Expressions of Sympathy: Tributes to the late Deputy Brian Lenihan

Death of Former Minister: Expressions of Sympathy

15^th June 2011

Senator Ivana Bacik: I am glad also to have the opportunity to join in the tributes to the late Deputy Brian Lenihan, on behalf of the Labour Party and on my own behalf because I knew him personally.

He will be sorely missed in a number of capacities. We focus here, I suppose, on his life as a politician, but he had a very successful and eminent career otherwise, and that should not be forgotten. He was a former law student at Trinity. He was very bright and an active participant in college life. He left Trinity and went into practice at the Bar, where he rose swiftly to become a senior counsel. He was a highly regarded senior counsel at the Bar and a huge number of his legal colleagues - I saw them yesterday at the funeral - came out to pay tribute to him as well.

He also had a strong and excellent academic career, taught at Trinity on a range of different subjects and was very highly regarded. When I first joined the law school, he was a part-time lecturer because he was very busy at the Bar, but he was also active in political life. There was a famous notice that went up in the law school on the event of his election to the Dáil in the by-election in Dublin West, which stated, “Brian Lenihan will be unable to give his evidence lecture today as he is taking up his seat in the Dáil”, which I think the students appreciated.

On his career as a politician, as Senators Cummins and O'Brien detailed already, he was an excellent choice as Chair of the joint committee on the Constitution. He brought all his legal strength and intellectual rigour to that. He was also a very strong and very successful Minister of State with responsibility for children. That, as his first ministerial appointment, must be emphasised because a range of people at the funeral yesterday had known him in that capacity, had worked on children's rights in non-governmental organisations and had very good things to say about him. He brought enormous dynamism and energy and a commitment to reform to that role and to the role of Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform which he held for a short time before he was made Minister for Finance.

We all were impressed at the speed with which he mastered the finance brief, his immense competence and the courtesy with which he dealt with that brief. Others have spoken about the long nights in this House, the long debates he oversaw and the way in which he engaged with Opposition and Government alike. With those of us who disagreed with him, he would engage intensively and was always happy to continue debate, argument and discussion outside the Chamber. That level of engagement, with detailed mastery of his brief, are qualities that will be sorely missed in politics.

I offer my sympathy and the sympathy of the Labour group in the Seanad to his wife Patricia, herself a Circuit Court judge, to his children, Tom and Clare, and, of course, to his extended family, among them the former Leader of this House, Mary O'Rourke. This was a man who bore his illness so bravely and apparently so lightly, and it was such a terrible illness. The level of regard for him is shown in the immense number of tributes that have been paid.