An Irishman’s Diary about TK Whitaker

Next year will be mainly about the men who died for Ireland. But I hope that, amid all those centenary commemorations, we can celebrate another with the man who lived for it. I refer, of course, to TK Whitaker.

If providence spares him, the great public servant will be 100 in December 2016. And it’s profoundly apt that he was born in the year he was, after the dust settled. Because in the practical business of achieving and maintaining independence during the century since, he probably did more than other Irish person.

So come the happy day, 15 months hence, I trust the Government will have something suitable planned to commemorate a living hero. Maybe it should just build a pedestal for the occasion, and invite him to stand on it.

I'm reminded of Whitaker's momentous age by the reissue in paperback of Anne Chambers's fine 2014 book, TK Whitaker – Portrait of a Patriot. Of which, in an otherwise glowing review for this paper last year, Diarmuid Ferriter complained that it was a bit of a "hagiography".

And it is. Chambers is a close friend of the subject and he chose her as biographer. But he’s better qualified for hagiography that most people, clearly. I doubt if even his harshest critic could have managed a hatchet job.

Born in Rostrevor, of modest background, Whitaker crossed the newly-created Border in the 1920s with his family and grew up in Drogheda, where he was educated by the Christian Brothers. Drogheda was also where two of his life-long loves – for the Irish language and salmon-fishing – began.

And no offence to the Brothers, but maybe he tasted the Salmon of Knowledge in that Boyne-side town (although he didn’t actually catch any there, according to Chambers), because by the time he left it to join the Civil Service, aged 18, he was already on a trajectory that would take him to the top.

It started humbly, with the clerical officer exam. But he finished first in Ireland, a feat he repeated in three subsequent exams within five years, for a rate of promotion that’s still a record in the service.

He also dodged such potential pitfalls as becoming well known to a colleague named Brian Ó Nualláin, aka Myles na gCopaleen (who once described careers in the Civil Service as being for “people of intelligence whose parents have no money”). And having thereby successfully avoided mention in Cruiskeen Lawn, he rose, by the tender age of 39, to become secretary of the Department of Finance.

Mere intelligence aside, Whitaker also had something unusual in a career civil servant. It was, in Garret FitzGerald's words, "the crucial addition of imagination". This inspired the famous "Grey Book" with which he and like-minded colleagues launched the economic recovery of the Lemass years.

The results of that are now well known, but Chambers reminds us of an important fact – that the work on it was entirely voluntary, done outside office hours, and unpaid.

Whitaker’s career has continued in like vein ever since. When he became governor of the Central Bank in 1969, he thought the proposed salary (£8,500 plus a car) excessive compared with Civil Service norms, and negotiated it down to £7,500, without the wheels. And when he officially retired from public life – a loose concept in his case because he was subsequently asked to sit on about 40 State boards and commissions and so he was at least as busy after retirement as before – he refused remuneration on the grounds that he was receiving a Civil Service pension.

As well as building Ireland’s economic independence, he was deeply involved in working towards peace with and in the North.

He arranged the Lemass-O’Neill summit, reoriented Jack Lynch’s republicanism with the “Tralee Speech”, wrote a 1971 draft of the Belfast Agreement called “Northern Ireland – A Possible Solution”, and was hailed as a much-needed calming influence behind the scenes of the 1997/98 negotiations.

I suppose he has his faults. I note for example that in 1967, during talks with the French over EEC membership, Georges Pompidou wanted to discuss with him “the differences between Gaelic football and rugby”, and Whitaker couldn’t oblige because “I did not know much about either game”.

But you can’t keep on top of everything. Which brings me back to the suggestion of erecting a pedestal for him to stand on next year. No doubt he’ll refuse on grounds of modesty. If so, perhaps the Government could exploit his sense of duty – declaring it a State board and asking him to sit on instead.

@FrankmcnallyIT