As Anne and I tried to structure our life around the needs of Justin, my employment commitments to Trinity College and the demands of a potential political career, Gaeta proved an ideal base.

Our car could be parked in the short drive in front of our hall door. Dalkey’s nearest general store and the bus terminus for the No. 8 route into Dun Laoghaire and the city centre were only yards away. To get the train into the city you had to walk the full length of the village’s main street and turn 100 yards up the hill past the post office, ten minutes’ walk at most.

I usually took the train to work. I had been promoted from Assistant Appointments Officer to be an Assistant Secretary of the College with special responsibility for the administration of the Science and Engineering Faculties. My office on the first floor of the Chemistry Department was in the oldest block of the granite-faced medical and science buildings, backing on to what was once a parade ground. This open area faced the backs of the once fine residences of Westland Row, the street which lent its name to one of the main commuter train stations on the east coast line. A pedestrian entrance into the parade ground meant that for my office destination the only effort demanded of me was a short walk.

My huge first floor office, which I was glad to share with the Faculty secretary, had a superb view of College Park and was dominated inside by an enormous bookcase said to have come from the old Irish Parliament building, now the Bank of Ireland on College Green.

Senate working days were not too frequent. Although, unlike the three members of the Senate elected by Trinity Graduates, I was under the discipline of a party whip, the College’s familiarity with having staff members as Senators helped me obtain acceptance of the absences my new status required.

In reality, the political demands on my time went way beyond my formal Senate obligations. My status on the Fianna Fáil national executive had been enhanced. I was seen in the constituency as a sort of second TD, a perception I encouraged in the hope that it might help me to get elected at the next General Election. In addition, I had to handle more and more invitations for articles, speaking engagements, and so on, and was also asked to lend my name to a number of organisations anxious to have a representative range of political names on their executive committee or list of patrons.

In descending order of calls on my time, I became a member of the executive of the Irish Council of the European Movement, a member of the committee of the Irish Family Planning Association, and a patron of the Irish Anti-Apartheid movement.

For all these activities my Trinity office base was ideal. The Senate Chamber in Leinster House, ICEM meetings in Merrion Square and IFPA meetings in Trinity Street were virtually equidistant from the Chemistry Department at different points on a semi-circle whose diameter on the familiar line running through the College’s front gate and campanile, could be traversed in little more than a ten minute walk. If I was late returning home in the evening, buses were more frequent than the train.

On Senate days I often enjoyed a lift home with Michael Yeats, who had been elected Cathaoirleach or Chairman of the Senate, following his own re-election to the chamber. He lived in a larger house in Dalkey of about the same vintage as Gaeta, at a commanding position on the road to Coliemore Harbour, which forked away from the main street towards the sea rather than the railway line. He always had a spacious car to transport the instruments of his wife and daughter, both harpists. His wife Gráinne had an international reputation as a singer of traditional Irish songs and accompanied herself on the Irish harp. Their daughter Catriona was studying the orchestra harp, the largest transport challenge of all.

Whether for concerts or elections, Michael had travelled the whole country and I felt he could drive almost anywhere with his eyes closed. As Tommy Mullins lived in Dun Laoghaire and was back in the Senate as leader of the Fianna Fáil Party group, he was often dropped off too by the Yeats taxi at the end of a Senate session. Part of the insidious charm of Leinster House was that, although it might be the seat of political confrontation, there was rarely any confrontation in the corridors. Thus, whenever Jim Dooge, leader of the opposition Fine Gael group in the Senate, who lived at Seapoint on the Dun Laoghaire route, also needed a lift home, there would be a friendly quartet in the car. I learnt a lot from those three elder statesmen in the rich conversations between Leinster House, Seapoint, Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey.

Inside Gaeta, a porch and a long hall led to a short flight of stairs down into a comfortable living room with a boiler grate which could provide hot water. To the left of the stairs, and outside the original line of the house was a lean-to kitchen opening on to a glassed-in sun room with a door leading to the garden sheds at the back of the house.

The garden then opened out from the side of the house into a sort of right angle triangle with a small greenhouse behind the kitchen and a square patch of vegetable garden diagonally across from there. The living room window looked through the sun room into the garden, a view dominated by an apple tree and a clothes line slung between the apple tree and the coal shed. The garden’s main triangle space was a lawn bounded by paths flanking the house and then a rose bed sheltered by the high stone wall which gave the garden its magic.

