Editorial: No Taoiseach has been more generous to unionism than was John Bruton

Fifteen men have held the post of Taoiseach, Irish prime minister in the 101 years there has been such an office.​

Yesterday, one of them died, the former Fine Gael leader John Bruton, aged 76.

Mr Bruton was arguably the Taoiseach who was most friendly towards unionists in Northern Ireland, which is quite a claim because other Irish prime ministers including Bertie Ahern and Micheál Martin have offered the hand of firm friendship too.

In 2016, on the centenary of the Easter Rising, John Bruton gave a lecture in Dublin about why he did not believe the rebellion constituted a just war. We reproduced about half of the 3,500 word essay in the newspaper and online. We also put the full version on our website, assuming it was too long for people to read – the conventional wisdom among newspapers in the pre digital age was that readers would not read an article of more than 1,500 words. But it is now possible to track how long people spend reading internet stories, and we noticed that the so-called ‘engaged time’ that people spent on that lengthy speech-essay by Mr Bruton suggested they were reading it all.

And no wonder. It was a devastating critique of the rising, and the way in which the Republic of Ireland had uncritically adopted that violent event as its glorious founding moment. Mr Bruton set out why he thought it was not justified – a remarkable thing for a former head of Irish government to do on such an anniversary.

Mr Bruton as Taoiseach between 1994 and 1997 was a scathing critic of Sinn Fein, and its apologising for IRA terror. He always sought to understand unionism, showing a generosity that wasn’t always reciprocated.

He was not without criticism, and was scathing about Brexit and the damage he felt it had done to this island. But Mr Bruton, who was also an international ambassador, was one of the great Irish politicians of the last century.