Mr John Bruton said he did not believe that a "pan-nationalist front" would work. In a speech defending his northern policy, delivered to the Meath Peace Group meeting in Navan last night, the Fine Gael leader said his view that a "reaching out" by the nationalist majority in Ireland to unionists was a necessary precondition for a settlement had been "consistently misunderstood" by some Northern nationalists, and in particular by Sinn Fein.
The building of a bridge between unionists and nationalists had been his priority since becoming Fine Gael leader seven years ago, he said. "We must lift the siege mentality on both sides."
As a priority, he had showed the "other side" - in this case the unionists - that there were many people in the Republic who really respected their rights, views and allegiances.
However, his approach had been consistently misunderstood and the motives varied. Some had chosen deliberately to misunderstand. Others, quite sincerely, believed that unionists could not be persuaded by generosity, and that a pan-nationalist front was needed that "stands up to them".
"I profoundly disagree with this view but do understand that it is a natural enough reaction to the discrimination that Northern nationalists experienced, especially in the period between 1922 and 1971," he said.
The pan-nationalist front would not work and would simply be a repeat of errors made by successive governments in the early years of the State, which focused on "anti-partition campaigns" rather than on practical steps to alleviate day-to-day nationalist grievances while building trust with unionists.
As Taoiseach, he was unwilling to have too many "front"-type meetings exclusively with nationalist parties, to the exclusion of other Northern parties. During the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation he had declined to have a special joint summit with the SDLP and Sinn Fein. That would have excluded other Forum parties from the North as well as the pro-union parties, which were not attending at all.
His decision not to meet the two Northern nationalist parties was prompted solely by a desire not to "isolate" the other parties.