Garden, greenhouse, kitchen and sunroom were ideally placed to profit from a south-westerly orientation.

The main axis of the house ran from south, south-east, to north, north-west, with another stairs going up from the hall into the large return bedroom over the living room. To get to the tiny bathroom you continued up, turning back into the roof over the hall. At hall level to the right was a sitting room lit by the villa’s two front windows. Behind it was a corridor serving two small back rooms. The first had begun as a study but became the centre of baby operations before Justin was big enough to have his cot in the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

Because of its age and construction – slate roof and stone and rubble walls – Gaeta did have occasional roof and drain problems. When in the garden, the pram covered by a wasp net could be watched from the kitchen. When inside, it could be rolled to and fro over the door saddle of the living room, creating the only rocking rhythm known to propel Justin towards sleep.

I found the odd night hours spent on rocking duty met some of my own requirements for calm and reflection. Winter and summer, the living room was a warm and cosy place for everything from eating, reading, writing and watching television, to bathing Justin. The front sitting room was only used on the rare occasions of formal entertainment, for occasional Cumann and other organisational meetings, and to receive constituents.

I remember most vividly switching on the BBC seven o’clock news one May morning and hearing the top headline begin: “There is a cabinet crisis in the Irish republic”. That really woke me up as I had been at a Party organisation meeting in Leinster House the previous evening where there was no sign of anything like that. By seven-thirty I had bought the three morning papers and was transfixed by the story that Charles Haughey, the Minister for Finance, and Neil Blaney, the Minister for Agriculture, had been asked to resign by Taoiseach, Jack Lynch.

One piece of spin-off from that unfolding and ultimately historic drama would shortly impinge on me directly.

Though Neil Blaney had left the government, he remained for a time a member of Fianna Fáil and Chairman of the Party’s organisation committee. In this latter position, he and his supporters succeeded in blocking a proposal that Jack Lynch should deliver the oration at the Party’s annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown on 21 June. Joe Groome, the Party’s resourceful Honorary Secretary, immediately put to the organisation committee the idea that nothing could be more appropriate than to have a Protestant deliver the oration and that I was the man for the job.

I had never had such a stressful assignment up to then and have rarely had one since. Although Jack Lynch gave me some rough notes on which he had been working, they did not look as if I could make them my own. In the circumstances what I felt was required was something honest and sincere which I would feel appropriate to deliver on an occasion with which I had little empathy, but was an important event in the Party’s calendar. Because of the tension in the Party, there would clearly be a large crowd there trying to interpret anything that was said. I deplored the fact that a similar Bodenstown ceremony dedicated to the physical-force tradition of nationalism, usually with known IRA speakers, also had its place in the annual calendar of political commemorations.

Although I had plenty of time to prepare, I never got beyond a satisfactory first sentence until late on the night before the oration. I had a rough text by about 1 a.m. and got up at 6 a.m. to finish it. When Anne appeared to remind me that we needed to leave for the cross-country drive to Bodenstown, I realised that my watch had gone slow through lack of winding and that I would be lucky both to have a finished text and get to the ceremony on time. Because the narrow approach road leading to Bodenstown was already blocked by parked cars when we got there, I had to leave the car and run ahead of Anne. As I pushed my way through the crowd I heard the Last Post and knew the ceremony had started. Joe O’Neill, the Party’s assistant General Secretary, saw me coming and cleared the way for me to step straight up onto the kerbstone of a grave to begin my oration without any amplification. My hands were shaking as I pulled the notes from my pocket, smoothed the much corrected text, and with a voice still palpitating from the dash to the cemetery, tried to read, with as much volume and dignity as I could, the finished speech.

Whilst I saw Douglas Gageby, editor of the Irish Times in the crowd, there seemed to be only one reporter present, a representative of the Cork Examiner who had clearly agreed to give all his daily paper colleagues a copy of the speech as delivered. But there were no copies.

Fortunately the reporter was resourceful. A typed text emerged for the first time in the hallway of a house near the cemetery where I dictated it to the reporter, who, having simply knocked and asked for access to a table and chair, hammered it out like a true professional on a small portable typewriter.

Read more: 1971 – Family Planning