John Bruton, Irish premier and diplomat, 1947-2024

John Bruton, the former Irish taoiseach who has died aged 76, led his country into the Celtic Tiger economic boom, helped usher in peace in Northern Ireland, made a game-changing appeal to clinch the legalisation of divorce and served as EU ambassador to the US.

Yet his career almost screeched to a halt a dozen years before he became premier, over beer prices and VAT on children’s shoes.

As finance minister, Bruton outlined a tough 1982 budget package to keep Ireland from having to call in the IMF. But the 2p increase in the price of a pint, and the introduction of sales tax on children’s shoes, proved too much to swallow. The budget was rejected and the government collapsed.

Ireland’s politics in the 1980s proved so turbulent, however, that within a year the conservative Fine Gael party, which Bruton joined aged 18, was back in government. By 1990, a man who once called himself “just a big teddy bear” was its leader and in 1994, he became taoiseach.

By the standards of political contemporaries who were mired in scandals, including prime ministers Charlie Haughey and Bertie Ahern, Bruton stood out as a statesman. Ahern hailed him as “a gentleman”.

“He wasn’t a showman — he was much more interested in ideas,” said Shane Kenny, Bruton’s press secretary during his 1994-97 term at the helm of what was dubbed the “Rainbow Coalition”, which included the Labour party and now defunct Democratic Left.

“He had a restless mind, an inquisitive mind and a great curiosity, and there was never a weekend [that] passed but you could get 10, 15, 20 ideas from John,” recalled Enda Kenny, Fine Gael taoiseach from 2011-17.

John Gerard Bruton was born on May 18 1947 to a wealthy farming family in County Meath and educated at a Jesuit boarding school.

He studied economics and politics at University College Dublin before becoming a barrister, although he never practised.

A committed European, he had an early taste of politics in 1966, when he challenged a speaker at a public meeting opposing the common market. Elected in 1969 at the age of 22, Bruton, who is survived by his wife and four children, was one of the country’s youngest deputies.

When news of his death broke, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar hailed a “doer and a philosopher” — an intellectual and serious public servant with “a distinctive and infectious laugh”.

Irish Times sketch-writer Miriam Lord called it “the famous Bruton bray — like a donkey suddenly twigging the punchline of a risqué joke and hee-hawing out a thundering guffaw with a skittish falsetto whoop at the end”.

As premier, the economy gave Bruton much to smile about. He claimed credit for helping unleash the Celtic Tiger boom, with annual growth during his term averaging 8.7 per cent and peaking at 11.1 per cent in 1997. He criticised Irish banks’ later unsustainable lending.

His government also devised the 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate, which for a quarter century helped make Dublin a mecca for global companies.

The peace process to end Northern Ireland’s three decades of conflict dominated his term; his brother, Richard, also an Irish legislator, said he saw “politics as the art of . . . finding the middle ground”.

In 1995, with UK Prime Minister John Major, he agreed the Framework document that culminated in the 1998 Northern Irish peace deal, the Good Friday Agreement.

But he snapped at a reporter in 1995 that he was “sick [of] answering questions about the fucking peace process” and that year scrapped a summit with Major amid differences over the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. In 1996, the pair had a furious row over a loyalist march.

His tenure was also a period of profound change south of the border. Although a committed Catholic, Bruton appealed for a Yes vote days before a 1995 referendum to end a constitutional ban on divorce. It squeaked through by half a percentage point.

Despite the ups and downs of Bruton’s career, “his whole political philosophy was ‘do the right thing but do something, keep moving forward’,” Kenny, the former taoiseach, said.

In 2004, Bruton became EU ambassador to the US. “He believed the EU was the greatest creation in international collaboration,” his brother said.

Green party leader Eamon Ryan recalled, as a new deputy, seeing Bruton in a white suit in the chamber. “He stood out — God Almighty, he was impressive. He could have been a Roman senator in a toga.”