It so happened that as my obviously happy relationship with Anne became a topic of interest within the IPA, I was becoming unhappy about the contribution I felt able to make to the Institute. Uncertainties about my performance, and indeed about the viability of the objectives on which my recruitment had been based, led me to consider whether or not I should seek other career opportunities elsewhere.

Perhaps I also felt that it was not a good idea to be developing a passionate attachment in a context where the two partners were in such close proximity each working day.

Anne and I reviewed the situation together. While aspects of my work had been a great success, the running of a well-attended social administration seminar in Cork, for example, other experiences suggested to me that I was unsuited to what was expected of me and that the whole idea of the establishment of effective regional branches of the Institute was unrealistic.

I had been apprehensive about the possibilities before I had set out to visit Institute members in county councils and other local authorities. As I pursued my planned itinerary I felt I lacked credibility as a salesman in the local authority context. Further still, I found virtually no one I thought would have the voluntary commitment and enthusiasm around which even one branch might be launched on a pilot basis. My scepticism as to the real potential for membership activities was reinforced by the disappointing attendance at an evening lecture and discussion programme I set up for Dublin members in the Economic and Social Research Institute’s lecture theatre on Baggot Street.

Anne helped a lot with that programme, particularly coming with me each evening to make sure that everything about the room, the seating, the coffee and so on was as it should be.

The aim of the programme was to provide public servants with an opportunity to hear good speakers talking about ways in which ideas from a wide range of fields might be relevant to developments in the public service. There were sessions on economic and social theory, on culture and on computers. It was disappointing that audiences were so small when the content proved to be both interesting and stimulating. No doubt part of the problem was that the programme was ahead of its time. Irish civil servants were not yet alert to the contribution cultural policy and computer applications might make to the body politic. The fact that I was there to listen to my own programme turned out to be a valuable investment for the future.

As soon as I decided I should look seriously for another job, an interesting vacancy was advertised in the Irish Times. The Trinity College Appointments Office was seeking an Assistant Appointments Officer. I knew the Appointments Office well. It provided the career advice and appointment services for TCD undergraduates and graduates, notably organising the annual information and interview visits through which final year students had an opportunity to meet potential employers. In my final year at TCD these services had been organised by Dermot Montgomery, a pleasant and business-like Northerner, who directed the Appointments Office alone, with the help of a small, student-friendly secretariat. It was thanks to the Appointments Office that I had been interviewed by the BBC and met the Westminster Press.

Although the salary on offer was virtually the same as I had at the IPA, which itself had been little improvement on my final Westminster Press salary, I felt that a return to the TCD environment would be a bonus. I felt confident that my three years of general reporting in England had given me a broad knowledge of the many employment openings for graduates of which most students were completely unaware. My IPA year had then made me aware of the current realities of Ireland’s economic and social development in a way that must surely be considered in positive terms by any potential employer.

When I was called to interview by Dermot Montgomery my belief that we could work together positively as partners was immediately confirmed and a job offer followed quickly.

While I felt Tom Barrington was disappointed at the speed with which I had decided to move elsewhere, the Institute’s leadership was itself aware that membership activities were much less likely to provide it with the expected income and service base it needed than the newly launched school and extended consultancy, training and publishing programmes. Once I left to take up my new appointment, I found that my personal relationships with everyone at the Institute, including Anne, were in fact enhanced. I now met them as friends rather than colleagues and I could move closer and closer to Anne without feeling the scrutiny of the coffee room.

I quickly settled into my new job, finding Dermot Montgomery a highly professional and congenial boss playing his role within the limits of what was achievable and reasonable on limited funding, and on an academic salary scale where the best hope for an Appointments Officer was to reach the level of Reader, a step below professorship.

The privilege of Common Room membership meant having constantly changing and interesting company at lunch. Being able to park on the College campus was also worth a great deal.

I told Florence that I was thinking of getting engaged and, given Anne’s family background, saw no alternative to getting married in a Catholic Church with the full ceremony and formality of an upper middle-class white wedding. Her unambiguous response that it was my happiness that mattered, adding that she liked everything she had seen of Anne, cleared the way for a proposal.

Within the Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown constituency, the Monkstown Cumann had played a particularly active part in helping towards the election to the Dáil for the first time of David Andrews, a tall young barrister with the battered good looks of a fighter, part of his inheritance from Dr. C.S. Andrews, the fearsome head of the national transport company, who was also President of the IPA.

The membership of the Monkstown Cumann seemed quite different to that of most of the other Cumann in the constituency. David’s attractive and highly intelligent wife Annette belonged to it and was a first-class organiser and fund raiser. As a talented musician who had worked in Irish radio she also had plenty of contacts in the entertainment world. She was able to organise dinner dance functions which seemed beyond the range of other Cumann. So it was that on an evening coming up to Christmas Anne and I found ourselves at a black-tie dinner dance organised by the Monkstown Cumann in the basement ballroom of the Metropole cinema on O’Connell Street. Jim O’Donnell of the IPA joined us with his fiancée, Mary Costigan, making up a lively table. The band was led by the well-known Dublin dance pianist, Peggy Dell, an elderly Marlene Dietrich type figure wearing a man’s dinner jacket and singing well-known songs in a very deep voice.

In what must have been one of his earliest cabaret performances, the young singer songwriter Shay Healy, accompanying himself on the guitar, brought the house down with lyrics like: “If I was a blackbird I’d fly to the Dáil, I’d fly in the window and … (heavy chord) … on them all.”
“It’s like Berlin in the 30’s,” said Jim O’Donnell, as Anne and I got up to dance as tightly together as we could to Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”.

That’s how “Strangers in the Night” became our tune. I proposed to Anne in the breakfast room in Bray early the following morning when we got back from the Metropole.

Thus, we moved happily towards Christmas. I had a job I felt comfortable in and was engaged to be married to someone I loved. I also think my proposal to Anne gave her brother Bernard the little bit of momentum he needed to propose to Maura.

Two weddings and an election would carry into 1967 the sense of roller-coaster experience which had been mine since returning to Dublin.

Read more: 1967 – A Wedding, A House, and an Election