‘Once he began to write, the words just seemed to flow’
Barbara Hussey, widow of former minister Justin Keating, on her late husband’s final writings
AFTER I retired from legal practice, Justin and I were able to spend time in a family house in the Languedoc in France, and most days while we were there he would devote time to writing in his notebook, a simple copybook bought in the local shop. I can see him now, settling down at the table. Once he began to write, the words seemed to flow for him. He left eight notebooks. The earliest is dated July 2006, the final one October 2009.
He wrote down what he could recall from memory and expected to have time to check details later; he didn’t get that time. Justin lived his life as though he had forever — a wonderful way to live, considering the dire warning he had been given on his diagnosis with Paget’s disease in the late 1970s. However, on the last day of 2009, with snow on the ground, he went to bed for a rest and never woke up. He was just seven days short of his 80th birthday.
As he would have said, why am I telling you this? Well, the notebooks were there, of course, uncorrected and unfinished. For a time they remained in a filing cabinet — I found it very painful to open them because his voice comes through so strongly in the writing. Slowly, I started to read them and realised he could make me laugh still, and his ideas were interesting. Using speech dictation software, I read his words aloud and found I had the beginnings of this manuscript. I emailed the first part to my stepchildren. They were intrigued and wanted more. I moved house twice in the meantime, but eventually all eight notebooks were transcribed. Much of what he had to say was relevant to today’s world.
Genial, conversational and emphatic in tone, Justin was a candid raconteur, whether writing about his contemporaries Garret FitzGerald, Charles Haughey or Conor Cruise O’Brien or declaring that he had been ‘in love four and a half times.’ Through Justin’s writings we can map his journey from the Marxism of his youth towards an ardently felt, Green-leaning social democracy. His prescience encompassed the perils of nationalism, the future of the Left and of Europe, civil liberties, globalisation, education, women’s rights, ecology and respect for the natural world.
There were things he did not get the time to write about. Justin loved his three children deeply, as well as his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Yet in his notebooks he had not got much beyond the description of their births and the delight he experienced with grandaughter Laura. But there is also very little about his father Sean, and again, I think he intended to come back to that. However, there is a passage in which Justin describes his father as the most honest man he ever met. I suggest that the theme of reworking his paradigm, which lies at the heart of these writings, is an attempt by Justin to re-examine and not only acknowledge, but also correct, his mistaken attitudes and actions and take responsibility for them. A phrase he held dear was, “If you show me better, then I must change.”
He was a gregarious man with a wide circle of friends, and a good storyteller. However, in the last four or five years of his life Justin became less mobile as the Paget’s disease took hold, and he endured a lot of pain. One of the crueller twists of fate was that his hear- ing went; in restaurants or crowded places he struggled to hear the conversation. By happenstance the pitch of my voice is such that he could usually hear me, so at times I took on the role of intermediary.
Justin was widely acknowledged as a brilliant communicator. He believed that communication was a skill, and it was one he worked at and honed for each lecture and speech until he was satisfied. On television, he had a way of leaning into the camera to better convey his point. He often criticised those who delivered their message ‘from above’ with this quotation from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village: “And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew/ That one small head could carry all he knew.”
Those expecting an academic’s tone might be surprised by his conversational style. My sense is that Justin wanted to examine complex ideas without distancing any part of an audience. Compiling this book, with Anna Kealy’s expert assistance, has been a labour of love, and my hope is that it will serve to extend Justin’s rich legacy.