Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I extend my sympathy and that of my family to Finola and her family, to Richard and his family and to the Bruton family across north Kildare, of whom there are very many. Long may it be so.

I see John Farrelly sitting up in the Gallery. We go back a long way, to when we were both councillors and first had direct dealings with John Bruton. I was a councillor in Kildare, my area of north Kildare being part of the Meath constituency at the time, and John was a councillor in Meath, in the same constituency. It was a time of great learning. John taught us how to work hard, to keep our eyes on the targets, to stick with it and to be resolute in the pursuit of objectives that were noble. That sums up his attitude to public life at the time. He taught us well and we never lost the work ethic. I remember that, after the clinics at the weekend, we would get the letters from John, who was a Minister of State in the 1973–77 Government. His was an inimitable, flowing hand – it was all handwritten. You could have up to a dozen letters at the time, all making representations about people in my constituency, on the Kildare side. Those letters concerned people in dire straits and not in a good place. That showed his compassion. That was his way of teaching us to be alert to what was happening and to do something. He would never ask, “Why didn't you do it?”. We thought it as well to do it first.

John was a man of words, integrity and vision. He was all that we would want ourselves to be for the Meath constituency, this House, this country and the international community. He gave his all, all the time. His interest was never-ending. He was a good historian, a good European historian, and he knew where all the issues arose, where they had been pushed to one side and whether they had been resolved. He was a great believer in the spoken word as a means of achieving what the sword and bullet could never do. We learned all that from him. He was a familiar figure at every Fine Gael event up and down the country from the late 1960s and all through the 1970s, inimitably addressing the congregations without any notes whatsoever. He was able to speak for as long as he wished and sometimes for longer than the rest of us wished. He never lost it.

He was also a man of the unexpected. The unexpected is important in politics. I always remember that there was some kind of upheaval in our party at one particular time. There were many such instances, I hasten to add.

See this speech in context