The chapters for 1998, 1999 and 2000 were written in 1997. They are part of the exercise covering the years 1939 to 2005 which I titled “Peace Process” and which is deposited in the Boole Library in UCC.

Looking back from the perspective of today, I have decided to let the chapters stand as witness to concerns which were of great interest to me then and continue to be so.

In editing my manuscript from 1997 onwards, I have been fascinated to note that I recorded little of the detail of my political and professional involvements and passed few judgements on personalities crossing my path. What has surprised me most in re-reading “Peace Process” is the extent to which my values, beliefs and artistic ambitions recur as the leitmotiv of my story. No one should have been surprised when on retirement in 2001 I listed as interests on my new visiting card: poetry/audiovisual/art/ideas.

Occasionally I ask myself what is the most important activity in my life. If the measure of importance is the time spent on the activity, then the answer is probably: “reading”.

There were moments when the time I gave to reading created tensions with Anne. I am so easily distracted by the temptation to read that I sometimes hate myself for wasting time on a newspaper, or the free publicity in the letter box, when I could have been doing something more useful.

Anne could get mad from time to time about the time I spent in the bathroom, when she knew I must be sitting on the lavatory reading the volume left on the wash-top surface beside my wash-hand basin. And then there were those, to her, infuriating delays, when called for lunch I did not respond immediately and was caught finishing a chapter or an article in some book or magazine.

Of course, where reading is concerned, there are the perennial problems of quality and quantity, and priority of choice. Some social scientists are even concerned that the basic importance of literacy may lose its place in humanity’s understanding of civilisation and culture in the 21st century. Information technology theoretically offers the possibility of a life driven by voice commands and the graphic choices presented by computer and TV-screen icons rather than by written messages or the understanding of written text.

I myself am not one of those who fear for the death of print and books, but I see that my voice and other voices need to be raised to remind leaders in the developed world of the importance of literacy to creativity and individual fulfilment in human society everywhere. Studies of the overall decline in educational standards in Europe and the US show a growing reluctance among students to read texts of any great length and to appreciate the importance of contact with primary texts as distinct from handy summaries. Historical and critical reviews and multimedia presentations are becoming increasingly popular through various electronic media.

I realise that I have been lucky to find almost all reading a pleasure. Of course I have read a great deal of crap and ephemera, but look at some of the things I have turned up. Within the family, everyone remembers the visit to the Hindu temple in a decaying red-brick building in a run-down corner of Leeds on one of those school long weekends when we decided that, rather than Justin coming home, we should all explore a new area of the North of England. What a wonderful experience when the temple treasurer explained Hinduism and its colourful worship as we sat with the local worshippers, shoeless on the temple floor, and shared the food handed around afterwards. We owed that experience to an advertisement placed by the Leeds Vegetarian Society in a co-operative news-sheet that I had picked up as a handout in the city centre shortly after our arrival.

In different professional roles I have also acquired notoriety as a reader. Whenever it has been appropriate, I have loved reading all the Dublin-published morning newspapers from cover to cover. Thanks to such saturation reading I knew long before it became generally accepted that, for example, The Times and The Irish Times were not always the papers of record they so often clearly felt themselves to be. I regretted greatly the moves towards tabloidisation affecting so many daily, weekly and monthly publications whose information and journalism I had valued over the years.

My own decisions to spend more time on serious reading and writing in recent years, together with the growing demands of email and electronic information, mean that my newspaper reading is now down to The Financial Times or The Guardian and, even there, I notice that more and more articles fail my acid test, namely are inaccurate, careless or superficial when covering topics of which I myself have some direct knowledge. But I still love the FT’s pink pages and almost feel a proprietorial interest in the comprehensiveness of the non-business coverage. Years ago I had pointed out to successive Financial Times’ Brussels correspondents that busy businessmen need to know the results of all the major classic sporting events. Now, thanks to the sports and other coverage, particularly at the weekend, I do not feel so deprived and exposed as I might otherwise have done in radically restricting my newspaper reading.

But what is all this about? I have only got on to the subject of reading because I remember 1998 as the year in which I rediscovered the novel. This was all thanks to Anne and the British and Commonwealth Women’s Club in Brussels. Some years before, when she thought she might take up golf, Anne had joined the Women’s Club to avail of its relatively easy access to the most exclusive clubs, particularly the Royal Golf Club at Tervuren. She discovered that the Women’s Club had a small but sound library for members, and a reading group which met from time to time to discuss books read on a pre-arranged basis. Thanks to her conviction that in joining anything one has a duty to give and not just take, Anne in time found herself not just borrowing books but on the library committee, and not just participating in the reading group but convening and chairing it also.

In a burst of activity in the early ‘90s she had been successively the reading group Chairperson and the Club’s Librarian. She was widely credited with raising standards and attracting wider interest among Club members. The talent most appreciated by the Club’s management committee was that she had proved exceptionally successful in finding excellent successors in these activities to build on her own good husbandry and initiatives.

The impact on the whole family of Anne’s literary-oriented activities came through the steady flow through the Brussels household of the latest novels, whether in first-hardback or paperback-reissue format.

She naturally sought to share her enthusiasm with Justin, Patricia and myself as she thought most appropriate. There would be a particular push behind those titles which attracted most interest and controversy in the Reading Group. Thus it was that it became virtually impossible for me to resist reading something of Robertson Davies. The particular volume into which I was propelled by Anne’s enthusiasm was “The Deptford Trilogy”.

What made this burst of 1998 reading particularly memorable was that my enjoyment of this extraordinary tale of an illusionist encouraged me to look at two authors not on Anne’s list, but who I understood to be among the latest important novelists, namely Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy.

Imagine my surprise when I found that their work also fell into trilogies, reinforcing my conviction that multifaceted reality always has to be dealt with from more than one angle and reminding me that many of my own most-valued insights have come from novels rather than from those weighty areas of non-fiction into which my reading choice and book purchasing have naturally fallen in recent years: philosophy, art, poetry, economics, history, travel and biography.

My renewed respect for the novel seemed to parallel something of the contemporary controversies of philosophy and literary theory in the English-speaking world. Although it probably placed me a little behind the times, I soon found my reawakened interest in the novel led me towards the relatively new paperback issues of Richard Rorty’s “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” and Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon”. I realised that reading, much more than painting, film, research, or other possible hobby interests could fuel my retirement aspirations.

Read more: 1999 – The Arrival of the Electronic Library