I've had different ones from time to time, but now I have nothing.

Tens of people have had their say about him this week, not all of them aware that estimates of a chameleon say a lot about the estimator. I know that my own circumstances . . . my age, my gender, what I think is my place in Irish society . . . condition my view of him. I've never been able to get away from seeing him within my own history . . . from remembering, for example, my first consciousness of him, when I used to watch his sharp face from the corner of my eye across a room packed with afterhours drinkers in Groome's Hotel. He was a very, very attractive man then, vibrant, not constricted by self-importance and wariness as he later became. It was understood that he was already on the way to being a minister, though he'd only been in the Dail four or five years. But he was old, of course, compared to the boyfriends of girls like myself and my sister. And married. And anyway she preferred the looks of Brian Lenihan, who was usually with Charlie. She liked crinkly hair.

We would have been there with our father, who was a social columnist, if that's the right term, with the Evening Press. He got up and went out to work in the afternoon, so the only time he might be met was late at night, when he was finished his round of parties and receptions and went down to Groome's for a few drinks before going back to the newspaper to write 'Dubliner's Diary'. That's how we mixed with the actors and actresses who'd just performed at the Abbey or the Gate and who, like my father, had been on display all evening and needed to come down. The hours in Groome's modulated between the public world of work and the private world of home.

Not that the home mattered in Groome's. Very few wives had a presence in that exciting, insiders' place . . . the only place I ever knew Irish bohemia to be on terms of bonhomie with power. Because of the protection Mr and Mrs Groome had as Fianna Fail publicans, for a few years artists and politicians and legal people and journalists belonged to the same loose coterie. That, by the way, is one of the ways in which the scene was premodern: nowadays, no politician with dealings to hide would dream of socialising with a journalist, even a journalist in as harmless a line of work as my father. But it was pre-modern, too, in the relative sophistication of it all. Married men and . . .

mostly unmarried . . . women drank and flirted late into the night while outside O'Connell Street was silent and monochrome once the cinemagoers had caught their buses home, and beyond O'Connell Street a simple and austere country slept.

Ireland then was just discovering a new way of being a man's world. Now there were men like Charlie and my father who had cars and drivers and business that took them all over the country and no one to answer to.

Men who knew every hotel and hotel manager in the 26 counties, men who knew hundreds and hundreds of people to drink whiskey and swap stories with. Men who could walk into any bar or club and be greeted with delight. Both of them were in their different ways pioneers, mapping an Ireland that was halfway between the ploughshare and PR, and they thrived in that classless space. There were few celebrities in those days. They were kings of a rainy country.

How much is my own view of them inflamed by envy? There'll never be such fun again, and it was never available to women. If their opportunities had been open to me, I don't suppose my personal morality would have stood up to the temptation. And if, later on, I'd acquired huge power, how real would public morality have been to me, since I'd have abandoned a personal standard? And was it almost necessary that there be a generation or two of amoral public men? Was amorality needed to unlock originality? Did men like Charlie and my father have to free themselves from the ethical norms of the quiet, decent lower middle class from which they both came, so as to do new things? They would both have claimed to be patriots, but something, after all, caused them to abandon the personal idealism once synonymous with patriotism.

What happened to the Catholic upbringing . . . and both Charlie and my father had devout parents and went to Joey's in Marino, a Christian Brothers' school . . . that confidently distinguished right from wrong? The historical questions surrounding Charlie are almost impossible to answer. And the biographical ones are just as difficult. Turn him this way and that and he looks different to different kinds of people. For example, to the child of a betrayed wife he seems both more glamorous and more destructive than he would to someone else . . . he looks as if he was always ripe for further transgression.

And that's just one example of a circumstance that might underlie an assessment of the man. Good for those who can manage a clear line, and there has been some wonderful writing about Charlie this week.

But I don't know where to start. How people choose their path . . . whether they do . . . is a mystery still to me.