Farewell, Danny Wallace, a champion of the northside

In the 1990s, Danny Wallace used to come up to speak to us student politicians a few times a year. Bertie Ahern made him a junior minister in 1997, and Danny’s driver would park the Mercedes by the Honan Chapel.

Danny was always in battle armour: a pinstripe suit with a Pioneer pin, gleaming black patent shoes, a gold watch. A Communion boy really, bound for the Sunset Ridge.

Afterwards, he’d come downstairs with us to the new bar for a can of Fanta, always in one of the old cone-shaped half-pint glasses.

He’d tell us about the time Prince Bira of Siam roared down the Straight Road in his racing car. Or the one about the way Willie Dwyer from the Sunbeam once grabbed the fifth seat in a general election, but only at the cost of having to buy Blackpool a whole new church first.

In those carefree days, the talk was usually about J1 visas, scholarships secured or missed by inches, and our various happy prospects.

Danny had little formal education, which is another way of saying that he was born poor and was press-ganged into Ford’s after his own father died suddenly.

For all that, there was never any edge to him with us, a dozen would-be future Fianna Fáil Taoisigh who quizzed him gleefully about his department’s budget. (€400 million the last time he met us).

I got the sense from him that the only downside to this pot of gold was that he was constitutionally barred from spending it on anything other than biodiversity grants and his beloved Environmental Protection Agency.

Left to his own devices, Danny would likely have sent suitcases of cash around town, with three especially heavy deposits reserved for the remnants of Dunlops, Verolme, and the B&I ferry.

His parting words were as consistent as his tailoring: “I love seeing you all doing so well.”

There was nothing inevitable about all this, of course.

A man forced into a car assembly factory at 13 might just as easily have despised undergraduates in the same way that a man born poor might, in his politics, have become a hoarder.

Poverty does not instil an inherent sense of solidarity if only because to be poor is, ultimately, to be afraid. And eradicating that fear became, in a sense, Danny’s mandate.

As a TD for one of the poorest constituencies in Ireland during the appalling 1980s, fear was everyone’s portion. The job was to be the kindly conduit between his constituents and a bureaucracy whose intervention usually signalled humiliation or actual crisis.

As such, Danny spent uncomplaining years in windowless rooms above pubs, trapped by the short and simple annals of the poor. All he could offer in response was an easy command of the various allowance schemes as they applied to the careworn hearts, those who couldn’t afford Confirmation clothes or were hurt at work.

And although he was an old-fashioned Catholic whose social instincts were essentially Victorian, I can no more imagine him turning away an unmarried mother or a gay teenager in trouble than I could picture him addressing the Dáil in a ball gown.

His religion was likely an important ballast against that tide of sadness in his daily round, if only as a reminder of that same faith’s first formal promise which he made his own: Love never falleth away.

The mastery of the allowances was one thing. That’s to be expected from a TD who represented an area like Knocknaheeny, whose population of 8,000 was deprived of a local post office, at least until they gave him a quota.

But Danny’s other, less obvious, preoccupations may surprise though.

It’s clear from the Dáil record that he watched the criminal courts closely, and taught himself the rules around bail and concurrent sentencing, handy knowledge in a constituency that was tormented by joyriders.

He also decided, in a rage, to learn housing law after seeing several elderly constituents get mauled by solicitors over arrears. (Danny was watching from the public gallery in Washington Street).

He was determined to heave rent disputes out of the District Court for good and into a special rent tribunal, which was duly created in 1983.

He was also the only person in the whole Dáil to realise at one stage that new consumer protection legislation had never been properly activated.

The then trade minister, Labour’s Frank Cluskey, seemed to have no idea what Danny was on about when he asked him pointedly once about the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980.

If one read that complicated legislation out loud today in the open air, the birds would likely fall from the sky. But its purpose is still clear enough though. (It was meant to make it harder to swindle working people).

Had Danny kept a diary, the entries would not just have recorded the contents of one admirable life.

They would, I bet, have recorded the contents of all human life, “a tiny purse of it, with all the coins there, well rubbed, much treasured.”

As he was himself.

John-Paul McCarthy is a barrister now based in London, who advises the UK Home Secretary. His biography of cabinet secretary Maurice Moynihan was recently published in paperback by Cambridge Scholars.