The World: The Master of the Tightrope Act

LIKE all Irish politicians, John Lynch has to contend with the ghosts of the past. Unlike many Irish politicians, he neither invokes nor exploits them. "I am not affected by any past bitternesses," he says. At 54, Lynch is a realist whose election five years ago marked the end of the era of charismatic strongmen with revolutionary pasts—William Cosgrave, Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass. Born the year after the 1916 Easter Rising, he is the Irish Republic's first Prime Minister, or Taoiseach (pronounced Tea-shock), of the post-civil-war generation.

Pragmatic and low-key, Lynch was once described as "the most ordinary man in the country" by the Irish Times. Referring to the fact that Lynch came to power in 1966 as a compromise candidate of his Fianna Fail party, the Times added: "His contribution has been to discover consensus politics; or maybe it was the consensus which discovered Jack Lynch." Equally plain-spoken was the London Economist's recent assessment of Lynch as "the best Irish Prime Minister that Britain is likely to get"—a judgment hardly calculated to endear him to an electorate that still regards Britain as the "ould enemy."

Jack Lynch was born in Cork in an age when peat, potatoes and parish priests meant Ireland. They are still valid symbols, and the country still feels the effects of the terrible potato famine of 1846-48, emigration and a low birth rate. Just before the famine, its population was 8,000,000; now it is 3,000,000. But today's Eire is also a land that produces electronics equipment, Pharmaceuticals and plastics, one where 500 factories have been built in the past decade.

Though Lynch grew up during a seminal era for Irish republicanism, there is nothing radical in his background. Once a noted athlete (soccer and hurling, a rough form of field hockey) he became a civil servant, then a lawyer, and was a relatively undistinguished Minister of Finance when opposing Fianna Fail factions chose him Prime Minister. While he was a legal clerk, he met his future wife, then a civil service secretary. They are childless, but his affection for children is deep; when he heard of the death of 18-month-old Angela Gallagher, hit by a sniper's ricochet in Belfast, he wept openly. A practicing Catholic, the blue-eyed, graying Lynch wears modish sideburns and hair long enough to curl around his collar.

The passions and factionalism of Irish politics compel him to perform a nonstop tightrope act between moderates and militants; he is working for a peaceful solution to the ageless "Irish question" while trying to avoid an outright collision with the Irish Republican Army, whose most extreme faction is trying to shoot its way to a reunification of Ireland, north and south.