Garret FitzGerald, politician, economist and journalist.
Born: 9 February, 1926, in Dublin.
Died: 19 May, 2011, in Dublin, aged 85.GARRET FitzGerald was twice Ireland's Taoiseach, or prime minister, and will be best reme
mbered for signing the Anglo-Irish agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1985 in an attempt to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It took a further 13 long years but that document was seen as paving the way for the breakthrough Good Friday agreement of 1998, by which time both FitzGerald and Thatcher were well out of the picture.
The 1985 deal, also known as the Hillsborough Agreement because it was signed in Hillsborough Castle, Northern Ireland, upset the latter's Unionists because it gave FitzGerald's Irish Republic a say in Northern Ireland's future.
To balance that, it accepted that there would be no change in Northern Ireland's constitution unless a majority of its people agreed to join the republic.
The document was a remarkable achievement for FitzGerald, always seen as a bulwark of integrity rather than using than the guile, cunning and spin now considered an entry qualification for would-be politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Often described as "Garret the Good", "an absent-minded professor", "a dizzy academic" or "the nerds' nerd who made trainspotters look normal", he was also seen as the Mr Nice Guy of Irish politics - "possessing all the legendary Irish charm, but without the blarney", as one writer put it last night.
His often unruly Brillo pad-style hair and gangly gait only added to the image.
Such was his respect among the Irish people, and politicians across the spectrum, that the news of his death in the small hours of Thursday, and the palpable nationwide sense of loss, cast at least a temporary shadow over the Queen's warmly-welcomed conciliation speech made only hours before at Dublin Castle.
Had he not been ill, Fitzgerald would certainly have been present at the monarch's speech, albeit perhaps in unorthodox footware.
In the early 19880s, after a photographer pointed out that he was wearing two different brogues - one brown, one black - during an election campaign, it never occurred to FitzGerald to retort with the classic: "And I've got another pair like this at home."
He simply eyeballed the photographer as though odd shoes were the most normal thing in the world.
His political nemesis, Charles Haughey, thereafter nicknamed FitzGerald "goody-two-shoes". (As things turned out, FitzGerald's first coalition collapsed, by a single vote, over the issue of imposing VAT on children's shoes.
A member and former leader of the Fine Gael party, FitzGerald, whose father had fought and been imprisoned by the British during the 1916 Easter uprising, was Taoiseach at the head of two coalition governments between 1981 and 1987.
A fluent French speaker and passionate Francophile, he was an influential voice in favour of Ireland's entry into the EEC. EEC colleagues recall a French delegate asking him, in the middle of a highly technical speech in French, to slow down.
