STENTORIAN, BRUSQUE AND DEEPLY PRINCIPLED
But his greatest legacy may be the ability to debate without rancour or retribution
THE road to peace in Northern Ireland was a long one and, in 1997, it almost took a very weird detour. During an impasse in negotiations between nationalists and unionists, an idea to break the logjam passed across Taoiseach John Bruton’s desk. The proposal was that the leaders on all sides would fly to South Africa to hold a peace summit and, while there, they would embark on a midnight safari as a bonding exercise.
‘This is rubbish,’ Bruton noted in a handwritten evaluation of the plan. ‘It is rewarding intransigencies to fly people abroad who won’t do business at home. The mind boggles.’
It is a small but perfect snapshot of his no-nonsense approach to politics, brusque and totally to the point. Never a man to court favour at the price of abandoning principle, his public persona was stentorian and occasionally awkward. His brand of nationalism was complex and his antipathy towards Sinn Féin thinly concealed.
His financial policies were occasionally ham-fisted (the attempt to impose Vat on children’s shoes remained low-hanging fruit for his critics for decades) before ultimately laying the foundation of the boom years of the Nineties that
A MAN WHO LOVED HIS FAMILY, WENT TO MASS AND ENJOYED HIS PINT
became the bubble years of the Noughties in the hands of a subsequent administration.
Despite his own conservatism, his first term as leader of the Opposition saw Fine Gael raise no objection to the decriminalisation of homosexuality and, while he was Taoiseach, his important intervention on the eve of the 1995 divorce referendum saw it pass by the slimmest of margins. In terms of the great social issues that have marked, and often divided, Irish life for the past half century, only his opposition to abortion remained intractable, and he was against the repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018.
After a long illness, his death at 76, announced yesterday, led to many tributes from all political sides in Leinster House. Many spoke of a different John Bruton in his private life.
To them, he was supportive and funny, a man who loved his family, regularly attended Mass, and enjoyed his pint in his local in Dunboyne, Co. Meath.
They spoke too of the fact that the so-called Rainbow Coalition he led from December 1994 to June 1997 was remarkably stable, given the peaceful co-existence of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Democratic Left, not the most obvious bedfellows ever to share power in this country.
The fact he became Taoiseach at all was the result of a quirk of political fate. In the 1992 election, Labour under Dick Spring had its strongest showing to date, winning 33 seats. Contrary to its tradition of forming governments with Fine Gael, Labour instead went into coalition with Fianna Fáil, a decision that would come back to bite it at the next general election. Before that, though, fissures within the coalition saw it torn apart, and Labour linked up with Fine Gael and Democratic Left to form a new coalition, the only time this has happened in the history of the State. Bemused, Bruton found himself heading the administration, even though opinion polls suggested Dick Spring was the popular choice. The idea of a revolving Taoiseach was dismissed, and it would take almost three decades before such a measure was implemented.
As it turned out, Bruton’s tenure in the top job would be the second-shortest in our history, at 924 days just 20 more than Micheál Martin, but it would prove to be an impactful one.
To understand why, and how, it is first necessary to understand exactly who John Bruton was. John Gerard Bruton was born on May 18, 1947 to Matthew Joseph (known as Joe) and Doris Bruton, who owned a farm in Dunboyne when Ireland still was working its way out of the privations of the Emergency, as the Second World War period was known.
Joe was well known as one of the pioneers of the introduction of Charolais and Limousin cattle to Ireland, and served as president of the Irish Grassland Association in the late Sixties. The family was staunchly Catholic and staunchly Fine Gael and, as well as daughter Mary, it included younger brother Richard Bruton TD, who until last September was chairman of the party, and had previously also served in many ministries.
John Bruton was educated in Clongowes Wood College, the exclusive Jesuit-run boarding school in Co. Kildare, which includes among its alumni a man who would prove an inspiration to the young pupil, namely John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1900 to 1918; all his life, Bruton maintained that the 1916 Easter Rising was an unnecessarily violent act when Redmond had made so much progress in securing Home Rule.
After school, Bruton received an honours Bachelor of Arts degree, and later qualified as a barrister at the King’s Inns. Any plans he might have had to practise law ended in 1969 when, at 22, he was narrowly elected to the 19th Dáil as a TD for Meath, the seventhyoungest ever to serve.
He doubled his vote in the 1973 general election, and remained a
TD for over 35 years until his resignation in 2004.
After the Fianna Fáil landslide in 1977, Bruton was appointed the Fine Gael spokesman on agriculture by party leader Dr Garret FitzGerald, and later to the key role of spokesman on finance. He became the minister in that department after the election victory of 1981 that saw a Fine GaelLabour coalition return to power, at the start of the one of the most tumultuous periods in the country’s political history.
Facing into economic ruin thanks to Fianna Fáil’s honoured 1977 promise to abolish domestic rates, the new coalition immediately backed down on its own promise to cut taxes, while Bruton’s Budget speech also included the imposition of Vat on children’s shoes. There was immediate uproar and, in the vote that night, Independent TDs Jim Kemmy of Limerick and Seán Dublin Bay Loftus voted with the Opposition, so the Government collapsed.
