Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I express my sympathy to John Bruton's family and of course to the Fine Gael Party nationally, but also the Fine Gael Party in Meath. To my colleague on the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, Richard Bruton, I formally extend the sympathies of the committee on the sad passing of his brother.

I recall a story from my youth some 30 years ago. I remember being intensely jealous of my brother when my father brought him to a Shannon-Garryowen rugby match in Limerick. I was doubly jealous when my brother, Morgan, came home and said he met the then Taoiseach, John Bruton. John was one of the first heavyweight political figures I remember from my childhood. When Morgan came home, I was really envious that he had got to meet a man who was so central to our lives growing up in the 1990s in Ireland. I remember Morgan describing the booming laugh that John Bruton had, which others have described today. It has stayed with me for 30 years. My father, a Fine Gael councillor in Limerick in the 1980s and 1990s, was a friend of John Bruton. He and John got on very well and knew each other well, and that is why they ended up going to the rugby match in Limerick on the day in question. I believe it was in 1995.

While that is a very fond personal memory, I should speak to John's legacy nationally and internationally. Most people in Ireland will know that an Irish kitchen shows so much about what matters to the family that resides there. In our kitchen at home, the house I grew up in and in which my mother still lives, there is a portrait of Michael Collins and a crucifix. There is also a photograph on the shelf of my parents attending the funerals of the Enniskillen bombing victims in 1987, when my dad was Mayor of Limerick. Also on the wall of the kitchen at home is a signed copy of the joint framework agreement from 1995. These items tell a story of what mattered in our family. The joint framework agreement mattered because it was so significant in bringing this country from a path of absolute devastation, death, destruction, horror and terror in the 1970s and 1980s to the peace we now know. John Bruton should forever be remembered for the role he played in bringing peace to this island. Of all the successes of the Rainbow Government, of which there were many, as rightly acknowledged here today, the most important was that peace was brought to this country. It led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Our family was immensely proud when John travelled to Limerick in 1999 and attended my father's funeral. There was no political reason to attend. Both my father and John had retired from politics at that point. Fundamentally, John Bruton was a man of honour and that is why he travelled down to Limerick and attended. It is an immense source of pride that a man of honour like John Bruton recognised my father's contribution to political life in Limerick by travelling that day. Fundamentally, John Bruton was a man of honour, and that is how he will be remembered.

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