This statesman left us with a legacy of peace

Albert Reynolds will be remembered not just for his conventional political failures in Ireland but equally for his success as a peacemaker and statesman, writes Gerard Howlin.

LEAVING office on the 17th of November 1994 must have seemed to Albert Reynolds a crushing disappointment. The circumstances of his departure were appalling, and in part were of his own making. But now that time has winnowed the wheat of lasting accomplishment from the chaff of political controversy, Reynolds ranks among the architects of modern Ireland. The 21st century that began in an Ireland at peace, will so long as peace endures, remember him as a founding father.

Albert Reynolds unique distinction among Irish politicians is the extent to which he combined conventional political failure with lasting success as a statesman and a peacemaker. Others fell overboard into the fast political current, thought few as spectacularly. None, however, managed to marry a career ending in comparable failure with a legacy of such lasting achievement. Speaking for himself in the Dáil on the day he left office, he was clear. The greatest accomplishment of the government he led was the “breakthrough to peace in Northern Ireland”. He was right.