‘Man of the century’ dies, aged 100
OBITUARY
TK (Ken) Whitaker, who has died aged 100, was probably the most influential civil servant in the history of the State and is largely credited with the creation of the modern economy Ireland enjoys today.
His biographer, Anne Chambers, summed up his long life and varied achievements: “His was the quiet presence, the rational and informed voice behind many of the most momentous episodes in recent history. For many decades, he was principal negotiator on Ireland’s behalf with international statesmen and institutions, adviser and confidant to every Irish political figurehead, including De Valera, Costello, Aiken, Sweetman, Lemass, O’Neill and Lynch — and after his ‘retirement’, to latter-day incumbents of political high office.”
For more than 60 years he was at the heart of the Irish establishment, as a civil servant, thinker, a member of a variety of State boards, and someone who was bestowed with almost every accolade that could be conferred on one man.
As the newly-appointed secretary of the Department of Finance in 1955, he inherited a stagnant economy, low living standards and emigration. He had already written a paper, Financing by Credit Creation (1946), but it was only after he became secretary of the department, before his 40th birthday, that he and a group of like-minded civil servants united to produce a white paper entitled Programme for Economic Expansion, which was published in November 1958.
Although Sean Lemass, as minister for finance, had designed the system of trade protection, which stifled Irish enterprise and indeed lambasted the establishment of Coras Tractala, Bord Failte and the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), he did a complete U-turn when he succeeded Eamon de Valera as Taoiseach in June 1959.
He accepted that the model of self-sufficiency, or the old Sinn Fein dictum of ‘ourselves alone’, had failed and embraced the new plan as the way forward, using his political clout to push through the changes that were required.
Whitaker never took personal credit for this seismic shift in Irish policy but included “colleagues, people of a similar age”, including Charlie Murray, Louden Ryan and others.
He always used the collective ‘we’ when describing this economic revolution. “We felt we owed something to the society that has brought us that far,” he said.
Whitaker and Lemass turned the inward-looking vision articulated by Eamon de Valera in 1937 into an economy willing to trade openly on international markets, prepared to join the European Economic Community and seek to attract foreign multi-nationals to Ireland, now known and sometimes derided as Foreign Direct Investment.
“Mr de Valera, Dr Jim Ryan and Mr Lemass, expert politicians, saw they could reverse policy more easily by attributing the change to the advice of independent civil servants. The whole business got through without even a debate in the Dail. The Opposition either missed their chance or were so delighted with it that they let it pass,” he told Ivor Kenny in an interview.
‘He came first in the civil service exams’
Thomas Kenneth Whitaker was born in Rostrevor, Co Down, on December 8, 1916, the son of linen mill manager Joe Whitaker, originally from Killucan, Co Westmeath. His father had been married previously and had three daughters by the first marriage. After his wife’s death, he married Jane O’Connor, the daughter of a blacksmith from Co Clare who had trained as a Jubilee Nurse and was posted to Rostrevor.
As a young boy growing up in the town, one of his best friends was Ben Dunne, who would later go on to found the Dunnes Stores retail chain, and their families continued that friendship into later life.
TK Whitaker was educated at the Christian Brothers School in Drogheda, Co Louth, and although he obtained top marks in all his Leaving Certificate subjects, his father was at that point retiring on a small pension and financially unable to fund a university education for his son, who wished to study medicine. Instead, Whitaker took the civil service exam for clerical officers, coming in first place in Ireland in 1934.
He later studied at night for a BA degree in London University in Maths, Latin and Celtic Studies. He had never heard of economics, but when he realised it would help his prospects in the civil service he switched to that discipline, eventually taking a Master’s degree in the subject. Over the next couple of years, he took firsts in each successive civil service examination until his appointment as secretary of the Department of Finance at the age of 39.
