Since the publication of his outstanding debut novel, The Barracks, in 1963, John McGahern has come to be regarded by many critics and fellow authors as Ireland's greatest prose writer of his time. With his beautifully crafted novels and stories, works of insight and clarity, he earned that accolade. It was a view shared by many readers who loyally followed him from book to book and for whom he became a beloved familiar.
In an essay on Tomás Ó Criomhthain's classic portrait of life on the Blaskets, An tOileánach, McGahern reminds us of how the islander author saw his task as "rescuing the day from forgetfulness". McGahern did as much for his own time and place, the Ireland of post-Independence. Here was a writer with a keen sense of the national psyche.
President McAleese, in her tribute, rightly alluded to his "enormous contribution to our self-understanding as a people". His was an intuitive and deeply insightful understanding of the society that emerged, with all its faults and failings, in the first decades of the new State - the same society which, with its certainties and dogmatic outlook, banned his work and drove him from his position as a national school teacher.
It has been remarked that his experiences in that old Ireland of the 1960s might well have sent any other writer into bitterness and permanent exile, but in his case it strengthened his resolve and his conviction that a writer should be a force of enlightenment, of straightforward honesty.
Instead of exile he settled down to a private life in the Leitrim-Roscommon environs that provided many of the characters that populated his work, the incidents that flavoured it and in the landscape which he celebrated with the lyrical deftness of the poet. The ordinary and commonplace, which became central themes in his work, were transformed by the sureness of his imagination and his forensic attention to language. Local histories were, he once said, "far more moving than accounts of great affairs of State".
He was the most non-egotistical of writers and rightly acknowledged as the master of precise language. His fidelity to place was as constant in his own life as it was in his writing. His last published book, his powerful and painfully-recollected Memoir, illuminated much of the fiction that preceded it - fiction that was in fact openly autobiographical and closely linked to his life.
John McGahern leaves behind him a rich literary harvest that will endure and will indelibly live on as surely as the memory of the man himself.