Malachy McGrady - a friend’s tribute

I FIRST met Malachy McGrady at the beginning of September 1937 when, ten year old boys, we entered the lowest form in St Patrick’s High School, then in the old Brothers’ house in Irish Street.  We spent seven years in the same form in the Red High, under the eccentric, often challenging but always stimulating Head, Brother Edmund Murphy.

Here I pause to join in the tributes often paid by Malachy to the dedicated de la Salle Brothers and lay teachers without whom at that time boys like us would not have had a secondary education.

Out of school, of course, there were all the shared activities and experiences of boyhood, adolescence and young manhood as we grew up in close proximity.  Our back gate opened on to Market Street directly opposite the McGrady shop and home, a street then teeming with youngsters, with shoppers and commerce, with trains coming and going and floods regularly in season, a place of wonder, excitement and recreation. 

There were street leagues and games, skating on the marshes in winter, fishing at the Roughal and swimming in summer at the Steamboat Quay.  There was blitz, blackout and black-market, evacuees and Yanks, queuing for pictures at the Grand and just messing about.  And there was a counter culture too of gaelic football and hurling, ceilis and feiseanna, Br Edmund’s efforts to reform the Irish language with Eeris and  long glorious twilights of double summer-time, dodging B Specials and Tail-light Murphy on lightless bikes with poor brakes learning Irish and singing rebel songs.  In Heaney’s words  “besieged within the siege, whispering Morse”.

Religion was a big thing too, daily mass and devotions a couple of times a week, apart from the great festivals, in which we both played, in our view, a crucial role in the liturgy pumping the bellows for the church organ, until made redundant by electrification.

We were thus exposed to a wide range of shared experiences and cultural influences.  In all of these Malachy stood out, even at a young age, for quiet leadership, for knowing what he wanted to do, for consistency and determination to see the job through which were to characterize him as an adult and as an effective and acknowledged community leader.

The son of Mickey McGrady, a master tailor and his wife, Lillian, an exceptionally intelligent, hospitable generous and articulate lady, Malachy was the third youngest of eleven children, each of whom (most notably Eddie in politics) in their different ways was to make a significant contribution to community life.

While building a highly successful accountancy practice (later extended to include insurance and financial services) Malachy found the time and the energy to participate in and to lead a wide range of voluntary and community activities.  At an early age, along with Bernard Deeny, Willie King and Seamus Byrne, he set up, in the Russell Gaelic Union, an innovative model which embraced social and cultural activities and community service as well as field sports, which was years ahead of its time.

He was also one of a small group which included Jack Magee, Arthur Pollock and Major Terry Johnston who pioneered the idea of a County Museum for Down and saw it through to realization  (ultimately in the safe hands of brother Eddie).  I recall a first exhibition of antiques and artifacts collected from big houses for which even Malachy could not get insurance cover, and which resulted in him and me and Arthur spending three nights on fire-watch in the old Town Hall.

It was, however, in the field of health and hospital administration that he made the most significant contribution, and in which he became an acknowledged expert, as a member, then Chair of the local hospitals’ management committee, the Hospitals Authority, the Eastern Board and Chair of the Central Services Agency.  He was, too, one of the Department’s most valued advisors when I was Permanent Secretary.  He was too, for ten years the sole lay member of the general Medical Council, which regulates the whole profession throughout the UK.

A deeply religious man, Malachy was awarder a Papal knighthood for services to church and community. His was not a religion of pious ostentation, but a living out of deeply held Christian values of charity, compassion and tolerance, of concern for the needy, of respect for others, whatever their background, of honesty and integrity in all his dealings. As Gerald Manley Hopkins puts it: “The just man justices: keeps grace, and acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is.” So Malachy gave witness in public to the Christian values he held so firmly in private.

He was in every sense a pillar of society, always ready to reach out across perceived boundaries to build bridges, to heal and to reconcile.  He was a beacon of tolerance and calm good sense in the worst of times when he contributed consistently and constructively to community relations and community cohesion in Lecale and more widely.  He would have been immediately accredited by Seamus Heaney as an Ambassador from the Republic of Conscience “where public leaders must swear to uphold the unwritten law, and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.”

In all this he was sustained by the love and devotion of his wife, Colette, and by his love for her and for their family of whom he was so proud — a love which was so beautifully returned in their tender care and support in his last years. I offer them my sincere sympathy, and also Malachy’s surviving sister, Marie.

The town he loved so well is the poorer for the passing of Malachy McGrady, but it has been enormously enriched by his contribution over a long life of generous service to the community.

So long, old friend. So long — for now.

Maurice Hayes

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