Memior: I believe that, if I were an objective reviewer of this book, I would recommend it most strongly - both for the beautiful writing, interspersed with some of Máire's poems, many of them translated from the Irish, and for its tender and evocative account of the Ireland of the first half of the last century.
But objective is what I cannot be about this marvellous book. For, as Máire records, her family and mine were close friends from the time of the Easter Rising onwards - a friendship that was unaffected by the Civil War: Cogadh na gCarad, as Máire has always described it.
In the early stages of that tragic conflict, when my father and his colleagues were under fire in Government Buildings from Republicans, and Sean MacEntee was besieged by the Free State army in what is now the Gresham Hotel, my republican mother and Margaret MacEntee took turns at bringing their children to stay the night in each other's houses on either side of Marlborough Road.
Then, barely a year after the Republicans were released from internment, Margaret, accompanied by almost four-year-old Máire, stood as my godmother in Donnybrook Church. Sean MacEntee was to have been my godfather, but in his absence my eldest brother took his place. Máire tells that in her family I was known as "the child of the reconciliation", my birth in February 1926 having demonstrated that, by mid-1925 at least, my mother's republicanism was offering no obstacle to my parents' personal relationship.
As Máire records, it was at the instance of Brendan Corish's father, then Mayor of Wexford, that in 1923 my father, Desmond FitzGerald, as Minister for External Affairs, secured Sean's release for a fortnight from GormanstoInternment Camp to enable him to inspect the public lighting scheme in Wexford town, for which he had been the consultant.
Máire is unwittingly unfair to her father in suggesting that, when that fortnight was up, he had no compunction about going on the run. My understanding of what happened is that at the end of the fortnight my father presented Margaret and Sean with two passports, and told them to go to Paris for a holiday, telling Sean not to bother returning to Gormanston!
My penultimate memory of Sean MacEntee is of a deeply conservative but quite brilliant contribution that he made at a meeting of the Council of State when he was 92 on the subject of property rights - an address sustained for a quarter-of-an-hour without looking at a single note.
My last meeting with him, as Máire records, was when I was taoiseach and he was dying. I was deeply moved that he asked to see me, to tell me how much I had been loved by Margaret - a love that I warmly reciprocated - and to talk of his regret that the Civil War had happened, as well as about his unhappiness with aspects of current Irish politics.
Leaving these family matters aside, I was particularly fascinated by Máire's account of the time she spent holidaying as a child in Dunquin with her remarkable polymath uncle, Father Paddy Browne, Professor of Mathematics in Maynooth, who later became President of University College, Galway. She conveys wonderfully the extraordinary breadth and depth of her uncle's learning - which ranged far beyond his academic discipline of mathematics as he translated into Irish many classics such as Villon, Racine and Corneille, Sophocles and Plutarch - and Homer's Odyssey - his version of which, however, was not published until 30 years after his death.
She caustically contrasts Father Paddy's Humanist openness to the world outside with the "complacent insularity" of D.P. Moran's Leader and with Daniel Corkery's "nativist ideas, coalesc\ with . . . the know-nothing Philistinism, then as now so powerful a force in our island in both languages".
And in her account of Father Paddy's evenings with his Dunquin friends I find echoes of my father's description of his time on the Blaskets in 1910, when, as a poet from London, he first visited Ireland.
"These would not be recognised story-tellers, (seanachaithe)", Maire says "but . . . men in their prime, responsible fathers of families, good companions and superb conversationalists . . . (In) the orchestration of those evenings there was always a text . . . The readings would be short . . . The life of Mark Anthony was the great favourite from Plutarch: it had everything: politics, passion, tragedy and war at sea. The company\ imagination ranged from the Atlantic to the Isles of Greece, from Puck Fair at Killorglin . . . to the ancient world and the siege of Troy."
Reading Máire's account of her childhood Dunquin experiences has served to intensify my own sense of guilt at having failed to maintain during my adult life the fluency in Irish that I acquired in Coláiste na Rinne two-thirds of a century ago.
Her book also reminds me of how similar, despite political differences, were our upbringings in so many respects. Her parents and mine practised, and sought to instil in their children, identical values of public service and integrity, values that Cumann na nGaedheal and the Fianna Fáil of those days had brought with them from the intense patriotism of the National Movement, in which their leadership had served together. As Máire remarks: "The era of which I speak is no mean era and the people who inhabited it, no mean people."
The children of both our families eventually came to share the same sense of having missed out on great events - a feeling so beautifully encapsulated in Máire's poem 'For Fergus', written to my next brother when they were at college together just before the war. Let me quote the first verse:
Friend, when we die, it shall be in our beds
And, having found no purchase worth the price,
We'll part from life perforce and grudgingly,
For us no trumpet and no sacrifice.
Later in the book Máire's account of the dramatic events of her unscheduled trip to Katanga in 1961 adds an extra dimension to Conor's To Katanga And Back. Her visit there - where another brother of mine, Pierce, was part of Conor's UN team - brought unsought notoriety to the pair.
Thereafter Máire's book chronicles her life with a man who came to replace her uncle Paddy as her intellectual companion - a man with whom ever since she has shared a deep and tender love.
This wonderful book leaves me deeply envious of Máire Mac an tSaoi's ability both to recall so much of the past and also to write about it all with such skill and elegance; no one could doubt that this book is the work of an accomplished poet.
As Seamus Deane said when he launched the book, this "passionate witness" is "an account of the growth of a poet's mind, and hence a volume in which love and language are strung as tightly as bow and bowstring".
Garret FitzGerald is a former taoiseach and author
- The Same Age as the State By Máire Cruise O'Brien, O'Brien Press, 352pp. €24.99