over the New Year contributed significantly to the shape of politics and peace in the Ireland we know today.Without the contributions of former Primate of all-Ireland, Cardinal Cahal Daly, former Government secretary Dermot Nally and former Labour minister Justin Keating, we would live in a much the poorer and more divided place.
It may seem strange to describe Daly in this way. His deeply traditional Catholicism, an intellectual leadership that informed and then publicly articulated the hierarchy’s positions on social and political issues from the 1970s on, above all reflected continuity in an Ireland that was beginning to open up to more liberal instincts.
But Daly’s courageous rejection of the historical baggage of the physical force tradition, and his embrace of ecumenism, made him that strangest of beasts, a conservative moderniser, an agent of political transition.
In 1972, he denounced the “mystique of the 
patriotic rifle”, and had rightly asked a year earlier in a pastoral letter, in a phrase that would be taken up widely, “who in his sane senses wants to bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland?”.
Daly recognised Protestants had to be accommodated in any peace, and in 1984 insisted to the New Ireland Forum that the bishops did not seek “a Catholic state for a Catholic people”.
But, sadly, he found it impossible to reconcile with reform of divorce or contraception laws, or secularisation of church-controlled institutions such as education and health.
The need to acknowledge the realities of the Protestant experience was also central to the contribution of Dermot Nally, who played a critical role in the “permanent government” of Dublin over the two decades, particularly on the North and EU affairs.
He was a masterful draftsman, the quintessential public servant, who was a highly valued adviser to five taoisigh and played a key role in Anglo-Irish negotiations from Sunningdale in 1973 to the Downing Street Declaration of 1993.
Nally warned against overreach from the South, cautioning about the violence sudden British withdrawal and repartition would provoke, and of the premature promotion of the idea of a Council of Ireland at Sunningdale.
Justin Keating was also passionate about the North, and played a part with David Tho
rnley in the Labour Party in curbing Conor Cruise O’Brien’s neo-unionist agenda.
But he will best be remembered for his embattled but largely successful years as the 1973-1977 National Coalition’s minister for industry and commerce during the energy crisis.
He publicly opposed Ireland’s entry to the then EEC in the referendum in 1973 only, later in life, to admit that joining Europe was one of the best decisions taken by the Irish people.
In 1969 his Dáil election had seemed to epitomise a bright new dawn for the Labour Party but coalition is always a messy business of compromise.
He made his mark not only in politics, but broadcasting and veterinary science, and remained a socialist, an atheist, an advocate for secularism, a passionate convert to the cause of Europe and an iconoclast to the end.
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