I first met Martin Mansergh – who died last week on a parliamentary trip to the Western Sahara – in the 1980s when he was an adviser and speech writer for Fianna Fail.
Published: 2 October 2025
Charlie Haughey had recruited him from the Department of Foreign Affairs and was the mentor to whom he always remained loyal.
Apart from Martin’s undoubted talent as an historian and a negotiator of exceptional patience and tolerance, Haughey also saw him as a status symbol.
He had an Oxford Ph.D and – even more importantly for the social-climbing Haughey – Mansergh was Anglo-Irish and had been brought up in the Georgian ‘Grenane House’ and surrounding estate in Tipperary.
It had been in the Mansergh family for three centuries and had a memorial to seven Manserghs who died in the Great War.
Martin managed the trick of being proud of his roots and a loyal parishioner of the Church of Ireland, but also self-deprecating and committed to Irish republicanism.
Haughey enjoyed showing off such a well-bred bag-carrier, who became Fianna Fail’s trusted expert on how to handle negotiations with the British throughout the peace process.
He would become the main back channel with republican paramilitaries from the IRA and other murderous spin-offs.
That continued even after 2002, when Martin graduated from the covert roles of speech writer and deniable negotiator to public roles as a senator and then TD for Tipperary South.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin called him a “true Irish republican”, whose “contribution to securing peace on this island marks him as a figure who will always be honoured” – which was, I think, a deliberate jibe at the men of violence.
From the beginning of my career as a political columnist I wrote for the Sunday Independent, which was greatly hated as almost the only Irish newspaper that was critical of the peace process.
In the Republic, Eoghan Harris, Eilis O’Hanlon and I – like Kevin Myers in solitary splendour in the Irish Times – were loudly at odds with what we saw as the appeasement of paramilitaries of both stripes.
I was also no lover of Fianna Fail (despite family links), had contempt for Haughey and loathed Sinn Fein/IRA.
But somehow Martin and I avoided clashing until February 10, 1996.
It was the morning after the IRA ended what they called “the cessation of violence” with a 1,000lb explosion in London’s Docklands that killed two newsagents.
In a world where we recently saw the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7 2023 blamed on the Jews, we shouldn’t be surprised to be reminded that John Major’s government was blamed for this bomb.
Martin and I were at yet another Foreign Office-hosted conference agonising over Northern Ireland.
When I saw him sitting alone on a bench in the garden with the shock, devastation and betrayal etched all over his face, I stopped by and commiserated.
“Aren’t you pleased?” he asked bitterly.
“You don’t really think that of me, do you?” I asked.
He instantly apologised, and in the ensuing years of public debate we argued good-naturedly in public and had a friendly drink afterwards.
Martin was a gentleman. We could do with a few more prominent republicans like that. Even if they’re women.
