Here is a most erudite tribute from one of Paddy Bort's closest friends and colleagues, Professor Chris Harvie of the University of Tübingen. It gives a rich picture of Paddy's wide range of activities, particularly in the years before we came to know him in Edinburgh. It seems to have been disseminated quite widely on email so I hope Chris doesn't mind me posting it here.

(Note, I feel bound to say re the first paragraph, that the exact circumstances of Paddy's death are not confirmed, and may well not be. However, I understand from a university contact that High School Yards, the location of Paddy's office, were closed by police on Friday morning; a small comfort that he may have been found there as opposed to somewhere more anonymous).

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Dear Freudies and friends,
Paddy Bort died suddenly in an Edinburgh street on Friday evening, apparently through a heart attack. We had supper on Thursday evening before I left for the airport and a Tuebingen Kompaktseminar and he was full of plans for the year, and beyond.

Thus ended a friendship of thirty-six years, and a life devoted to peace, regionalism, socialism, learning and drama. In Edinburgh he famously embodied folk music - in some ways as his hero Hamish Henderson had done - but there were different Paddys in different places, who will go on stirring things up.

In Tuebingen's Bert-Brecht-Bau students were rehearsing in the theatre Producer Paddy helped build out of a large and useless cloakroom - it gave that 'austere-brutalist' building a heart. Politics Paddy went on to repeat the act with the similarly-pilloried Scottish parliament, recognising how Miralles' strange creation could throw people together in ways that made them think differently.

His ANNALS OF THE HOLYROOD PARISH (2015) shows (inter alia) how it got us our Borders Railway back - Paddy published the first pamphlet in 1999, and was at a 'fete champetre' at Avenel for David and Judy Steel when it finally opened to Tweedbank in autumn 2015.

As 'Academic Coordinator' he grasped the practical experience Holyrood could provide, partly because, while a student, Stadtrat Paddy was also an SPD councillor in Ilsfeld, the small vineyard-town south of Heilbronn where his father taught. He was influenced by his next-door neighbour the dynamic Lothar Spaeth, pioneer of 'eco-hi-tech' and later Minister-President and even 'the bunch of rascals' who were his conservative opponents but still civic actors. Mutual if wary trust saved their burgh the vast administrative costs we face in Scotland.

Like Patrick Kavanagh Paddy preferred parishes to provinces, because they represented human experience better. The bad news reached Tuebingen via the Phoenix Irish Pub which Barman Paddy had helped restore amid the barges and bridges of Lauffen-am-Neckar.

Freudenstadt started with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung who then owned the Zollernblick in 1991. Its early July discussion weekends now total 26, with 'and-a-half' evenings at Edinburgh's Summerhall.

Above all there was Ireland: that year teaching German at Trinity in 1978-9 when the place began to change; then after 1985 when demographics and new voices from changing Dublin and Belfast reached Tuebingen too. Brechtbau Actor Paddy was Hugh the hedge-schoolteacher in Brian Friel's TRANSLATIONS: perhaps his finest stage role.

Health hadn't dealt the Bort family good cards. Paddy's parents and his younger brother Claus died prematurely and underneath the wit and energy there ran a heroic melancholy, a sense of 'Work, for the night cometh ...'

Something you get from both the Yeats's words and pictures. From 'At Galway Races' we can recover them:
'Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,
We'll learn that sleeping is not death,
Hearing the whole earth change its tune,
Its flesh being wild, and it again
Crying aloud as the racecourse is ...'

Prof. Christopher Harvie