Sir, – As a young civil servant in the taoiseach’s office from 1979 to 1982, I had the privilege of being a witness to Anthony Cronin’s extraordinary friendship and policy collaboration with Charles Haughey. Both men of course knew (like most of us) what an utterly bleak life most Irish artists had at the time, holding body and soul together when their earnings were so sparse and infrequent.
Anthony, however, had lived through the experience. He provided the spark, the practical idea of Aosdána, the artist-led institution, with its echoes of the Académie française, which has, since its introduction, provided sustenance and dignity for our best creative artists.
The Haughey /Cronin collaboration was an alliance of kindred spirits. Ireland is a far better place today because of it.
We must always find a space in our public policy discourse, as we did in that collaboration, for those public intellectuals, like Anthony Cronin, who appeal, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, to “the better angels of our nature”. – Yours, etc,
SEAN AYLWARD,
Sandymount, Dublin 4.