"We don't often pay enough respect to public servants who have done a great deal to build up this country", Mr Douglas Gageby said in Dublin last night at a reception to mark the publication of his new book, The Last Secretary-General: Sean Lester and the League of Nations.
Mr Gageby, who was editor of The Irish Times from 1963 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1986, tells the story, based on his father-in-law's diaries, of the man who held the highest office in the League of Nations.
Dr T.K. Whitaker, who launched the book, said that Sean Lester was one of the great Irishmen who, like Ed Phelan, head of the International Labour Office, was a pioneer in international politics. Both had sustained their offices through the desolation of wartime. Today, Mary Robinson belonged to that distinguished league of international civil servants.
Biographies of fathers-in-law, Dr Whitaker said, were rather uncommon, but there was nothing starry-eyed about this book. Douglas Gageby had made a fair appraisal of his father-in-law after a lifetime of acute appraisal of the world. He had done so with the light touch which readers of The Irish Times had come to relish.
Sean Lester was a worthy subject who merited commemoration as a great Irishman. He lived from 1888 to 1959 and had been League of Nations High Commissioner to the Free City of Danzig in the troubled years leading up to the second World War. Later, he became Acting Secretary-General of the League of Nations, holding out in Geneva during the war years.
The book provided gripping reading about the tense situation in Danzig before the Nazis gained control, Dr Whitaker said.
Mr Gageby said that his father-in-law had been the first Western diplomat to encounter the full blast of Nazism, but then, he said, he had seen the indignities inflicted in Ireland by the Black and Tans.
The reception was attended by Mr Gageby's wife, Dorothy, who was in Danzig with her parents and sisters for much of the period covered, and by their children, including Mrs Justice Susan Denham, who sits on the bench of the Supreme Court. Others present included Major T.B. McDowell, chairman The Irish Times Trust Ltd; former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald; Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness; Mr Paddy McKernan, secretary-general of the Department of Foreign Affairs; Senator Feargal Quinn and the author and journalist Maeve Binchy.
The book is published by Town House and Country House.