John Bruton: a modest and accommodating man, but…

I had two encounters, both pleasant, with John Bruton. The first was when he attended a service in Enniskillen following the cenotaph bombing. I’d been interviewing someone else and tape-recorder in hand, was on my way to my car when I noticed An Taoiseach standing with a number of his followers/minders. I nipped across the road and asked him if I could have a few words on some topic of the day (probably the Enniskillen bomb but I can’t remember). I do remember he was polite, unassuming and accommodating.

The second time was when I was assembling a book about Brexit and the Irish border. By this time Bruton had retired from politics, and I was told to ring him at his home at 6.30 pm on a given date, and I could record the interview over the phone. I was doing a lot of other things that day and when I looked at my watch it was 8:00pm. Gulp!  I’d just stood up a former Taoiseach! With some trepidation I dialled his number and apologised profusely. “Not at all” he said. “We’ll do it now – that’s grand.” And we did.

These two encounters convinced me that he was a genuinely decent and unassuming man. But he was also a politician, and judged by that he comes out smelling less of roses. He was suspicious and fearful of “Sinn Féin/IRA” and saw republicans as cynically switching on and off the violence tap. He was opposed to all republican violence in the North during the Troubles that began in the 1970s.  His abhorrence of violence was given public expression by having in his office as Taoiseach, not the more usual painting of Michael Collins, but one of  John Redmond. In fact he argued that the violence of Easter 1916 was a mistake and that Ireland could have achieved independence by following the more peaceful path chosen by John Redmond.

Many Irish people would disagree with such a line: Easter 1916 is seen as the gallant beginnings of the drive to the independence secured with the Treaty.

However, you might admire Bruton’s consistency: he disagreed with IRA violence in the final decades of the twentieth century, and he disagreed with IRA violence in the early decades of the twentieth century. There appears to be a courageous adherence to anti-violence, regardless of when it occurred.

Except there’s a huge contradiction at the heart of Bruton’s pacifism. His hero John Redmond urged young Irishmen to join Britain in the Great War, the “war to end wars”, and they responded to his call. The conservative figure of 35,000 young Irishmen died in battle, thanks in large measure to John Redmond’s call to arms. The deaths that Michael Collins and others were responsible for shrink to near-insignificance  when set alongside the mass butchery of Irishmen in the Great War.

John Bruton was a barrister and said to be highly intelligent. He seems to have suspended his intelligence when confronted with Irish republicanism.