Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On my behalf and on that of my family and the Fine Gael organisation in County Limerick, I offer sympathy to Finola Bruton, John's children, his sister Mary and our colleague Richard.

I was struck by Deputy Creed's commentary about the torment our parliamentary party put John Bruton. I joined Fine Gale in the early 1990s, along with people like Deputy Phelan, the Taoiseach, Deputy Denis Naughten and a few others. At a conference in UCD one time, John Bruton said to us "Cause me difficulty", and, by God, we caused him plenty of it. It was a time when young people involved in politics was extremely engaged, to be quite honest. The party had just gone back into government and all of a sudden these young whippersnappers who were in college were causing him, as Taoiseach, and his ministerial colleagues more than their fair share of difficulty. He came to meet us at one stage in UCC because we had had great ideas in the previous couple of months about what difficulty we were going to cause for the party at national level and for the Government. Little did I know these kinds of things would come back to haunt people like me. He took us aside at the time and said, "When I told you to cause me difficulty, I did not quite mean this much difficulty”. However, he meant it in the spirit that it was said. John was somebody who, as many previous speakers have said, advanced the cause of younger people in the party.

I remember attending a function in Limerick in 1995 when he Taoiseach. It was a fundraiser in Adare Manor. I was involved with the party at the time and got an invitation to attend from the Taoiseach's office. I did not even own a suit. It was a huge deal for me. I thought I was going to be seated under the stairs or something like that, but, no, John Bruton insisted the youngest person at the function would be sitting at his table with him.

I have memories of often going into the reading room here, which not too many Members use, in the mornings and often seeing John Bruton reading the papers or going through research he was doing for particular columns he was writing for the following Sunday. Shortly after, I became Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works. Covid and everything had wound down. We were outside there and he was talking about Grangegorman cemetery. He was fascinating in terms of his knowledge and his total immersion in that part of our history, because he believed it fundamentally. He was so proud of the fact that this was the tradition he came from.

I had huge respect for John. In the most recent referendum campaign, which was difficult for a lot of people, I made an appearance on a particular television show that I have since tried to forget about, but with great difficulty. I received a very nice handwritten letter from John Bruton afterward regarding the referendum on repealing the eighth amendment. He basically stated that people had their own views on that subject, that they were entitled to them and that he respected that. That letter displayed a real sense of collegiality. I never heard a truer word than that from the leader of the Green Party who referred to being liberal but conservative all in the one movement.

The other aspect of John Bruton's leadership that I and people in my part of the world will never forget relates to 1996, when our local garda Jerry McCabe was murdered on the street in Adare. John and Nora Owen provided leadership at the time. The Minister of State from Meath, Deputy Thomas Byrne, was right in what he said about the atrocities in Manchester, Canary Wharf and Adare. John Bruton could have decided to go a different path, but he did not; he stuck with the principle that the pursuit of violence was never going to achieve a political objective on the island of Ireland. These were the politics of Hume, O'Connell, Parnell and people of that great tradition.

John Bruton's legacy is one of somebody who was unswerving in his absolute commitment to constitutional nationalism and Ireland's place in Europe. For that, we all owe him a massive debt of gratitude, especially those who were of a younger age when he was in his stride. I was explaining to my mother yesterday that John Bruton had passed away and she summed it up when she said, "The Lord have mercy on him. A nice man".

See this speech in context