I first met Eoghan Harris nearly 20 years ago. I had just become editor of Magill and was hoping I could persuade him to become a columnist, writes John Waters.
He wasn't writing for anyone then, but I had read his treatise on television and terrorism and thought it tremendous. He wasn't keen to write for Magill but we met for lunch. "I know you're not a Provo," he greeted me, "and I don't think you're a Trot. What the f*** are you?"
At the time I was, I think, a post-nationalist existential pluralist, but I hadn't gotten around to labelling it, so I just said that I had only recently come up from the country. He understood and laughed. I liked him a lot. He was brilliant, funny and passionately engaged with reality. He declined my offer and we ate our lunch.
We've been friendly since, though never what you could call friends. We frequently disagree, sometimes publicly, but this has not affected our ability to get on when we meet. I was tickled once to be described by him as a "nationalist witch-doctor".
I was the first journalist to write about Harris's indispensable advisory role in Mary Robinson's presidential campaign of 1990, in a short report in this newspaper on the day following her election. Harris and I were in touch throughout the campaign and he promised he would give me the inside story at the end. He was as good as his word, though this remarkable story almost didn't make it into the paper because some senior editors of the time were so sceptical about the idea that Harris could have been such a central figure. I had to go at the last minute to Mary Robinson's husband Nick to have the whole thing verified.
The response to Harris's appointment to Seanad Éireann, undoubtedly the most exciting and interesting appointment of recent years, has stirred up similar elements of churlishness. Indeed when I called to congratulate him on hearing the news, we pretty much wrote the script there and then. The general tenor of commentary has centred on his journey from left-wing radical to alleged buttress of the establishment. In the past week, several letters along these lines have been published on the page opposite. One heavily sarcastic missive gets it across: "Congratulations to Eoghan Harris on his appointment to the Seanad," wrote a reader from Shankill, Co Dublin. "No doubt his performance on the Late Late Show in the run-up to the general election had no influence on the Taoiseach's decision to appoint him and it was based purely on his outstandingly constructive contributions on every side of the political spectrum over the last 40 years."
It is intriguing that, in a society that has changed out of all recognition in the past decade, we still implicitly regard consistency to a singular viewpoint as exhibiting the highest ethic of personal conviction. Why is this? Everything is changed utterly and, in our moral evaluations of this, we almost invariably present these changes - prosperity, peace, freedom - as virtuous. Very well: somewhere beneath these changes, there must have existed some strong dynamic of thought, guiding and propelling them forward. And yet, when we come upon an example of a thinker who has exhibited in public the characteristics that most readily resonate with the seismic shifts in our cultural conditions, we decide there has been something suspect about this person's willingness to change horses.
Commentators, because they envy him, often miss the extent of Harris's intuitive understanding of the feeling of his people. This, I think provides the only real map of his journey. He has been right about many things, as he was right recently about Bertie, because he listens to his own tribal pulse, sometimes going with it and sometimes realising that it needs to be denied.
I was with him on the Late Late that night in May, and knew instantly that what he had done was remind people what they felt in their hearts and told them that it was permissible to express it. Harris personifies what has happened in this society in our lifetimes, not only because his personal journey has reflected a broader collective odyssey, but because he was present at the scene of more than one or two key incidents along the way.
He was there for the Robinson moment, and again when David Trimble made those first faltering steps towards reconciliation. He did much to keep nationalist Ireland honest through it all. Observing Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing at each other's jokes, we must surely realise that such a transformation would not have been possible if dogged flat-earthism remained the primary political virtue.
A weak man's changing is of no consequence, but a strong man's change is an inspiration and a reassurance. The changes that have happened in Ireland in the past couple of decades could not have been accomplished by moderate minds, but only by extremists capable of yielding when the occasion called. Nobody represents better than Eoghan Harris the qualities that brought us from where we were to where we are now.