Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Most people are speaking, certainly on the Fine Gael benches, about their abiding memory of the former Taoiseach, John Bruton. My abiding memory is him speaking and giving an oration on 20 September 2000 at my mother's funeral. As the Deputy Leader remembers recently, and John would have remembered recently as well, at a funeral of a loved one you do not remember everything. He spoke eloquently, and it was very emotional but I cannot remember what he said because, when you go through grief, you just do not. I remember that it was a big thing for us as a family and for the community. What is striking in the last 24 hours is the amount of messages I have received from people who were at the funeral 23 years ago, and who spoke about what he said. They reminded me of how he spoke about my mother and her life in politics. A lot of the attributes he remarked on in her are quite true of him.

John spoke about political parties being a family, and sometimes we get grief about being in political parties and having a whip. However, there is a family community in it. I speak a lot about that when we are in a private setting as a political party but not here as such. There is a family feeling in our party. After Mam's funeral, we were obviously grieving at the time. Most people are talking about John Bruton as a Taoiseach and a leader but he was such a decent person. He approached my father afterwards and asked if he would be interested in just keeping involved in the Fine Gael Party, not as a public representative but just keeping involved. He knew that we were all proud of our mother, and we all had an interest in politics. We were young at the time, and maybe he foresaw something in the future. He appointed Dad to be a trustee of the Fine Gael Party, which is a really big role to have as a lay person. Dad was not too excited to do it at the time because obviously, he was grieving the death of his wife at a very young age. However, it kept him involved and it kept us, as a family, involved in the family of Fine Gael. I really think a decision like that, which he made at that time, kept Dad involved and he became a local politician. It kept me involved, and I studied politics in college and got to where I am today. It is because of the decency of the man, who thought of a family, what they were going through, and how he could play his role in supporting them. It meant an awful lot, and we were discussing in the family over the last 24 hours the role he played.

For my mother's whole career in politics, he was essentially the leader. I was named after a different leader of our party but he was the leader while she was a TD. While there were so many attributes to him as a Taoiseach, I think he was even greater as a person. I want to pass on my condolences to Finola, the family and, importantly, to our colleague Richard.