Jack Lynch(1917–1999)

John Mary Lynch was born at Bob and Joan Walk in the Shandon district of Cork city on the fifteenth of August 1917, fifth child of Daniel Lynch, a tailor of Bantry-Lynch stock, and Norah O'Donoghue of Shandon. He was schooled at the North Monastery Christian Brothers' School in Cork, took the Civil Service entrance examination in 1936, joined the Department of Justice as a clerk in Dublin, and through his twenties combined the Civil Service career with the practice of law (he was called to the Bar at King's Inns in 1945) and with the central interest of his life, Gaelic hurling and football.

He played senior hurling and senior Gaelic football for Cork from 1936, was on the Cork team that took the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship in 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1946, and on the Cork team that took the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship in 1945, the six consecutive All-Ireland senior medals being a feat matched by no other player in the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association. He captained the Cork hurling team to the 1942 and 1946 championships, was named in the GAA's official Hurling Team of the Century in 1984 and the GAA Team of the Millennium in 1999, and remained throughout the political career the central popular figure of Cork sporting culture.

He was elected Fianna Fáil TD for Cork City North-East in the May 1948 general election in his thirty-first year, held the seat (under successive constituency boundaries Cork City Borough, Cork City North-West, Cork City) continuously for forty-three years to 1981. He served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Government under de Valera (1951 to 1954), Minister for the Gaeltacht (1957 to 1959), Minister for Education (1957 to 1959), Minister for Industry and Commerce (1959 to 1965) and Minister for Finance (1965 to 1966). On Seán Lemass's retirement in November 1966 he was elected leader of Fianna Fáil and on the tenth of November 1966 took the office of Taoiseach in his fiftieth year, holding it to March 1973 and again from July 1977 to December 1979.

His seven years as Taoiseach (the second-longest combined tenure in the office in the history of the state) covered the central decade of modern Ireland's institutional transformation. He led the Republic of Ireland into membership of the European Economic Community on the first of January 1973, the foundational European-integration step that became the framework of Irish economic policy for the next half-century. He led the state through the most acute years of the Northern Ireland crisis (the 1968 to 1969 collapse of the Stormont order, the 1969 Battle of the Bogside, the 1972 Bloody Sunday, the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings), held the line against the IRA's pressure on the constitutional Republic, ordered the construction of Irish Army field hospitals at Donegal and Cavan-Monaghan in August 1969 in support of the Northern Catholic civil-rights position, and committed the Irish state to the constitutional path that culminated in the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and finally in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. He retired from active politics in December 1979, served on as TD until 1981, and died at the Hermitage Hospital, Lucan, on the twentieth of October 1999 in his eighty-third year. He was given a state funeral at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne in Cork. The Lynch name in modern Irish public life carries the weight of the six All-Ireland medals and the EEC accession of 1973.