The death of the former chief of staff reminds us that our highest offices are still amenable to the highest values, writes JOHN WATERS
THERE WAS a moment last Saturday afternoon in Newbridge, Co Kildare, just after the completion of the military honours, when the crowd gathered around the last resting place of Dermot Earley did not know whether to remain or disperse. In that moment of hesitation, a male voice was raised in final salute: “Up the Rossies!”
Although the immediate reflex was to laugh, it was in truth a devastating moment, perhaps the most achingly sorrowful of Roscommon’s saddest week for a long time. Instantly, the gathering was transported by that verbal reveille from the uncertain sunshine of Co Kildare in the high summer of 2010 to the dancing light of some indeterminate 1970s summer afternoon, and a different crowd, perhaps emerging euphoric from an encounter at which the all but superhuman powers of Earley had been on display, to a world indescribably enhanced on that account. Or perhaps back to a Roscommon streetscape on some half-remembered summer’s evening, and the shouted accounts of triumph or heroic failure carried breathlessly from mouth to mouth, and the intense pleasure of being part of that family of which Earley was such an adored elder brother.
That cry spoke of football as metaphor, as agent of communal cohesion, as the drama of the tribal march towards an unknown destination. It conveyed defiance, nostalgia, hope, love, supplication, but also the merest hint of fear for a future without the chieftain about to be interred.
It is striking how deeply Earley’s death has resonated, and not just on account of his relatively youthful and unfathomable striking-down. It is difficult to think of a comparable sporting figure, who had not achieved the primary honour, but who withal, as has emerged here, could scarcely have been more revered had he a display-case of All-Ireland medals at his back.
I met Earley only once, last year, just before the onset of his illness. Since his death, his handshake has become one of those clichés in which the media tends to excel, but I have no conscious memory of any vice. I remember a deeply impressive man who for an extended moment connected with me as surely as anyone I have ever met.
I remember his ease and confidence, a manifest capacity for affection, an exceptional sense of authority without aggression, as though he was so aware of his own strength that he matched it with a deliberate gentleness. He possessed in abundance the classical qualities of manliness: strength, energy, fearlessness, honour and physical grace, but carried them with a humility that was instantly distinguishable from false modesty.
In a time when leadership of almost every kind is disintegrating around us, Earley bore witness as Army chief of staff that the qualities of a sublime sportsmanship could be available to the public realm. By his pedigree and record, he provided reassurance, even as the State seems increasingly to turn into a nuisance or a monster, that the higher offices in the land are still amenable to the highest values of humanity.
Earley was a shining light of an Ireland that, if you stayed in Dublin and relied on the media for your sense of things, you might imagine had disappeared. But it is still here, in the countryside and smaller towns, an Ireland where people are easy about being unfashionable, where values relate to the fundamental principles of existence rather than ideological agendas, where “parish pump” is not a pejorative metaphor. This is a disarming Ireland – garrulous, ironic, exuberant, but with a compassionate heart that derives from a deep but comfortable sense of its own centre.
Earley’s personality, grace and bearing spoke of that place which, at the level of formal discourse, we have spent several decades trying to dismantle.
A memorial card handed out at the funeral outlined the five points of his Plan for Life: “1. Enjoy time with my family; 2. Give the best to my work; 3. Give back to my community; 4. Spend my leisure time well; 5. Make time for God in my life”.
These are the tentpole values, without which everything collapses, and yet they adumbrate a worldview that, in the hubris of our recent period, has been pejoratively designated “conservative”.
Earley’s life and personality demonstrated how wrong this is. A thoroughly modern man in the persona of a mythic hero, he could step on to the world stage without changing anything about himself, exuding – without affectation or self-consciousness – a nobility unmistakably forged in the fields and byroads of west Roscommon. He was intensely proud of his origins in Gorthaganny. When he spoke of his home place, it was as though it was the centre of the universe.
He embodied an Ireland that we urgently need to stop taking for granted. His passing has allowed us briefly to look in regret at the waning of values we are no longer permitted to mourn for their own sake.
He was Roscommon’s gift to the nation in our time, the very best that we could give. And that was something to behold.