He was just doing a favour for a young Northsider but I’ ll never forget our first meeting

THE professional gap between the lowliest newsroom reporter and a man who had recently left the service of Charles Haughey was, to me in 1995, about as wide as could be. But not to PJ Mara. As a cub reporter at the Evening Herald, I was ordered to do a story on a proposed casino in the Phoenix Park. The news editor gave me a mobile phone number (a rare thing in those days) and told me to ring PJ. He was on one of his early public relations jobs.

He explained the whole thing to me. At the end of the conversation he said something that was rare from a high flying PR man; ‘What do you think of the project John? Would you like to meet up to look at the plans?’

We met in a pub and, like everybody else who came in contact with him, I was utterly charmed. He knew my lowly ranking but he was just doing a young fella from the Northside a favour.

And there began a 20-year professional relationship, and I would like to think a friendship.

This newspaper was widely viewed as an opponent of Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil, to put it mildly. So when I joined this newspaper in 2004 as a political correspondent, there was an icy welcome from the ruling party.

My communication to the top, and the court at Bertie’s St Luke’s headquarters, was maintained through PJ. But frankly, I’d ring him and meet him just for the entertainment.

PJ spoke in a manner that left you in no doubt as to his erudition. But he was not averse to peppering a sentence with some unparliamentary language.

I phoned him one Friday evening in 2006, after a vivacious, long lunch in the Unicorn Restaurant on Merrion Street. I suggested that a certain Cabinet minister would succeed Bertie Ahern. His response was classic PJ.

The exchange made the paper, with a headline, surely unique in Irish political coverage: ‘You can now go down to Paddy Power’s and put your SSIA savings on any odds that that **** will never be leader of Fianna Fáil.’

The minister in question was outraged,

and I was forced to write a letter of apology.

I had to apologise to his wife as well. The minister insisted she bought the paper every week and had nearly choked on her croissant that Sunday morning.

As we became closer over the years, we would exchange books and discuss them. We were both huge fans of Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson was, like PJ, a tall, larger-thanlife man with a foul mouth and a scary dark side. And Johnson was, like PJ, a political genius. We were fans of the monumental works on Johnson by American author Robert A Caro. PJ, of course, had met Caro at a dinner party in New York. It has taken Caro over 35 years to get to the fourth volume on Johnson’s life and it was published in 2012.

PJ bought me an advance copy in New York in the summer of 2012 and presented it to me with great ceremony at his gentleman’s club on St Stephen’s Green. Like so many things with PJ, he didn’t have to do that. I recall that he waited for me in reception that day and could barely get out of his seat because of pains in his back.

He’d an operation on his back in the winter of 2014. He would ring me religiously from the Caribbean or some other exclusive destination every Christmas.

He rang me last year, I think it was from LA this time, and he sounded a bit down. He was at the beginning of a bad run of health. Sometimes I reckoned PJ was ringing from a beach just, for a bit of fun, to make me jealous.

He could have done it with loads of people at home in Dublin. But I was always touched and a little honoured that he’d take the time. It was an example of the oldworld charm and kindness of the man. He did lots of things that he didn’t have to.