There is one central truth about Martin Mansergh that probably wouldn’t get into the history books or the obituaries: He was a really good, kind man, as generous towards his foes and his critics as he was to his friends. I could be counted within the former group, and I am not proud of some of the things I said about him, not least about his acquired Irish accent. This was unkind and ungenerous, yet he never retaliated, never upbraided me, never mocked in return. That was almost certainly not a careful stratagem, but a measure of the man himself, who did not think badly of anyone.
That instinctual urge towards goodness is the only explanation for his extraordinary relationship with Charles Haughey, the most corrupt politician in Irish history. Perhaps it was Martin’s almost pathological inability to think ill of anyone that made him both blind and immune to Haughey’s toxic humours or his malignant world view, though he could not have been blind to Haughey’s intellectual brilliance. The Irish Farmers’ Union President Joe Bruton (uncle of the future Taoiseach) who detested Haughey once told me that he was also the most intelligent man he had ever met. It is the great and perhaps inexplicable paradox of Martin’s life that he could have volunteered to work so loyally for such a dreadful man, for they were not so much poles apart – for nothing quite resembles a pole as its rival – as sea and sky, Watson and Holmes, Jeeves and Wooster.
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