He did important public things in his life, and one of them which no obituary will omit, was that with his friends, a marvellous band of bilingual and Ireland-loving men and women, he founded Cumann Merriman. The Merriman people relished the language and what's more they relished life - they liked other people and drinking and singing and listening to singing and arguing and being attracted and set-dancing and gossip and the acquisition of detailed, intimate, loving knowledge of every corner of this island. Their summer school aimed to rescue Irish for pleasure and emotion.

It was Seán's personal inclusiveness lightly institutionalised. It was his mentoring energy finding a form. And that's what the obituaries may not capture - that what he was in the Dublin where I was lucky enough to settle into being his combination pupil and gofer was a mentor. Since most of the social, not to mention the intellectual, life of the time took place in pubs, young gofers were almost a recognised caste. It was they who had to go off to try to collect a cheque or to leave in a book review just scribbled on a bit of paper borrowed from the barman or to buy the pound of sausages intended in the long run to be brought home to the wife or to place a bet or, above all, to make a phonecall. And the telephone boxes of the time - remember the steel boxes with button A and button B? - were not for the fainthearted.

The important person in the group, you see - the one who was on form, pouring out anecdotes and jokes and information and working by instinct to stimulate everyone there and unobtrusively coax them into the company - that person, who was often Seán, couldn't move. Once that person put on his coat - I never knew a woman to be that person - the whole thing was over. So that person had to send out the student - apprentices like myself were known as students even when we weren't actually studying anything anywhere - to establish where everyone else was. Because there was a population then, mainly of men, who migrated between the newspaper offices and Radio �?ireann, then in the GPO, and various departments of the civil service, and UCD, then in Earlsfort Terrace, and a large and varied selection of pubs;

and they were always looking for each other.

(Women journalists had not yet been invented, except for those writing on the women's pages, but there were Radio �?ireann women and a few girlfriends and mistresses and the occasional wife. ) The most characteristic action of this population was putting the head around the door - of the pub, or the snug, or the back lounge - to see who was there. The incomer had to gauge whether they were entitled to join such-and-such a company. They had to estimate how long everyone there had already been drinking and how likely it was that they were heading for trouble. The incomer had to weigh the duties of the job and home against the attraction of the present company - and I never saw anyone turn away at the door for fear of being bored by Seán Mac Réamoinn. And for peripheral figures who had done nothing to distinguish themselves - for example, myself - there was the question of whether they were wanted. Even wit and erudition and personal distinction wouldn't necessarily make a person wanted; the only thing that was certain to, just like in Ulysses, was the money to buy a round, since everyone concerned was either poor or grindingly poor. I had no money and if it wasn't that Seán was my patron, I would have had no entrée to hours, days, years of sitting in pubs listening to the best of talk. Golden times.

Seán could do his jobs on the hoof, well able to scrawl a thousand-word article or script on more or less anything while constantly on the move - I remember him in joyous talk all over Rome and London as well as the most remote corners of Ireland - though he couldn't type and couldn't drive.

But he settled down, of course, into the substantial work and service to the country that the obituarists will document. Yet to me that era in his life when I first knew him was the truest to his nature. He was profligate with his personality. He never said a sentence that he didn't make interesting or have an encounter that he didn't put energy into. He was a feeling man with a rich store of mind anyway, but what made him hum and buzz and sparkle was society. He wanted to love his fellow man - he believed in Christ and Christ's injunction that we should love one another. But it surely never crossed his mind that his way of living his life exemplified that love - that when he bustled around Dublin, creating little outposts of the lifeforce wherever he held court for a while, he was celebrating other people as well as himself. But it crossed my mind, without my knowing the words for it. I saw him make a gift of himself to other people, conferring value on them through nothing more magic than talk. I saw him and thank him for demonstrating, without for a minute meaning to, that there's such a thing as living generously.