NO COMPLAINTS

Let me start with the cover, a joy and a sadness. The joy to see the real Maurice there as I knew him. The sadness that he is now gone from us.

This is a beautiful book - the cover, the content, and the handling of it.

It falls neatly into two parts. The first covers Maurice's youth and education. The second deals with his career in the Public Service. So it's two for the price of one really.

The first part is a window on rural Ireland, very personal, written in an economic style with not a redundant word.

Moyvane, where Maurice was born, comes alive. A small country village where life was hard and the world was full of characters. We all know at least some of these people and we can vividly see their stories play out. But if you read it too fast you will still miss so much of the subtlety of Maurice's pen.

Let me take an example from his section on daily life and the virtual absence of timekeeping.

The only regular time signal came with the angelus bell which rang about noon and again at six in the evening.

p49

I don't want to fall into the trap of Joycean exegesis but that little "about" and its contrast with the precise time later is surely significant.

Again when it comes to Maurice going for the priesthood.

We all went forward with the best of intentions and some with our parent's vocations and we gave little thought to the matter otherwise.

p58

There is a whole chapter sitting inside the phrase "our parent's vocations".

Don't get the idea from these two quotes that Maurice was a serious boy above playing the odd prank.

I love his story about subverting the national metereological records. Even in the village of Moyvane there was a requirement to contribute to the collection of national statistics. Like the later electronic voting machines, some of the collection procedures were eminently hackable.

One of these chores was to give regular readings on rainfall to the Metereological Office. There was a special container in the back garden of the garda station to record rainfall and as youngsters we sometimes added liquid to the contents of the container which leads me to suspect that the rainfall statistics for Moyvane might well have been considerably overstated.

p43

This beats boxing the fox but you never get to see, or eat, the results in this particular escapade.

Maurice's account of village life has all the elements and style of the Seanachaí garnished with a gentle literary breeze from the nearby cultural hotbed of Listowel, a mere half an hour's cycle down the road.

Education

Maurice's experience of the education system was fairly typical of its day. There was an emphasis on book learning and an environment which endorsed corporal punishment. He makes a point of saying, however, that even with corporal punishment, it was not administered out of malice but to ensure high level performance. Education was very much seen as the ladder out of poverty.

St. Brendan's in Killarney was a class of a minor seminary, which meant it groomed young lads for the priesthood. So it was no surprise that Maurice then went on to Maynooth. He only stuck that a while and decided the priesthood wasn't for him. Don't forget that this was in the pre-Vatican II era and, as he says, "it seemed as though the rules and procedures of the Catholic Faith had not changed for a thousand years".

This was also the era of the "spoiled priest" and it was not easy thing to leave a seminary. Maurice decided to do what was right for him and he admits to harbouring a sense of guilt afterwards. I don't think he was looking forward to his meeting with the local Parish Priest who had sent for him. However, much to his surprise, Father Dan complimented him on his courage and suggested that Maurice might now be mature enough to share a drink with him.

Public Service

Having left the seminary it appeared he was destined for a career in teaching. He taught in Joey's in Fairview and in Plás Mhuire in Granby Row, just around the corner from my own school, Coláiste Mhuire in Parnell Square. We had some pupils from Plás join us for the Leaving Cert in Coláiste. This was followed by a year teaching in Switzerland and a stint at Sanford Park before he entered the Civil Service.

Maurice has a particular observation on the Christian Brothers, which I share but when I raise the matter nobody else seems aware of it. The brothers were not priests and did not wear the full Roman collar, just a thinner version. Some of them were quite sensitive about this and I remember our own class brother giving us a long talk on how they were in no way inferior to the priests except in their inability to say mass and hear confessions. They viewed their vocation as on a par with that of the priest and certainly their achievement in educating the youth of the country stood them in good stead in this argument. Nevertheless the sensitivity persisted.

And so on to the Civil Service where I worked with Maurice and admired him very much. He was a dynamo and demanding. He was loyal to his staff and they to him.

My direct knowledge of Maurice comes from the later stage of his career in the Department of Finance. I didn't know him hardly at all in my early days in the Department though he had a room just down the corridor. Then he went to the Department of the Public Service and later to the Department of Economic Planning and Development, where I was myself, but I had no real contact with him there.

My main contact with Maurice in the Department of Finance was during the last decade of the twentieth century.

It involved negotiations in the first half of 1990 in agreeing and setting up the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). These took place in Paris and were very intense. Ireland had the EU Presidency at that stage and we spent a lot of time negotiating, once till 2am and after the interpreters had left at midnight.

Then there was the EU Investment Services Directive and the legislation coming from that. I was also involved with him during his period on the board of the European Investment Bank (EIB) which was on my desk.

I think I got to know him reasonably well over that period and his account in this book fills in some of the gaps.

I will confine myself to some anecdotes about my own dealings with Maurice.

Launch of the EBRD negotiations in the Kléber Conference Centre, Paris, on 15 January 1990.
[l-r] Seán Connolly: Finance Ministry Principal at Irish Permanent Representation in Brussels. Pól Ó Duibhir: EIB/EBRD Desk in Finance Ministry, Dublin. Jim Flavin: Foreign Affairs Ministry, Dublin. Maurice O'Connell: Second Secretary General, Finance Ministry, Dublin. Dieter Hartwich: Secretary General, European Investment Bank.

