We were lucky to have Hayes, the Irish Renaissance man

The anxiety in my older sister’s voice calling me from a Belfast hospital told me something was seriously wrong: ‘Mum’s had a bad fall and we’ve been in A&E here for the past 17 hours but she hasn’t even been properly examined yet.’

I immediately rang Maurice Hayes who was on the board of the Dublin newspaper where I worked; he was also chairman of the Mater hospital in Belfast. He listened, said he would ring back and 20 minutes after he called me in Dublin, a consultant in Belfast was dealing with my 86-year-old mother’s broken hip.

I had never before, or since, asked anyone in authority for help in a family crisis. I later apologised for seeking preference but Maurice Hayes dismissed my mewling: ‘The Mater let down all of our patients in A&E that day, including your mother.’

I made it my business to find out more about Maurice Hayes and after his death last week I hope to see his face on an Irish postage stamp in 2027, the 100th anniversary of his birth. The honour could be shared with another mighty man from Co. Down, the economic architect of modern Ireland TK Whitaker.

Truth is that Maurice Hayes could have been anything he wanted to be anywhere he chose to go. He was an Irish Renaissance man: a polyglot with a Phd, a gifted civic administrator, a prolific author and journalist; heroic in achieving sporting ambitions.

Official obituaries chronicle his many great achievements in public life: European Person of the Year in 2003, honorary doctorates from all of the major Irish universities, north and south. He served two terms as a Senator in the Oireachtas and did the donkey work for the Patten Commission that transformed the RUC into the PSNI. He ran the health service in Northern Ireland and he was the first Catholic appointed Northern Ireland Ombudsman; he was a chairman of The Ireland Funds.

He wrote five books between regular crises and a hectic schedule… a boy scout perpetually prepared for the next predicament.

But there was also Maurice Hayes, the county hurler who took the hot seat as County Secretary of the GAA in Co. Down in the mid1950s and set a ten-year plan for the football team. He wanted

Down to be the first county from Northern Ireland to win an All Ireland final – and they did: first in 1960 and again in 1961.

It is hard to imagine the notan-inch Unionists in the 1960s resisting civil rights to Catholics trusting a fluent Irishspeaking lover of Gaelic sports – but the cleverer ones did.

And if his resignation from Northern Ireland’s Community Relations Council in 1972 after the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry had any consequence, it was to enhance his reputation as a public servant.

Unionists of nearly every stripe in government saw Maurice Hayes as the most reliable-yet-imaginative of public servants – one of their few judgements shared by John Hume and the nationalist SDLP party.

But the founder of the DUP distrusted him and he later returned the compliment in a memorable quote: ‘There are about six Ian Paisleys: two were reasonable, two quite awful and two who could go either way.’

He was not surprised when Paisley decided to share power with Sinn Féin.

He spoke the Irish language fluently, brilliantly deconstructing the arguments of Republicans whose campaign advocated murder in the name of Ireland. The Hayes family links to Waterford and north Kerry predated independence and Maurice had an easy understanding and familiarity with the 26 counties. But he loved Northern Ireland, his neighbours in Downpatrick and it didn’t really matter to him what church they attended – or if they had any religious beliefs, or sometimes even criminal convictions. And it wasn’t just GAA geeks in the North, or venerable civil servants north and south who appreciated and admired Maurice Hayes.

But the countless small kindnesses and enormous favours that he delivered to so many people came with conditions: he insisted on discretion and prudence.

Politicians and public figures took turns reciting his qualities before and after his funeral last week.

But Maurice Hayes’s nonnegotiable values and the towering strength of his character will live on in his eight grandchildren and their children.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.