Ken made his work accessible to us all
DURING the many months I spent researching Ken Whitaker’s private archive and conducting interviews with him, our daily focal point became lunch in a local hostelry. Each day, as we made our way through the dining lounge, complete strangers would approach him simply to shake his hand, to wish him well, some to bemoan his absence from public life.
Since his passing, much has been written about his contribution to the economic, financial, social, educational, political and cultural evolution of modern Ireland. But it is the ethos that motivated his lifetime work as a public servant that is, perhaps, his greatest legacy.
The foundation for the dedication, honesty and integrity, the hallmarks of his public endeavours on behalf of the Irish people, were formed in his early upbringing.
Born in Rostrevor, Co Down, and reared in Co Louth, claiming a dual nationality of both the Republic and Northern Ireland undoubtedly influenced his engagement in the evolving relationship between the two political entities on this island.
As a boy of five looking out the window of his home in Drogheda at the terrified face of an IRA “irregular”, gun in hand, being chased down the street by armed Free State soldiers was to remain an evocative memory. It reinforced his adult aversion to violence as a means of achieving political ends and coloured the seminal behind-the-scenes role he played between 1967 and 1997 in the search for peace, by constitutional means, in Northern Ireland.
The spending power of ordinary families in the Ireland in which Whitaker grew up was constrained both by means and the availability of goods. Shrewd housekeeping involved thrifty purchasing and expenditure and minimum waste, enshrined within the credo of living within one’s means. “That was the environment and thinking that I grew up in,” he recalled. “There was no extravagance; money was always put aside for the rainy day, while indebtedness was considered a failing.” His mother’s prudent administration of the family budget was to instil in her son a similar prudence in respect of the country’s finances later entrusted to his care.
While his father was to remain somewhat distanced, both by years and authority, from the young son of his second marriage, it was his mother Jane who was to have the greater influence on his life. “She was always the decision maker in our home.” His mother’s character and ability fashioned his own later belief in, and support of, female equality in the various institutions and boards over which he later presided, as well as in the Senate, long before it became a legal requirement, extending also to the thorny issue of equality of membership in his golf club.
Described by fellow students as the “most brilliant student” to pass through the portals of the CBS in Drogheda, Ken preferred to attribute his scholastic ability to enlightened teachers who imparted their knowledge with enthusiasm and dedication, with “attractive presentation of new knowledge, encouraging independent judgment, to make our own critical assessments, never to take anything for granted, never to take history as written or as being the last word”.
His unorthodox path to third-level education (see obituary below), studying while working and “rocking our firstborn to sleep”, impacted on the economic strategies and policies he later initiated, endowing them with a unique practicality and accessibility. Unlike most economic programmes, his 1958 blueprint for the regeneration of the country is written in a style and in a language aimed and understood by the ordinary Irish citizen.
The isolation of full-time students of economics from the practicalities and realities of the world outside academe in the 1950s made him intercede with university authorities to introduce “a more fully integrated series of courses… with applications to practical problems”. To expedite such a change, he forwarded them his own “suggested syllabus”, much of which was adopted.
His boyhood passion for salmon fishing on the banks of the Boyne led him in adult life to his first catch in Donegal in 1963 and to his last, at the age of 96, on the Owenmore River in north Mayo. This pastime over the years developed into a crusading scientific quest to protect and conserve national stocks of salmon and sea trout.
No life, especially one as long as that enjoyed by Ken, could be expected to pass without its share of personal sadness. How he dealt with the loss of his wife of 50 years Nora, his second wife Mary, his only daughter Catherine, his son Gerry, a grandchild and a daughter-in-law, is as inspiring as the triumphs he achieved in public life. With characteristic stoicism and optimism he soldiered on, content in the realisation “that you have been so fortunate in having had such relationships and warm feelings, so it is part of your make-up that you have surges of optimism that keep you going”.
While his faith remained constant, “gone for all of us”, he admitted, “in these better-educated but more secularist times, is the fervent unquestioning faith of our mothers and grandmothers. Our faith, if graphically represented, would be a hatched, undulating curve rather than a firm unbroken line”.
His own mortality and thoughts of an afterlife he approached philosophically and with characteristic humour. “One of my regrets is that limbo was abolished in my lifetime. It was just the sort of place in which I would have been content to spend the next life, renewing close relationships and old friendships in pleasant surroundings.”
Whether in limbo or somewhere more in keeping with the remarkable contribution he made to this life, Ken will, as ever, acquit himself with honour.
Slan abhaile, Ken, agus go n-eiri an bothar leat. Anne Chambers is the author of TK Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot (Transworld Ireland)