Patrick Hillery

Patrick John Hillery was born on May 2, 1923, in Milltown Malbay, a small market town on the Atlantic coast of County Clare, then part of the Irish Free State ^[1]. His father, Michael Hillery, was the local dispensary doctor, and medicine ran through the household as naturally as the west Clare weather. The family was comfortable by rural standards, and young Patrick grew up between the surgery, the schoolroom, and the strand at Spanish Point.

He was educated first at the national school in Milltown Malbay and then as a boarder at Rockwell College in County Tipperary, where he showed ability in athletics as well as in the classroom ^[2]. From Rockwell he went to University College Dublin to study medicine, following his father's profession. He qualified as a doctor in 1947 and returned home to practise, taking over much of the dispensary work in his native town ^[1].

For anyone asking who was Patrick Hillery before politics, the answer is a country GP with no obvious ambition for public life. He served as a coroner for west Clare and as a medical officer, and he might have remained a rural doctor had local Fianna Fáil organisers not pressed him to stand for the Dáil ^[3].

Hillery was elected to Dáil Éireann in 1951 as a Fianna Fáil deputy for Clare, sharing the constituency ticket with Éamon de Valera, the party's founder and the dominant Irish politician of the century ^[3]. For eight years he remained a backbencher, continuing his medical practice while learning the rhythms of parliamentary life. His break came in 1959, when Seán Lemass succeeded de Valera as Taoiseach and appointed the 36 year old Clare doctor Minister for Education ^[1].

At Education from 1959 to 1965 he began loosening a system that had barely changed since independence. He announced the introduction of comprehensive schools in 1963, expanded provision for technical and vocational training, and commissioned planning work that prepared the ground for the wider reforms of the later 1960s ^[4]. Colleagues found him cautious in style but persistent in substance, a pattern that held for the rest of his career.

Lemass moved him to Industry and Commerce in 1965, and in 1966 Hillery became the first Minister for Labour, a new department created to manage industrial relations during a decade of frequent strikes ^[2]. In 1969 Taoiseach Jack Lynch gave him the post that made his reputation: Minister for External Affairs, soon renamed Foreign Affairs, at the very moment Northern Ireland was sliding into violence ^[3].

The outbreak of the Troubles in August 1969 put Hillery at the centre of Irish diplomacy. He travelled to London to press the British government over the treatment of nationalists in Derry and Belfast, and he raised the crisis at the United Nations in New York, seeking international attention for the deteriorating situation ^[5]. In July 1970 he made an unannounced visit to the Falls Road in Belfast to see conditions for himself, a trip that infuriated the British government but signalled Dublin's concern for the nationalist population ^[3].

After Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when British soldiers shot dead thirteen civilians in Derry, Hillery again flew to the United Nations and toured foreign capitals to protest, telling reporters that Britain's policy in the North had failed ^[5]. At home he stood firmly with Jack Lynch during the 1970 Arms Crisis, when two cabinet ministers were dismissed over alleged plots to import weapons for northern nationalists. At a raucous Fianna Fáil ard fheis in 1971 Hillery confronted hecklers from the platform, declaring that they could have Kevin Boland but they could not have Fianna Fáil, a moment of uncharacteristic public fire that delegates long remembered ^[2].

His most durable achievement in the department was European. Hillery led the Irish negotiating team that concluded terms for membership of the European Economic Community, campaigned in the 1972 referendum in which 83 percent of voters backed entry, and signed the accession documents. Ireland joined the Community on January 1, 1973 ^[4]. Any account of Patrick Hillery achievements begins with that negotiation, which reshaped the Irish economy and its place in the world.

When Ireland took its seat in Brussels in 1973, Lynch nominated Hillery as the country's first member of the European Commission. He was given the social affairs portfolio and made a vice president of the Commission ^[4]. It was a deliberate signal that Ireland intended to take the social dimension of the Community seriously rather than treat membership purely as a market arrangement.

In Brussels he pushed forward the Community's first social action programme. The most consequential measure of his term was the 1975 directive on equal pay for men and women, which member states, including Ireland, were obliged to implement ^[6]. When the Irish government of the day sought a derogation to delay equal pay on cost grounds, Hillery's Commission refused, and the legislation proceeded. For Irish women workers the episode showed that European law could deliver rights that domestic politics had withheld.

He expected to serve a second term in Brussels. Events in Dublin decided otherwise ^[1].

In October 1976 President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resigned after the Minister for Defence called him a thundering disgrace for referring emergency legislation to the Supreme Court. The office was suddenly vacant and damaged. Fianna Fáil asked Hillery to stand, and since no other party nominated a candidate, he was elected unopposed and inaugurated as the sixth president of Ireland on December 3, 1976 ^[3].

Hillery set out to make the presidency quiet again, and largely succeeded. He performed the constitutional duties of the office with care, received foreign heads of state, and travelled widely in Ireland without courting headlines. In 1979 he faced an unusual ordeal when rumours circulated abroad about the state of his marriage. He took the rare step of summoning political correspondents to Áras an Uachtaráin to deny the stories directly, and the matter subsided ^[2].

His most tested moment came in January 1982, when the Fine Gael led government lost a budget vote in the Dáil. Senior Fianna Fáil figures telephoned the Áras that night urging him to refuse Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald a dissolution, which would have allowed Fianna Fáil to attempt to form a government without an election. Hillery regarded the calls as improper pressure on the presidency, refused to take them, and granted the dissolution in accordance with convention ^[7]. The episode, confirmed publicly years later, is now cited as an example of the office's independence. Re-elected without a contest in 1983, he served the maximum two terms and retired on December 2, 1990, handing over to Mary Robinson ^[3].

In 1955 Hillery married Maeve Finnegan, a fellow doctor whom he had met during their medical training in Dublin. The couple had two children, John and Vivienne ^[1]. Family life brought deep sorrow during his presidency: Vivienne died in 1987, at the age of seventeen, after a long illness, a loss the Hillerys bore almost entirely in private ^[2].

Away from public duty Hillery was a keen golfer, a member of Lahinch and other clubs, and he returned constantly to Spanish Point in Clare, where the family kept a holiday home. Friends described a modest, dryly humorous man who preferred conversation about medicine, sport, and the west of Ireland to talk of politics ^[3]. He never wrote memoirs, though he cooperated late in life with the historian John Walsh, whose authorised biography appeared in 2008 ^[2].

After leaving Áras an Uachtaráin in 1990, Hillery lived quietly in Dublin and Clare, appearing occasionally at university and European commemorations. He received honorary doctorates and served as chancellor of the National University of Ireland during his presidency, an office traditionally held by the head of state at that time ^[1]. He died in Dublin on April 12, 2008, three weeks short of his 85th birthday, and was honoured with a state funeral before burial at St Fintan's Cemetery in Sutton ^[5].

Assessments at his death balanced two reputations. Critics of his presidency called it excessively cautious, an era of ribbon cutting between the storms of 1976 and the transformation under Mary Robinson. Defenders answered that restraint was precisely what the office needed after the Ó Dálaigh resignation, and that his refusal to bend in January 1982 protected the constitution at a dangerous moment ^[7]. Taoiseach Brian Cowen described him at the funeral as a man of integrity who had served the state in nearly every role it could offer.

The fuller Patrick Hillery biography rests on the years before the presidency: the education reforms of the early 1960s, the creation of the Department of Labour, the diplomacy of the early Troubles, the EEC accession, and the equal pay directive in Brussels ^[4][6]. A commemorative summer school and public buildings in Clare carry his name, and among Patrick Hillery facts perhaps the most telling is that a reluctant country doctor spent nearly forty years in public office without ever losing an election ^[3].