Gavan Reilly: 'John Bruton left the place better than he found it: that’s his true achievement'

Simply on the facts and figures, John Bruton’s career was a remarkable one. Simply becoming Taoiseach is a landmark achievement in and of itself. To have been the leader of a major party for 11 years would equally have been an achievement. To serve in the country’s highest job, be seen as ‘losing’ an election, and yet remain as party leader for years afterwards, is in modern times largely unprecedented. To be made the Minister for Finance aged 34 is frankly amazing. To be a member of the Dáil for 35 years for the same constituency, winning election eleven times in a row, is a sign of someone with immense capacity for moving with the times.

Following all of that by being entrusted to represent a growing bloc like the European Union, as its ambassador to the United States and liaising on Europe’s behalf with the White House of George W Bush at a time of global tumult, speaks only to the immense respect in which he was held across the continent. (Ireland’s EU Presidency in 1996 must have lived long in the memory, for him to be chosen as the European ambassador to Washington eight years later.) To have achieved all of that after the infamy of proposing to charge VAT on children’s shoes, the sort of single-line scandal that would end most careers, is itself a tribute to his esteem and his immense political profile.

It is perhaps fitting, though, that he would leave the stage in the same week that his most passionate project - peace in Northern Ireland - once again bore fruit. In some quarters Bruton was perceived as an unrepentant Tory, and even a closet unionist - derided by suggesting Irish independence could have been achieved through peaceful means without the need for a violent revolution. The passage of time has illustrated instead that Bruton was simply ahead of his contemporaries in realising that peace and power-sharing in Northern Ireland would never happen if unionists felt coerced into any kind or arrangement, nor if the IRA and its political voice in Sinn Féin were outside the tent on any solution. He and John Major may have departed the stage by the time George Mitchell dragged a deal over the line in 1998, but it was under his watch that the seeds of the eventual success were shown.

Indeed it’s a particular testament to his work that the party he had such visceral objection to, Sinn Féin, now leads that peaceful (albeit stuttering) power-sharing arrangement. John had such concern about the IRA’s perverse understanding of Ireland and Irishness, and worried that its position would irredeemably overtake that of the Government. Whatever about the outcome, the process which resulted in Gerry Adams sitting alongside Ian Paisley, and the daughter of an IRA prisoner leading a peaceful administration alongside the daughter of a loyalist gunrunner, is his lasting accomplishment. Others got the ball over the line; he got it rolling.

And all of this without mentioning how the seeds of the Celtic Tiger were sewn under the Rainbow Coalition under his watch. Undoubtedly, he left Ireland in a much better place than from where he had found it. For all his personal achievements and accolades, that is the crowning one.

Read Gavan Reilly's full column in this week's paper!

- Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist for the Meath Chronicle.