When I think of Dick Walsh, I always remember the first time I really sat down and talked to him. It was in 1983 or 1984. I was a young reporter with the Sunday Tribune. He was the distinguished political correspondent of The Irish Times, a figure of great presence and authority in the worlds of journalism and politics, writes Fintan O'Toole
We were thrown together on a trip to Germany, a briefing for journalists who would be covering a state visit to Ireland by the German president.
After a very early flight from Dublin, a rigorously Teutonic day of grindingly boring meetings and a compulsory visit to a tedious three-hour ballet, we emerged on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg close to midnight. I was 25, in the whole of my health and completely exhausted. Dick was in his mid-40s and already badly affected by the painful and debilitating condition that bent him out of shape. I was ready for bed. He was ready for his favourite pastime: conversation.
Sheepishly, I followed the herd of veteran journalists led by Dick as they ducked into a vast underground beer hall. The place was like something from a Jacques Brel song. About 30 sailors in old-fashioned sailor suits were in the middle of a chaotic, bacchanalian debauch with perhaps a dozen whores. Various ne'er do wells, looking like black marketeers from a post-war movie, were hunched in conspiratorial huddles.
And for hours, while the sailors fought, made up and then joined the whores in a wild, madcap conga, Dick talked about his childhood in Co Clare, about Oliver J. Flanagan and Ger Connolly, about an Ireland that he despised and adored. When I think of him now, after his death last week, that image of him chuckling quietly away about the delights and infuriations of Irish public life while the world around was going mad seems entirely apt.
Having got to know Dick a little that night, I understood why he drove Fianna Fáil in particular up the wall. What really annoyed them was that he belonged precisely to those parts of the country where an Irish Times liberal used to be as exotic as an escaped parrot.
Dick had all the right credentials for a Soldier of Destiny. He grew up in de Valera country, rural east Clare. His father was a national school principal. His was a staunch Fianna Fáil household. He was a nifty hurler in his youth. He spoke and wrote Irish with a fluency that would shame many a self-proclaimed Gaeilgeoir. He returned to Ireland from exile in England as a result of the Lemass boom of the 1960s. He greatly admired Jack Lynch. And he was fascinated by the lore and legends of Irish machine politics.
While the mainstream of Fianna Fáil had no problem with stereotypical Irish Times liberals (West Brit shoneens or council-estate communists, not really Irish at all), Dick's deep disillusionment with the party after the resurrection of Charles Haughey in 1979 could not be put down to innate anti-Irishness. He should have been one of them. For him to come from a classic Fianna Fáil background and end up accusing the party of a corrupt alliance with modern gombeenism was the kind of data that did not compute.
The only way to fend off the thought that maybe it was the party that had betrayed the values that Dick inherited rather than the other way round, was to invent a different Dick Walsh, a congenital Blueshirt who couldn't be expected to know any better.
Hilariously, Jim McDaid, in the 1994 Dáil debate on the report of the beef tribunal (a scandal which was first exposed because of Dick's revelations of the links between Larry Goodman and Liam Lawlor), actually articulated this fantasy.
Unable to rebut Dick's stinging criticism of that whole sordid affair, McDaid resorted to the old back-of-the lorry bluster.
He first accused Dick of rigging an Irish Times opinion poll which showed that a large majority of people didn't believe the Government's protestations of innocence.
He then suggested that Dick was unfit to write about the subject because "Mr Walsh told a friend of mine some years ago that he was reared with a siege mentality in a Fine Gael household surrounded by de Valera's supporters - shades of the Alamo". At other times, Willie O'Dea described him, with heavy sarcasm, as "a fair-minded commentator".
Noel Treacy called him one of Fine Gael's "many scriptwriters".
Dick himself regarded this kind of idiocy as a hoot. It amused as much as the Haugheyite who threatened: "We'll straighten you out, Walsh", prompting Dick to point to his twisted back and murmur "I wish you could".
And yet Dick loved the whole lot of them. He had a passion for political life far beyond the merits of many of the fools and chancers whose deeds he chronicled.
In that lies the only consolation of his untimely death: that he didn't live to see the week when the world went to war and the Irish parliament went on its holidays.