He married a fellow civil servant, Nora Fogarty, who worked in the Department of Education in August 1941, and they bought their first house in Kimmage Road West, before moving to the Stillorgan Road where he would live for the rest of his long life. The couple had six children, Kenneth Oliver (born 1943); Gerald (1945-2002); Raymond (1947); David (1948); Catherine (1950-1998); and Brian (1952).
In keeping with the times, the family holidayed in Rush, Co Dublin, every summer, although the children were also sent to the Ring Gaeltacht and Ranfast, Co Donegal, to learn Irish. The family later bought a holiday home near Bangor Erris in Co Mayo, where Whitaker indulged his passion for fishing and the Irish language.
In his maiden speech in Dail Eireann in 1957, Charles Haughey declared: “If we are to achieve national recovery, it will involve a tremendous national crusade. It must be made clear to our civil servants that they all must take part in the crusade,” words which Anne Chambers in her biography, Portrait of a Patriot, said “must have stung, as well as motivated our public service”. Whitaker and Haughey would not see eye-to-eye in the future and, according to Whitaker, the future leader of Fianna Fail (and Lemass’s son-in-law) was “not overly inspiring... tending to be over-confident and to favour the spectacular”, but, he conceded, he was also a man “of great ambition” who worked extremely hard.
Whitaker was “old school” and so more in tune with Lemass and his successor Jack Lynch, who had been a fellow civil servant in earlier years. Together with Jim Malley, private secretary to the prime minister of Northern Ireland, Whitaker organised and attended the first historic meeting between the two Irish leaders Jack Lynch and Terence O’Neill in Stormont in January 1965. He had already met O’Neill in London and coming from Northern Ireland hoped the meeting would break down barriers between the two states. Although it did not succeed in that endeavour, it was, at least, a historic starting point.
“It was not easy to wean Fianna Fail away from belief in our right to take over Northern Ireland,” he said later. He wrote Jack Lynch’s famous ‘Tralee Speech’, which outlined the principle of consent (from a majority in Northern Ireland) to Irish reunification. But he said there were hardliners such as Haughey, Neil Blaney, Kevin Boland, “and to my surprise”, Michael O’Kennedy, who did not accept this principle.
TK Whitaker retired from the Department of Finance in 1969 and was appointed governor of the Central Bank, a position he held for the next seven years. Shortly after he retired from the Central Bank, he was appointed to the Senate by his friend Jack Lynch as one of the Taoiseach’s nominees and he served until 1981. Following the change of government, Fine Gael leader Dr Garret FitzGerald reappointed him and he served until elections were called in 1982.
His wife, Nora, died in May 1994, following a protracted illness from a brain haemorrhage, which may have been caused by a fall while attending an art exhibition.
In 2005, he remarried a nurses’ tutor, Mary Moore, who died three years later.
Despite being a deeply committed Catholic, he wasn’t afraid of the power of the Church and during the 1990s had a testy exchange with Cardinal Desmond Connell over the abortion issue. When the archbishop questioned the “inadequate understanding” of the issue by an All-Party Oireachtas Committee of which he was a member, Whitaker replied: “One would expect that anything published in the Church’s name would be expressed in temperate language and be scrupulously fair and free from attribution of ignorance or sinister intent, recognising or at least charitably assuming, in those criticised, a parity of intelligence and integrity.”
During his long lifetime, Whitaker was chairman of the National Industrial and Economic Council; joint chairman of Anglo-Irish Encounter; chairman of Bord na Gaeilge; chairman of the Inquiry into the Penal System; and a director of Coras Tractala, and the Broadcasting Review Committee. He was conferred with honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin and Queens University Belfast. He was chancellor of the National University of Ireland from 1976 to 1996 and also served as president of the Royal Irish Academy.
A fluent French speaker, he was conferred with the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1976 and voted The Greatest Living Irishman of the 20th Century in a popular poll.
Dr Whitaker, who had been ill for a short time, died on January 10 and was buried last Friday after a funeral Mass in the Church of the Sacred Heart, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.