Richard Bruton: ‘Politics is much more about emotion than about evaluating evidence’

It is 42 years since Richard Bruton first walked through the gates of Leinster House as a member of the Oireachtas.

He was a senator then, the son of a farmer from Co Meath, elected on to the agricultural panel when a single Fianna Fáil vote went “slightly astray”, he says, to his benefit.

A few months later he was back as a Fine Gael TD for Dublin North Central. His rival for the party’s nomination was another economist, the Dublin footballer Robbie Kelleher, but he thought better of it (“I’d say he would have topped the poll”). Wise choice, though: not only did Bruton win in the subsequent general election in 1982, he has been re-elected in 10 subsequent elections; Kelleher went on to be a director at Davy Stockbrokers.

He’s been minister for lots of things: junior at the department of energy in 1986; into the cabinet in 1995 as minister for enterprise, trade and employment; back to the same department in 2011 after the economic crash; into the department of education in 2016; and the department of environment and climate action in 2017. Squeezed out of cabinet in 2020, Leo Varadkar made him chairman of the parliamentary party. This week, Bruton, now aged 70, announced he would not contest the next election.

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He decided that the 2020 election would be his last about a year and a half ago, he says. He is healthy and preposterously fit – pictures of him in his swimming togs had the ladies of Leinster House swooning over his six-pack a few years ago (he resists requests from The Irish Times to take his shirt off for the photos) – but wonders if he would still have the appetite for the demands of a TD’s life for a further five years. There are plans for travel and vague ideas of public service roles, perhaps in the education field.

[ Richard Bruton: four decades in politics but few enemies, despite heave against Enda Kenny’s leadership ]

The first stint in government in the 1980s was difficult, he remembers, as the Fine Gael-Labour coalition wrestled with a deep economic depression. It did not cope well. The Fitzgerald government was widely criticised, at the time and since, for not getting to grips with the economic crisis in the country.

“I’d say it’s not so much not getting to grips with the economic reality, it’s not moving swiftly enough at the beginning of the term, when you could do these things and say, ‘These have to be done’.”

Is this one of the lessons of his long career in government?

“Yeah. The lesson in any government is you have to do the difficult things first. There’s no point in postponing the difficult things and thinking more talk or something will turn up. It’s like in 2011: some of the decisions came too late. There was a big kickback against water charges. Had it been possible to do that very quickly, people probably would have lived with it.”

Fine Gael lost the 1987 election and when the party returned to office in late 1994, Bruton was in the cabinet led by his brother John (“I didn’t get any favourable treatment”). The great economic transformation of the country was under way – multinationals were flooding in and employment was surging. It left the country’s finances in what was then astounding good health (“Ruairí Quinn ... people would have said he was the best Fine Gael minister for finance”). And it lost the subsequent election to Bertie Ahern’s Fianna Fáil. “Tragedy,” he says. Fine Gael did well. Labour was monstered. “People were waiting in the long grass for Labour.”

The result of Labour’s collapse was that Fianna Fáil took the reins just as the economy was revving up to roar for a decade. Fine Gael was out of office for a long time. The 2002 election – by which time the elder Bruton had been purged in one of Fine Gael’s period bouts of fratricide – was a disaster for the party, losing more than 20 seats. He ran for leader afterwards but was defeated by Enda Kenny; with Kenny he began the long road back. Remarkably, and in large part due to the economic credibility that Bruton carved out for the party as finance spokesman, within five years they were competitive again. He was critical of social partnership and benchmarking, and warned that the country was losing export markets and competitiveness. For all the country’s apparent economic strength, it was vulnerable, he warned. As events would later attest, this was something of an understatement.

Critical of the government though he was, his party did not offer an economic platform that was markedly different from Fianna Fáil’s. In the 2007 election, voters stuck with the Fianna Fáil version.

“We probably dodged a bullet,” he admits. They certainly did.

But what does the success of Fianna Fáil’s spendthrift, showtime electioneering model of politics say about how we do elections? What lessons are there for the voters out of all that?

With a politician’s feint, he slips past the question, preferring to reflect on what politicians can do themselves. But he reflects that social media and the changing nature of political debate have made good government much harder.

With Fine Gael failing to dominate in opposition, he launched a hesitant heave against Kenny in 2010, but it floundered. Did he regret it?

“Ah we lost. I regret that a lot of people had stuck their necks out to support me and we failed. That’s the part that hurts more, you know you let people down. People say maybe I didn’t have the guile, maybe I don’t have the guile, but that’s the politics I do. But I’d say on the positive side it galvanised Fine Gael. Je ne regret rien. You do what you think is right.”

Had he won, he would have been taoiseach. The thought doesn’t consume him. Later, he quotes the late Hugh Coveney: “‘Never a backward glance.’ I think that’s been my philosophy. I don’t beat myself up about what might have been. Maybe that’s kept me going as long as I have.”

Bruton’s great success was the Action Plan for Jobs. “We needed an ambition, we needed a credible ambition to rebuild self-confidence, confidence in what we could do. You needed to build a strategy to get people onside. Getting Enda onside and being able to ‘bite with the president’s teeth’, as they say, that was really important,” he says.

Isn’t this one of the lessons for his career? That the machine of government needs to be pushed – and pushed hard, sometimes against its will?

“It does, yeah. But the first thing you have to do is engender belief ... and then you have to rigorously monitor it.”

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Civil servants hate that, don’t they?

“Some do and some don’t. I found the same was true when I went into climate. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of inertia. But there were people whose energy you could harness to drive this on.”

It’s the job of political leaders, he says, to paint a picture of the future that people can see themselves in.

“That helps motivate public servants but it also helps to motivate the wider public who have to live with the actions you’re going to be taking.” It’s especially relevant as government addresses the challenges of climate action, he says.

“Politics is much more about emotion than about evaluating evidence ... You’re asking me what I’ve learned from politics – it’s trying to harness that emotional piece that is so much at the heart of politics with the stuff you have to get done. That’s what we can be good at.”

Irish politics has changed beyond recognition since Bruton began his career. Then – and for much of the period that followed it – politics here was defined by the competition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Aren’t they now essentially the same political force?

“No – I mean, they come from the centre ground, they come from the same political model that doesn’t radically change policy. But they’re not the same, they’re culturally different, they are different on social policies, different across a range of things. But they’re sufficient[ly] similar to be able create good policies together.”

Does he expect to see votes transferring between the parties at a rate not seen before?

“I would expect so. The two parties are ahead of Sinn Féin but I think that transfers are the key ingredient to make that a credible base for forming a government,” he says.