In May 1957, Ken Whitaker, a Catholic from Northern Ireland who had become secretary of the Department of Finance the previous year at the age of thirty-nine, had begun, quietly and with a small team of officials, to write a 250-page document mapping out what that change would be. Nobody asked him to do it, and he and his collaborators worked in their spare time.97 Whitaker’s motivation was existential – he believed that ‘Something had to be done or the achievement of national independence would prove to have been a futility.’
