Tribute: It would be very difficult in the Ireland of today to forget Charles Haughey, even were people to set out to do so, his former arts adviser, Anthony Cronin, said in a reflection at the end of last night's removal ceremony in Donnycarney parish church.
Mr Haughey remained present "in our laws, in our economic activity, in our treatment of the old and disadvantaged, in the very structures and buildings of our capital", he said.
He had brought us "a little nearer the Yeatsian hope that art would come back into life in all its aspects and that the place of the artist in society would be recognised".
Mr Cronin began by quoting in full Shakespeare's Fear no More the Heat of the Sun. He continued that he had known Mr Haughey for 60 years and "in all that time there was never a moment when I regretted that friendship".
On the contrary, he had never felt "other than extremely proud" of it.
Mr Haughey was "a complex, many-faceted man.
"Most of us are complex and in fact much of life is spent in schooling that complexity," he said, but Mr Haughey was also very simple in the strength of his friendships and loyalties and his pursuit of the ideal of friendship, he said.
"He and Maureen were a well-known couple at UCD, she dark haired, one of the beauties of college", while "Charlie had that rare sort of vitality - very rare - when he came into company".
He "already had the mark of destiny, whatever that destiny might be", which would later manifest itself as "a clear enough vocation for politics", he said.
He felt Mr Haughey had something of the artist in him - a creative tendency that favoured simple conception, bold execution and hard work. He had those artistic qualities of flamboyance and puritanism.
Mr Cronin continued by referring to "the old Aristotelean/ Thomist distinction between the man of action and the contemplative man", commenting that while "Charlie was a man of action he read a great deal. He knew Yeats almost by heart.
"He was deeply concerned with the countryside, including the landscape of Ireland. He was as much at home with animals as people. He loved trees. He loved the sea. He went back to the edge of the old Irish world to be alone with the sea."
Only the other day Mr Cronin had told him [ Mr Haughey] his biographers would love the contradictions and so would history.
While they were talking there, Maureen came into the room and he was reminded of those early days at UCD.
"Life had come full circle and a great many things had come to fruition," Mr Cronin said.
He concluded with a poem of his own that began, "All things tend to completion..."
