In her 2014 memoir, Inside RTÉ, former producer Betty Purcell recalled her days on the pioneering radio programme Women Today, which began broadcasting in 1979. In October 1981, Purcell invited then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to come into studio and face a panel of women “who wanted to quiz him about issues concerning their lives under his administration”. He immediately agreed. As recorded by Purcell, “he came in and faced an angry group of women, without any notes or civil servants, and with no idea of who the women were. He had the intellectual confidence that he would be able to answer any of the questions he was asked”.

The force of that assuredness appears in most assessments of FitzGerald, who was born a century ago this week. He articulated his ideas in public from the 1960s right to the end of his life in 2011. This earned him the description “an intellectual in politics,” but many who admired him also regarded him as someone whose essential humanity was never drowned out by the torrent of words, statistics and theories. What people appreciated was that he wanted to put his ideas into practice for genuinely patriotic reasons.

The year before he was elected a Fine Gael senator in 1965, he wrote what amounted to a personal manifesto, published in the Jesuit journal Studies. Its title was something of a novelty in Irish politics: “Seeking a National........

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