Garret FitzGerald - Early Life

Early Life

Garret FitzGerald was born in Dublin in 1926 into a very politically active family. His mother Mabel McConnell had worked for Under-Secretary for Ireland, James Macmahon decoding messages sent from London. Each day between 2:30 and 3:30 she would pass any information acquired to either Joe McGrath, Liam Tobin or Garret's father, Desmond. Desmond FitzGerald was London-born and raised. He was Minister for External Affairs at the time of his son's birth. FitzGerald senior, whose father had emigrated as a labourer from Skeheenarinky in County Tipperary, had joined the Irish Volunteers in 1914 and fought during the 1916 Easter Rising. Desmond FitzGerald had been active in Sinn Féin during the Irish War of Independence, and had been one of the founders of Cumann na nGaedheal. The party was formed to support the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which created the Irish Free State.

Although a senior figure on the "pro-treaty" side of Ireland's political divide, Desmond FitzGerald had remained friendly with anti-Treaty republicans such as Belfast man Seán MacEntee, a minister in Éamon de Valera's government, and father-in-law of Conor Cruise O'Brien. The families of Patrick McGilligan and Ernest Blythe were also frequent visitors to the FitzGerald household. FitzGerald's mother, the former Mabel Washington McConnell, was a nationalist and republican of Ulster Protestant descent, although some sources indicate that she became a Catholic on her marriage. Her son would later describe his political objective as the creation of a pluralist Ireland where the northern Protestants of his mother's family tradition and the southern Catholics of his father's could feel equally at home.

FitzGerald was educated at the Jesuit Belvedere College and University College Dublin (UCD), from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946, later returning to complete a Ph.D. which he obtained in 1968. He was deeply interested in the politics of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. A bright student who counted among his contemporaries in UCD his future political rival, Charles Haughey, who also knew Joan O'Farrell (the Liverpool-born daughter of a British army officer, Richard O'Farrell) a fellow student, whom FitzGerald married in 1947. Their children were John, Mary, Mark and Desmond.

Following his university education, in 1947 he started working with Aer Lingus, the state airline of Ireland, and became an authority on the strategic economic planning of transport. During this time he wrote many newspaper articles, was the Irish correspondent for the Economist Magazine, and was encouraged to write on National Accounts and economics by the Features Editor in The Irish Times. He remained in Aer Lingus until 1959, when after undertaking a study of the economics of Irish Industry in Trinity College, Dublin, he became a lecturer in economics at UCD.

Fitzgerald qualified as a barrister from the King's Inns of Ireland and spoke French fluently.