The Man Who United Ireland

"From the crush, you mean? From the people wanting autographs? Yes, I do. But I've come to accept the loss of what little time that takes, simply because there is no sensible alternative." Coghlan is unfailingly patient with even the most aggressive seekers after his touch, his word, a stroke of his pen. "I kind of take pride in the general idea of being noticed," he says, "for it means I have done something well. I try not to let the actual words and people tarnish that idea."

From a ridge, the runners turn and descend toward Bonabreena, finally relaxing, freewheeling. Coghlan runs with the quietest arm action of the world's best runners, and at this six-minutes-per-mile pace he never fully straightens his legs, touching his heels down with the knees still slightly bent. It is a practiced distance runner's stride. There is no sense of a man with unanswerable speed. The only way to fully appreciate his speed is to be his victim off a final turn. Here, in the hills, he prefers to talk.

Much as Shaw and Joyce and Beckett left Ireland in order to write about it, Coghlan seems a man able to stand outside his own culture. "I feel I'm half Dubliner, half American, sometimes holding these opposites equally dear. The American part is ambition, I guess. The Irish half has more to do with acceptance." Acceptance, as Coghlan uses it, ought not be confused with surrender. The harshest acceptance is of the pain of effort.

"I accept defeat as I do success. I can't bring back Montreal, so why brood over it? I've always been sort of a believer that your life is set out for you." Which makes acceptance a more sensible philosophy than raging to change the inevitable, but there seems a catch, namely the contradiction between a preordained life and freedom of will. "If your life is following a preset plan," Coghlan is asked, "does that absolve you of responsibility for it?"

Coghlan carefully considers this as the runners drop into green paddocks and thicker air, nearing home. "Maybe it's ordained that we have responsibility for our actions," he says, trying to dodge the logical incompatibility of the two states, controlled or free, blameless instrument or responsible being. "No, that can't be right."

Finally he says, "What I feel is that we do have choices, we do have control, but in the end we are going to have only one life unfold. In that sense you have to know when to relax and stop worrying about it."

He reaches his front step and hears Suzanne crying, so rushes in to comfort her. "There is always responsibility," he says firmly, holding up the child as irrefutable proof. He nuzzles her into a smile, and in that moment it seems that if one has only one life to aspire to, Eamonn Coghlan's would do quite nicely.