From the time she was at college - I can't speak personally of her schooldays - Joan was a popular figure: liked, respected, enjoyed - and loved by those who had a chance to know her well. As someone three years younger and two years behind her academically, she was initially outside my range.
And when we first met some weeks after I started in Earlsfort Terrace, no spark flew. I had come there bringing with me a romantic interest in another girl that I had developed when I was eight; and so far as Joan was concerned, I was juvenile and much too full of myself. But within a year we had begun to find each other. I was coming to realise that the attentions of the girl I had aspired to from childhood were focused elsewhere, and Joan was finding me good company, albeit not someone to be taken seriously. It was during her postgraduate year of social science studies, and in the closing weeks of the second World War, that I began to realise I wanted to spend my life with her.
Nearly four months were then to elapse before I could persuade her to take my aspiration seriously and to accept me as her life companion. During those months I learnt of the trauma she had suffered as a girl of four when she had to run for help after her father, an early-retired colonial civil servant, had attempted to drown her mother and young brother on a Sussex beach in a fit of mental instability.
This experience had left her emotionally very vulnerable: she needed to be absolutely secure in any relationship she formed to be certain that it would be lasting and deep. And her uncertainty about the causes of her father's mental state - and thus about the prospects for any children she might have - had to be stilled. Somehow, although in many ways still an unusually immature 19-year-old, I succeeded in fulfilling these needs.
That deep insecurity remained part of her right up to the closing years of her illness. She remained in need of constant reassurance - and in that, perhaps, lay the key to the closeness of our relationship. I am not sure that she ever actually rang me as often as 28 times in one day, as has been suggested, but on occasion it may have come close to that.
And in recent years when she was confined to bed, often in great pain, I knew that when away I must ring her frequently - normally three times a day.
But that deep vulnerability was ultimately the source of her attraction for so many people: it was precisely because of it that she empathised with and radiated concern for others: that, and her natural warmth and love of people. She was indeed a "people person" in a way I knew I could never match. And when in recent decades, through my political involvement, she became known to an ever-widening number of people, it was wonderful to see how people gravitated to her - often telling me good-humouredly that it was she they wanted to meet and talk to - not me.
She had been brought up with a distaste for politics. Her family background was in part Parnellite - her mother's father had been a shooting companion of Parnell's in Wicklow. On her father's side the family had British army connections.
Joan was born in Waterloo, near Liverpool, where her mother had gone to stay with Wyse cousins to get away from the Civil War here. Her mother's and aunts' political views were, in fact, confined to voting for de Valera, "because he kept us out of the war." I think I was viewed by them with considerable doubts - coming from what they would have seen as a "Sinn Fein" background.
From the start Joan accepted intellectually, but never emotionally, that I had an eventual political career in view. It was my friend, Maurice Kennedy, who, as we lay on the grass at Belfield one day in 1945, warned her that if she married me she would end up in what he sardonically described as "the Royal Box at Croke Park, explaining the finer points of the game to the British ambassador".
When I finally decided to take this path - having, as my father had wished, abjured politics until he was largely forgotten and I had made my own way in life - she was distinctly unenthusiastic. Indeed, it was mainly her unhappiness at the prospect of seeing me enter the Dail that led me to withdraw at the last moment from joining John A. Costello as Fine Gael candidate in Dublin SouthEast in 1965.
But when I finally took the plunge, standing for Seanad Eireann a month later, she gave me thereafter unstinting loyal support - while always maintaining her own political independence. In so doing she was in a way following the precedent of my mother, whose personal loyalty to my father had inhibited her from actively following her republican convictions in 1922. However, despite Joan's strongly-stated dislike of politics, I don't think she ever wrote to a friend, as my mother did after my birth in 1926, to say how much she hoped her husband's government would be defeated at the next election.
But, although Joan would never admit it, in her own way she got a lot out of politics, for it enlarged enormously her circle of friends. She enjoyed election tours because she loved meeting people. She formed friendships with congenial politicians of all parties. She enjoyed the company of journalists - as I did. And she made many friends among civil servants - especially in the Department of Foreign Affairs where official travel throws ministers' spouses together with civil servants in an often quite intimate way.
What she disliked about politics was the strain it imposes on those engaged in this most stressful of professions. And what she feared about it was the tendency of power to corrupt .
It was that fear that made her such a wonderful politician's spouse - for she was constantly vigilant lest I be tempted to compromise my principles in some way, and politics is, of course, replete with such temptations. She was not unrealistic: she recognised the necessary tension between the need to do what is right even if unpopular, and the simultaneous need to seek to preserve the opportunity to do good through securing re-election. But any sign of leaning too far towards the latter at the expense of the former would be pounced on.
To that ever-present vigilance were added two other crucial qualities in a politician's wife: a finely-honed critical faculty and political judgment; and a personal warmth that went far to compensate for my own more cerebral deficiencies in personal relationships.
But she was determined that neither she nor I would become immersed in politics to a degree that would disrupt our extra-political friendships - or, above all, our family life. And in this she was successful to quite a remarkable degree.
Inevitably there were sacrifices to be made in her own life. By the 1970s she had become an aficionado of bridge, but bridge requires a measure of continuity in social life which is impossible if you are married to a minister for foreign affairs. She accepted with equanimity the loss of that outlet for her personality and her mental skills.
But she managed to maintain her interest in theology - and in the early 1980s, despite all the pressures of being wife to a Taoiseach, she succeeded single-handed in energising clerical friends at a dinner party to initiate annual conferences in living theology. By the time they had left the table they had been told where the first meeting was to be held, what subjects were to be discussed, and who might be the speakers.
But whatever else had to be sacrificed, friendships, and above all family life, were sacrosanct. Here there could be no compromise. After the children had grown up, summer holidays were spent with friends in shared houses. I recall that 24 people shared our first rented house in Schull in 1975. including several other foreign ministers and their wives. A few months earlier, together with Miranda Iveagh - who, with her husband Benjamin, had most kindly lent us Farmleigh for the occasion - she had hosted brilliantly the first informal meeting of EU foreign ministers and their wives.
Right to the end, she welcomed our friends to dinner, the table set right beside the bed, so that if well enough she could participate, or if not she could at least listen to and enjoy the conversation and later have a private word with one or other of the guests. Confined to bed during those four last years, she was cared for by several people who had been helping her for years beforehand, but also by many nurses and new carers. She evoked from them, as from so many others throughout her life, deep affection. But, above all she was a mother and grandmother. As I had somehow known would be the case when I fell in love with her, she was an instinctively skilled mother, neither over-indulgent nor over-strict, restraining my impatience and over-disciplinary instincts.
In matters maternal, as in other areas of life, she had a capacity for lateral thinking, as, when finding that a child disliked being confined within a playpen, she would get into the playpen herself to read The Irish Times in peace, while her offspring roamed the room.
In recent days she had little arthritic pain, and she died peacefully, in my presence, after just a few hours' illness.