1972 was my peak year of political performance, as is evident in many of the boxes of Keery Papers in the Boole Library at University College Cork.
Leave of absence from TCD was made possible by my taking up an appointment as Research Officer at the Fianna Fáil Mount Street Headquarters. This gave me a top floor office at the back of the tall Georgian building, two flights up from my friend and mentor, Tommy Mullins.
The post had been created primarily to ensure that someone was available to organise the Party effort that would be required in support of the government, assuming successful negotiations on the terms for Ireland’s accession to the European Communities would be followed by a referendum campaign, for which preliminary market research suggested the prospects of a “Yes” vote in favour of EC entry were far from assured.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Patrick J. Hillery, who was leading the negotiations – and who rightly showed concern that only he in his privileged position saw the importance of the issues at stake – had made sure that he himself would be Director of the Party’s Referendum Campaign and Chairman of the Planning Committee. Work had started at the end of 1971. Inevitably Dr. Hillery was often absent and in his absence my role as secretary of the planning committee assumed additional responsibility and importance.
At government level, the Minister for Transport and Power, Brian Lenihan, stood in whenever Dr. Hillery was away and I felt myself lucky to have two such intelligent, pragmatic and good-humoured characters as political masters.
In addition to the referendum, as Research Officer, I created for myself the job of briefing the Parliamentary Party on legislation coming up for debate in the Dáil and Senate. I had argued for years that a modern party needed such research support and I was thrilled to have an opportunity to show what could be done. I believe that some good basic briefing was produced.
My 1972 files show that I again delivered the Bodenstown Oration and that Anne and I went to a Wilton Park Conference, one of the international conferences organised near London by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as exercises in cultural diplomacy. I cannot really remember either of these events and assume that that was entirely due to the volume and range of things I had to deal with.
It seems hard to believe that, in the 1971-72 period, Anne and I, working with my mother, managed to find and finance the purchase of a larger house in the constituency.
Victoria Lodge, at 9 Seafield Avenue, Monkstown, was a large semi-detached early-Victorian three-story house with good gardens front and back and a mews in bad condition along the lane adjoining the house which then provided a tool shed and garage. The house itself, while lived in by its previous owner, had once been divided into two households.
While it looked in bad condition, our architect friend Ciaran Diskin was convinced it could be made into a good family home with a comfortable granny flat for Florence on the ground floor. It helped us to take the decision to have the house completely refurbished when Ciaran introduced us to Tony and Barbara O’Neill, architects living with their family next door, who had begun modernising their adjoining half of the Seafield Avenue block. Not only did we like what the O’Neill’s were doing, we saw them as perfect next door neighbours, and so they proved to be.
Inevitably the construction work and the sale of Gaeta were out of synchronisation and for a short period Anne and I, Justin and Patricia had to live with Jim and Patricia Moran in Bray before we could move into our own house and get Florence moved into the ground floor flat. Everything was in place in time for our biggest and best party, thrown to mark the unbelievable success of the referendum campaign.
Very little of Fianna Fáil’s preparation for the EC referendum came to the attention of the press during its five months of peak activity. There seems to have been virtually no attention paid to it by academics, most of whom seem to assume that the size of the majority and of the turnout was the inevitable outcome of the obvious benefits of Irish accession, the Fine Gael Party’s support of the Government, and the special publicity campaign mounted by the Irish Council of the European Movement.
But, you only have to note the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ rejection of the accession decision almost immediately after the publication of the Government’s White Paper in February, and, later, the low voter turn-out for the autumn referendum to lower the voting age to 18, and to remove the reference to the special position of the Catholic Church, to realise that there was nothing simple about the Yes vote for Europe.
A huge tragedy for the country, and for the friends and families of those killed, was the aircrash near Staines, just outside London, of the plane bringing the first post-referendum visit of high-level business representatives to Brussels.
I particularly mourned the death of Michael Sweetman, a dynamic organiser and Fine Gael activist, who the European Movement had made its executive director for the campaign period. Following this tragic loss I myself was asked to take over responsibility for tidying up the organisation’s financial and administrative situation and to wind it back down to a level appropriate for normal day-to-day activity. This proved to be another major learning experience in management and human relations.
So 1972 came to an end. I suppose it must have been the case that I had become part of the Irish establishment. I was 36, I was a respected Senator, I had an almost textbook family, and a large house at a desirable address. My former employee, the IPA, had done me the honour of inviting me to become a member of its Council and to be a member of a study group examining civic education in Ireland.
Yet I did not feel part of any establishment. For a start Anne and I were in straightened financial circumstances. Because the Fianna Fáil and ICEM jobs had paid so little compared with my TCD salary, I had to take a decision to defer payment of tax in 1972.
When, with the help of an accountant, my situation was brought back into line the following year, the outstanding sum to be paid to the Revenue Commission was £28.
Secondly, Anne and I were clearly outsiders in the context of the country’s two religious communities, Catholic and Protestant. We had Justin and Patricia baptised as Catholics following the same logic as our own wedding ceremony. But where practice of religion was concerned, if we were to be found anywhere on a Sunday morning, when the vast majority of the country’s population would visit Church or Chapel, we were most likely to be found in the Quaker Meeting House on Pakenham Road, not far from Seafield Avenue.
We would be there because we did feel some kind of spiritual home in the Christian tradition, because the quiet simplicity of the organisation of the Religious Society of Friends seemed natural and appropriate, because we admired the decency and integrity of so many people we knew to be Quakers or members of the Religious Society of Friends, and because, whether realistic or unrealistic, we felt that a commitment to non-violence was as credible an approach as any in efforts aimed at getting the gun out of politics in Ireland.
The beginning of my interest in the Quaker approach to war and violence had been my concern about US intervention in Vietnam. Here was a war that cost thousands of lives unnecessarily. Even in the US far too few people had been prepared to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Many of them were Quakers and through reports borrowed from Joe Haughton, a leading Irish Quaker and the Professor of Geography in Trinity, I learnt that Quakers had not limited their anti-war activity to protest but had sought to promote all kinds of reconciliation and had done humanitarian work in both North and South Vietnam. Quaker tradition was becoming the yardstick I would use to assess my life and work.
As the year ended it seemed likely that a General Election might be called early in 1973. I realised that with all I had accomplished during the past year I was nevertheless not that much more prepared to stand as a candidate in that coming election than I had been when called upon so unexpectedly in 1969.
Neville Keery 