Bruton publicly took the blame, though in a 2020 memoir, No Complaints, senior civil servant Maurice
O’Connell admitted the move was his fault.
‘In the lead-up to the Budget, the instincts of the minister and his political advisers were to restrict the imposition of 18pc Vat to adult clothing and footwear and to have an exclusion for children,’ he wrote. ‘Fortified by advice from colleagues from Britain, who had first-hand experience of this, the Department of Finance recommended in trenchant terms, under my signature, that the exclusion for children would probably be unworkable and wide open to abuse.’
It certainly left Bruton wide open to abuse, and it was a taunt he endured all his political life. In the first of two general elections in 1982, Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fáil came to power, only to be replaced by another FG-Labour coalition that November, ending 15 quite extraordinary months of political to-ing and fro-ing.
Bruton regained the Finance portfolio in 1986 and also served over the course of the Eighties, variously, as Minister for Industry and Energy; Industry, Trade, Commerce and Tourism; and Public Service.
The coalition suffered heavy casualties in the 1987 general election, and Garret FitzGerald resigned, to be replaced by Alan Dukes, whose so-called Tallaght strategy of supporting Fianna Fáil on economic reform, as well as the poor performance in the 1990 presidential election campaign of party nominee Austin Currie (getting just 17% of the vote), ultimately led to his demise as Fine Gael leader.
Bruton, who had been runner-up to Dukes in the previous leadership election, was now elected unopposed, on November 21, 1990. In the 1992 general election, Fianna Fáil won 68 seats, Fine Gael 45, Labour 33, the Progressive Democrats ten, Democratic Left four, the Green Party one, and Independents five. There was surprise when Labour went into coalition with Fianna Fáil, but disputes – including over irregularities in the beef industry that led to a drawnout tribunal, and the controversy over the botched extradition to Northern Ireland of the paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth – saw that government collapse.
For the only time in history, a new coalition materialised without a general election.
Once in power, Bruton set about accelerating both the economy and the peace process, with considerable progress on both fronts. Historians look at 1995 as the first year of the Celtic Tiger era, which saw economic growth average over 9% a year, while unemployment, which stood at 14.5% in 1994, had dropped to 10.1% by 1997.
As regards the peace process, the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe by the Provisional IRA in
June 1996 was a major stumbling block for Bruton’s continued engagement with Sinn Féin, but he was commended for his condemnation of police actions during loyalist marches through mostly Catholic Drumcree in Northern Ireland. On the gangland front, the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin in July of that same year led to robust action in the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau that October.
In 1995, with voting intentions in the divorce referendum on a knifeedge, his last-minute plea to the electorate to think of those they knew and loved who were trapped in failed marriages helped carry the day, by just 9,114 votes. The general consensus was that if farmers were looking at seeing their properties impacted in divorce settlements, this reassurance was much needed.
There were stumbling blocks too, not least when it emerged that Government minister Michael Lowry had not paid tax on payments from the supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne, and Phil Hogan had to resign as a result of Budget leaks, even though Leinster House nowadays is a colander when it comes to flagging Budgets.
Nonetheless, the successes were such that it was widely assumed that the Rainbow Coalition would be re-elected in 1997. Fine Gael increased its seats to 54, but Labour suffered heavy losses, dropping from 33 in 1992 to just 17, and Fianna Fáil and the PDs returned to power.
Would the more prudent Bruton have avoided the excesses of the Ahern years and averted the property bubble that caused such havoc? There are many who believe that would have been the case, but we can never know for sure.
Because of the Fine Gael success, Bruton remained as party leader, but after two subsequent heaves against his leadership, he was
HIS IMPORTANT INTERVENTION ON THE EVE OF THE DIVORCE REFERENDUM SAW IT PASS
HE REMAINED POLITICALLY ACTIVE AND WAS VOCAL IN HIS OPPOSITION TO BREXIT
replaced by Michael Noonan in 2001, and left the Dáil in 2004 to take up the role of EU ambassador to the United States, serving five years in Washington DC.
On the personal front, Bruton married Finola Gill in 1978, and they had four children, Matthew, Juliana, Emily and Mary-Elizabeth. He also is survived by his sons-in-law, grandchildren, brother Richard, sister Mary, nieces, nephews, and many cousins, according to the family statement.
He remained active in public life and, as a committed defender of European integration, was vocal in his opposition to Brexit, and trenchant in his criticisms of how the British implemented it.
In everything, he remained true to himself, not least in seeking no publicity during his illness, known only to family and close friends, and a surprise to almost everyone else when news of his death was announced.
After Seán Lemass, he is the youngest former taoiseach to die, and his passing has robbed the Council of State, and the wider society, of views that were always worth listening to, even when they ran counter to popular narratives.
As many people said yesterday, you could have a row with him but you would never fall out.
In a world fractured by social media, where even the mildest utterance can lead to being cancelled, that might be his greatest legacy, namely the ability to engage in debate without rancour or retribution.