a grey Mini and was one of the most elegant smokers I had ever seen, manipulating a Zippo lighter of tooled silver with real style.

By the time I asked her out I had already spent pleasant evenings with one or two other female staff members. With the exception of a newly recruited young Oxford graduate and Mrs Morrisey, all the women staff were single and Catholic. They represented an extraordinary range of talent from Tess Higgins, the Secretary of the Institute, to Finola Flanagan, a young economist who was to lecture in the School. There was, of course, considerable male talent in the Institute too. People like Jim O’Donnell, the Publications Officer, who would stay at the Institute, developing a major publications programme, and Paddy Burke, a civil servant seconded to be the senior lecturer in the school, who became my most regular squash partner until his tragically premature death from cancer.

Once it became clear that Anne and I were beginning to spend quite a lot of time together our relationship was naturally a topic of great interest within the Institute.

What made Anne and I a couple, from my point of view, was that Anne seemed genuinely interested in hearing about and following the things in which I was interested – politics, films or whatever. She quickly showed that she was prepared to go further, going out of her way to wait for me and drive me home if I hadn’t my own car. When I first collected her from her house in Bray, just south of Dublin, where she lived with her parents and her unmarried elder brother Bernard, I felt warmly welcomed and noted the evident wit and intelligence of the household – both her parents were chemists, owning and running a successful pharmacy in Bray.

Anne also had a married brother and sister, Paddy and Gemma, so the Morans were becoming a prosperous extended family. Around the time Anne and I were getting together, Bernard had become interested in Maura, one of the lively daughters of a city centre undertaker. Everyone liked Maura so a foursome was always potentially available for outings.

Sunday afternoons always seem special. They seem to offer a unique opportunity to either potter or enjoy a few hours in a truly relaxed mood. As our courtship developed, Anne and I spent our Sunday afternoons in Bray. She would cook something special for us both as soon as her parents, Jim and Patricia, had left to spend their ritual Sunday at the nearby golf club. We then had the house to ourselves for the afternoon.

Read more: 1966 – Changing Job and Getting Engaged