I noticed during the EBRD negotiations in Paris that Maurice needed to take on fuel in the middle of the day or his battery would start running down well before tea time. This may reflect his origins in more ways than one. In a working rural community, dinner was in the middle of the day, unlike in today's eating out culture. But there's more to this in Maurice's case. He records (p59) that the sparse diet in St. Brendan's College has left him with "an abiding memory of hunger". So, stocking up in the middle of the day now was not just to keep the machine functioning at full belt, it was also to soothe the psyche in the process.

Maurice also had a great opportunistic streak in him. I'll give two examples.

During the EBRD negotiations the not insignificant matter of sorting out the constituencies (groupings) on the board of directors came up. Maurice was out of his seat like a flash to buttonhole the Danish delegate, with whom he sat on the EIB board, and do a quick deal with him that was so favourable to us that Danish HQ later tried to unravel it, without success I might add.

The second concerned Charles de Gaulle, the airport not the man. There we were rushing for the plane back to Dublin when the lady at the check-in desk, not from Aer Lingus but from the airport administration ADF, objected to our documentation. Apparently the name on my passport and that on my ticket didn't match. This we needed like a hole in the head. Maurice, rather ungallantly, snatched the papers from the lady's hand, shouting "that's his name in Irish" as we rushed past her towards the boarding area. It was only later that we discovered that I had handed her my passport and Jim Flavin's ticket - a confusion from the handing back of passports and tickets on the inward bound trip.

Maurice was fiercely loyal to his staff. I once made a serious gaffe in correspondence with the Attorney General's Office. It arose out of a sloppy cut and paste on my part. But Matt Russell, the head of the office, threw a hissy fit and insisted on a formal apology. Maurice was incensed as this could have been quietly rectified but Matt, as was his wont, chose the path of confrontation. I was clearly in the wrong and it took me all of my persuasive powers to persuade Maurice not to die in the ditch over this one.

Maurice was on the board of the EIB in Luxembourg, so once a month he'd travel out there. There was, however, one big problem with this arrangement. The Secretary General of the Department, Seán Cromien, had a habit of calling Maurice down in the early afternoon, just as Maurice was trying to leave to get his flight, to discuss something in a submission that Maurice would have sent down earlier in the day. When Seán Cromien called he was to be obeyed and the mere matter of an EIB board meeting did not cut any ice with him. I know, from personal experience, that Seán just considered such trips a perk which had no place interfering with the real work of the Department.

So tension would start to rise on departure days - would Maurice get away in time or not? Well, not one to leave things to fate to decide, Maurice had his own little strategem to get his way here. During the earlier part of the day, instead of sending submissions down to Seán he would pile them up on his desk and only transfer the pile to his out tray on his way out the door. They would then be collected well after his departure. And I had strict instructions that if Seán rang looking for him I was to say I hadn't a clue where he might be. This worked very well. I think I had to lie under orders only the once. Hello Nuremberg.

When discussing Budgetary preparations in the Department of Finance which involved long hours and frantic activity once a year, Maurice makes reference to the Department's wine cellar (p91). Now that was a new one on me. I know the EIB had a very fine wine cellar and I know this from personal experience. But that was a Bank and this was the Civil Service. Perhaps he was just being facetious. Or, the thought struck me, maybe Ruarí Quinn installed more than a coffe dock in Government buildings known only to the few. I remember the coffee dock. I was thrown out of my room to make way for it at the time.

When Maurice entered the civil service he was supposed to be heading for the Department of Education but never got there (p69). Education's loss was Finance's gain.

To my recollection the allocation of AOs to Departments was very much a random affair, and this was true even within the Department itself. I remember when Eithne Ingoldsby and Deirdre Carroll joined the Department. Eithne had an economics background and Deirdre's was sociology. So they assigned Eithne to social policy and Deirdre to banking. That may have briefly deprived the Department of some modern skills but against that, this was general administration and to advance up the ladder you had to have a broad range of experience.

Maurice ended up as Governor of the Central Bank. I think he was a serious cultural shock to some of the senior staff there. In my experience the Bank was unbelievably hierarchical. When the Department was to meet them, they always insisted on knowing precisely who was coming to the meeting so that they could match up the grade profiles on both sides.

Anyway, I gather when Maurice arrived there he would phone up any relevant person within the Bank regardless of their grade. That can be a shock. I know. Martin O'Donoghue did the same in the Department of Economic Planning and Development.

I know the incidents I recounted above are not in the book, but seeing as how you are going to buy and read the book I thought I'd give you some additional material on Maurice's character.

Anyway, to get back to the book itself. It is a little gem which I enjoyed reading. Even if you have never heard of Maurice O'Connell you will enjoy sharing his youth in Moyvane, his education from primary school through to Maynooth and back, and his public service career from the 1960s to his retirement from the Central Bank in 2002.

He wrote this memoir in 2010 and Felix Larkin, who spent most of his career working with Maurice, has added a fine Afterword commenting on Maurice's life and character. Felix tells us that Maurice was his mentor in the public service. What more could you ask.

John Bruton has written the Foreword and his high opinion of Maurice shows through.

The book is published by Fr Anthony Gaughan, a close fried of Maurice. He deserves great credit for a very fine book which will keep Maurice's memory alive for many years to come.

You can get a copy of the book from Kenny's bookshop in Galway, or, I'm told also directly from Fr. Gaughan.

I have a review in the March 2021 issue of The FURROW, reproduced here by courtesy of the Editor.