As taoiseach from 1994 to 1997 with responsibilities for Anglo-Irish relations and the incipient peace process, John Bruton gets a poor press. Much of it may have been his own fault. He was a man who had taken a keen interest in Irish history throughout his life and was stubbornly “his own man”.
Why else would he have risked continuing to champion the Irish Parliamentary Party, a century after their tide had gone out? And he even liked to argue that Irish independence could have been won without a resort to violence.
That line of argument seemed suited to a student debating society – but as leader of a nationalist party in Dáil Éireann in the 1990s it seemed gratuitously reckless.
And when, at last, he found himself in the Taoiseach’s office in 1994 his choice of the portrait he would hang behind his desk was of John Redmond, the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
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He would not have been faulted had he chosen 19th century giants of constitutional nationalism such as Parnell or O’Connell: but he insisted on the deeply unfashionable Redmond.
He now found himself the unlikely custodian of the incipient peace process.
Would Bruton’s lifelong interest in Irish history prove a burden?
His predecessor as taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, had no such encumbrance: Reynolds indeed had famously mocked Bruton in the Dáil as “John Unionist”, faulting him for invariably remembering to consider unionist sensibilities, in any consideration of policy.
With Bruton, this was a caste of mind; it had, of course, been all too absent from the traditional nationalist approach to partition. And was it not implicit in John Hume’s championing of an agreed Ireland?
In the recently released tranche of State Papers to be released in 2025, there are a few important traces of Bruton’s handling of the peace process. On March 31st, 1996, Bruton paid a visit to Greencastle, to what is termed John Hume’s residence in Donegal.
This was to be shown a document which had been drawn up by “the priest” – a reference to Fr Alec Reid, a long-time facilitator and acknowledged to be the central intermediary in the peace process. This would be a central document in the peace process.
Hume’s main claim, according to Bruton, was that “there would be a ceasefire” were the document to be agreed by the Irish government, the SDLP and Sinn Féin.
Bruton suggested a different timeline: starting with the promise of a ceasefire, to be followed by an agreed statement which would be made public only after the ceasefire, rather than before. Hume said he had not thought about that but “did not rule it out”.
In general Bruton sounds a cautious note, obviously conscious of his role as custodian of the Irish government’s interests in the entire process. He was especially wary of the quicksands were his government seen to issue a statement in association with Sinn Féin and in advance of an IRA ceasefire.
Hume was manifestly a salesman for what he must have seen as a breakthrough, and he burnished his credentials by claiming that since 1993 during his work with Gerry Adams, he had “succeeded in shifting the IRA position considerably”.
What he needed from Bruton now was his backing for a pan-nationalist consensus to be presented for consideration by the unionists.
Hume stressed the importance of a referendum; mentioned the thorny issue of IRA weapons and a possible international body to oversee their decommissioning; and he agreed that all of this would trigger the opening of talks on June 10th. And the prize would be a guaranteed ceasefire which would prove permanent.
Bruton said that on reading the document it seemed to be an agreement about process rather than about the context of any final settlement. Hume agreed.
Bruton was manifestly concerned at the optics: and especially insisted that he could not have a situation where the IRA was dictating what constituted “the nationalist consensus”.
And he could scarcely have been impressed with Hume’s answer to his query as to why the IRA had resumed violence in February. Hume said it was a reaction to John Major’s announcement of an election and their “general frustration about the long-fingering of talks”.
Summing up, Hume described the proposal as an agreed approach between SDLP, Sinn Féin and the Irish government, who would work together to promote issues related to parity of esteem pending the reaching of an overall agreement.
Some months later there is further evidence of Bruton’s approach to the peace process when he – and his foreign minister Dick Spring – attended a meeting with US president Bill Clinton in the White House in Washington on December 17th, 1996.
Bruton described this as a moment of opportunity for the peace process, although this was not yet “fully realised by republicans”. The Irish government insisted that “a ceasefire would change the whole dynamics of the situation, making Sinn Féin masters rather than subjects of the process”.
It was clearly Bruton’s read that Sinn Féin should declare a ceasefire not least because Major “would then be under pressure from a variety of sources to admit Sinn Féin to the talks”.
Bruton also emphasised the importance of the wording of any IRA ceasefire. He hoped it would be drafted “generously”, ideally emphasising “an acknowledgment of the British identity of the unionist community”, thereby helping “significantly in building confidence”.
Bruton then listed the “significant gains” of the previous two years: the opening of talks, agreement of ground rules, and the appointment of Senator George Mitchell, the experienced US diplomat, credited with clinching the Belfast Agreement.
He also faulted Sinn Féin for being “inclined to focus on what is lacking, rather than taking full advantage of the important gains which are still in place”.
Bruton also told Clinton that as Major had so few obvious successes to point to, it might “make him more likely to respond to a ceasefire declaration”.
Clinton, for his part, said he felt Major to be an “honourable man” but in need of presenting himself as a “man of tomorrow” rather than allowing himself to be seen as “a failed politician of the past”.
Was Bruton concurring when he allowed that one of Major’s motivations must now be “to secure his place in history”?
The main achievement of both Major and Bruton is surely their initiative in introducing the Joint Framework Document which has been too neglected by those studying the provenance of the Good Friday breakthrough of 1998.
The Bruton era deserves greater scrutiny – and that may well be further prompted by the recent book by his press secretary, Shane Kenny.
Individuals do matter in handling issues as sensitive and important as Northern Ireland policy: if in doubt, consider how differently Lynch, Haughey, FitzGerald, Reynolds, Bruton and Ahern impacted on the North. And not all the evidence of their differences is to be found in the State Papers. Some, like Bruton, maintained their lifelong interest in Northern Ireland.
And in Bruton’s case, he penned a remarkable essay in the Jesuit magazine Studies on how inattentive, sloppy and dangerously casual the negotiators of the Belfast Agreement must have been when they signed off on the clauses covering the mechanism by which any referendum on future Irish unity might be considered.
It is thoughtful, reasonable and among the best-judged writings on the agreement. And since sloppiness and inattention are difficult to measure, I would expect few traces of such failings will be found in the voluminous files covering the making of that agreement.
Dr John Bowman is an historian and broadcaster. He is author of De Valera and the Ulster Question: 1917-1973 which won the Ewart Biggs Award for its contribution to North-South understanding. He has been writing about the annual release of State Papers for The Irish Times for the past 40 years.
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