Arthur Noonan had a long memory and he made good use of it: he forgot neither his home and family in Mayo nor the training he'd had in the local papers.
He was steeped in the history of the place and full of affection for its people. Long before he left RTE he had spent every spare moment on Achill, at work on the house to which he and Frances would retire.
And long before that, when he had only recently left the Mayo News for the Irish Press, he was planning the return journey. Many who leave the country dream of going home: Arthur meant it and made it.
In the meantime he achieved his professional ambition to rank among the country's best commentators on current affairs, reporting and analysing every significant political event for more than 30 years.
It was an ambition which grew out of his experience in local papers and in that forcing ground of journalism, the Irish Press newsroom of the 1950s.
It called for high - and, in these days, unusual - standards. But Arthur never neglected the attention to detail on which local papers thrive; his memory was precise and his sense of history striking; and if he admired plain speaking, he stuck to his own advice: to be convincing, opinion must be founded on fact.
He held strong opinions, especially on the need for honesty in public life; but before saying what he thought - in a voice that was rarely raised and never strident - he made sure that his audience knew what he was talking about.
Many of our colleagues in the Irish Press were to work with - or against - him for the rest of a long and mostly happy career. But he was happiest when he moved from Burgh quay to Middle Abbey street and became political correspondent of the Irish Independent.
There, he had the space provided by a weekly column in which to offer opinions that had begun to develop while he was still at school in Castlebar and continued through an apprenticeship with Clann na Talmhan.
He was happiest in his years with the Independent, not only because he enjoyed unravelling tricky technical problems or delving into local knowledge on Saturday mornings, but because he'd become a panellist on RTE's new programme The Hurler on the Ditch.
John Healy was chairman and the other hurlers were the political correspondents of the daily papers and RTE, Michael McInerney, Michael Mills, John O'Sullivan and Dick Dowling. The programme provoked more discussion and threw up more ideas than any other.
Arthur was more at ease in its discursive atmosphere than with the relentless demands of daily broadcasting. And the more thoughtful role of political editor was to suit him better than the pressure of life as a political correspondent when he joined the station's staff full-time.
For someone who was so long in the public eye he was unusually diffident, almost shy; and gentler than anyone engaged in two cruel trades - politics and journalism - has a right to be. Even when he was ill, and had to travel from Mayo to Dublin for treatment, he paused to visit Leinster House and old friends who will miss him now.
D.W.