Bruton’s legacy is his decisive role in the divorce referendum
WITHOUT intending to, John Bruton tapped into the zeitgeist in 1995 when he told a radio journalist he was ‘sick answering questions about the f***ing peace process’. Looking back now at the interminable talk, stubbornness, hissy fits, delays, and the promise of a much better future that has still to be delivered in the North, it’s easy to understand what a pain in the face, and elsewhere, he must have had with it all.
The talks in the North had been dragging on for years and while, technically, a taoiseach shouldn’t really be saying things like that, at least not publicly, it revealed classic John Bruton tetchiness – a reminder that he was human, like us all.
Such irritability was clearly part of an overall personality that rounded up to a good man in general, and a worthy third-generation post-independence political leader in particular.
PEOPLE are entitled to criticise his position, at right of centre on the political spectrum where he promoted business and property ownership, with an overarching fiscal rectitude when it came to looking after the money. And that’s the same kind of rectitude that wrecked the minority Fine Gael/Labour coalition led by Garret FitzGerald in 1982, when Bruton’s budget proposals failed to get the vital support of Limerick’s free-thinking independent TD, Jim Kemmy.
That was a bitter lesson that Bruton banked, and used to his great benefit as taoiseach during the Rainbow Coalition with Dick Spring’s Labour and Democratic Left from the end of 1994 to 1997.
But in a move contrary to his conservative image, Bruton played perhaps the decisive role in the 1996 divorce referendum with a passionate television intervention on the eve of voting.
His strong Catholic beliefs made his contribution all the more potent, with the new divorce law approved by 50.3% to 49.7%, a winning margin of just over 9,100 votes out of a valid poll of 1.63 million.
Bruton’s politics recognised the crucial distinction between Church and State after decades of poisonous and mutually destructive inter-mingling.
His nuanced political doctrine was further illustrated by his early attraction to Declan Costello’s Just Society proposals in the 1960s, which attempted to move Fine Gael from its traditional big farmer and business bases to a left and more social democratic landing zone – a move reflected in policies adopted later by Garret FitzGerald.
There is little doubt that John Bruton could have made a fortune – beyond the comforts he was born into as the son of a wealthy Meath farmer – if he had pursued a career as a barrister for which he qualified but never practised, or any other career for that matter. Instead, politics and service to the State and people took up his entire public life.
In December 1994, at the age of 47, he became the youngest taoiseach we had ever had – Leo Varadkar would later become taoiseach at 38 – but his administration lasted only two-and-a-half years, succumbing to Bertie Ahern’s rise to power in the 1997 general election. Ahern’s huge and long-lasting popularity meant there would be no second helpings for Bruton.
In February 2001, I had the opportunity (with a colleague) to meet John Bruton for lunch. Within hours of a wide-ranging chat, his Fine Gael colleagues had given him the chop. Good luck and thanks. He was just 53 years old.
ONE is entitled to wonder how much more he might have had to contribute here in Ireland at the highest level of politics, instead of spending five years, from 2004 to 2009, in Washington as European Union Ambassador. Those missing years erased him, for all practical purposes, from the Irish political landscape.
But what we must never forget was his sensitivity towards unionist concerns in the North during the ‘f***ing peace process’ and his determination to create a warm house for them in the South. That’s a political and neighbourly doctrine of friendship and reconciliation that we all still need to remind ourselves about and embrace, perhaps now more than ever.