November 18 1974
THE first President of Ireland under the 1937 constitution was a Protestant, Dr Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League. Death has robbed Ireland of its fourth President and another Protestant, Mr Erskine Childers, son of the Republican leader executed during the Civil War.
President Childers whose untimely death all Ireland is now mourning, worked hard during his tragically short period of office, to fulfil his own ideal of the presidency, of bringing the office to the people. It was his intention that the office should embrace the entire community, not only in spirit but in actuality. In that he was eminently successful.
From the outset of his public career, to which he brought a single-minded devotedness and a high standard of integrity from which he never departed, particularly as a minister in several Fianna Fail governments, he refused to become a prisoner of his historical traditions. He was a Republican, yes. His father had been mindlessly executed during the turmoil of a Civil War. If the same difficulties beset him as beset other sons of Treaty or anti-Treaty fathers, the younger Erskine Childers refused to nurse animosities.
As chivalrous and high-minded as his father, he preferred the justice of creating a spirit of reconciliation in the community which, for so many years after 1922, had been so cruelly and ruthlessly divided.
President Childers from the beginning, concentrated all his efforts on the rescue and preservation of Ireland’s cultural heritage for a new generation to whom the Civil War and its aftermath were passages in their history books.
He called for patience and understanding in political life; and although a missionary for Fianna Fail, his speeches and actions, inside and outside Dail Eireann were always marked by a pattern of conduct that won for him the esteem and affection of political friend and foe, alike.
As a figure above politics, he felt an urgent will to voice concern for the healing of divisions in Ireland. There was no failure of conviction that this healing could be achieved. In his short time as President he registered this and other high ideals which remain to be copied and enhanced.
Irish News editorial with an obituary of Erskine Childers, the fourth President of Ireland, who had died suddenly the previous day, after being in office for just under 18 months.
