David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I second Senator Bacik’s amendment to the Order of Business. This is a matter that we have all been pursuing. I instanced it first at the passage of the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Bill 2010 because this was an anomaly then affecting the Civil Service. Subsequently David Parris took an action which I am sorry he lost.

A couple of days ago I received a telephone call from a very old friend of mine, Victor Griffin, the former dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. He is 93 and had been sent home from Altnagelvin Hospital to die of cancer. As a Christian he is quite happy with that and is in no distress at all. He wanted T.K. Whitaker's address because he wanted to write to him as an old friend and colleague to congratulate him on his 100th birthday.

This is something well worth doing. I am glad it has been raised by my colleagues here. He was a very distinguished Member of this House. He was very young when he entered the Civil Service in a senior position. For a while the great poet Thomas Kinsella was his private secretary, which is a rather curious and interesting fact. He was also instrumental in improving relations between the South and the North of this country. He entered discussions with the private secretary to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland which led to meetings between Sean Lemass and Captain Terence O'Neill. He worked with the Ford Foundation to launch the Economic and Social Research Institute and for a long time he was president or chairman of that institute. He was chancellor of the National University of Ireland, president of the Royal Irish Academy, a member of the Board of Governors of the Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland and he had a great love of the Irish language. The seminal collection of Irish poetry, An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600-1900, was dedicated to him.

It is also interesting and very heartening that on an RTE television programme which held a mass vote for the greatest Irishman of the 20th century, which Senator Feighan mentioned, he was up against all kinds of armed revolutionaries such as Michael Collins and beat the hell out of them. That is a terrific tribute to the feeling of the Irish people for the parliamentary democratic tradition of this country. I am very happy to wish the former Senator T.K. Whitaker a very happy birthday. I am sure the whole House would want to do this too. I only had the pleasure of meeting him once. He was a friend of former Senator Feargal Quinn who last year gave a lunch party in his honour and I had the opportunity to exchange a few words with him then. He is a great Irishman. We are all living with the positive benefits of the economic plan that he conceived.