THE Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, seemed to have great difficulty in accepting the role of leader of nationalist Ireland, and Northern nationalists had simply lost confidence in the Government as effective guarantor of the peace process, the Fianna Fail leader, Mr Bertie Ahern, has claimed.
In a speech on the peace process delivered in Cork yesterday, he suggested that Mr Bruton's "difficulty" in accepting this role lay in his "misunderstanding that it somehow precludes seeking agreement and accommodation with unionists".
A change of government in the Republic would "complete the transformation of the political landscape which began with the British general election", he said.
An impasse had existed since shortly after the Rainbow Government took office over the organising of inclusive and substantive all party talks, Mr Ahern said.
"The most serious consequence of the fateful change of government brought about by the Labour leadership in November 1994 was that it broke the political momentum after the cease fires and made Taoiseach someone who inherited an initiative not his own, constructed on very different lines from the approach that he would instinctively have favoured," Mr Ahern said.
Acknowledging the "sincerity" of Mr Bruton's efforts and much hard work done by both him and the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, the Fianna Fail leader said, however, that the "inconsistencies and mistakes" made by the Taoiseach came from "this tension" which was more than once expressed in unseemly terms of frustration.
"Such mistakes compounded the effect of the very serious mishandling of the peace process by the British government, for example, in backing Mayhew's disqualification of Sinn Fein at unionist behest in the Washington III decommissioning precondition of March 1995; in refusing to meet John Hume and Gerry Adams together that autumn; in lukewarmness about the Framework Document in the year following its publication; and, above all, in failing to challenge effectively the British government's continuing stalling of the peace process," he said.
According to Mr Ahern, the Taoiseach seemed to have a principle of never disagreeing in public with the British government. He discarded this principle only on very rare occasions, he claimed.
When the previous British prime minister, Mr John Major, said "I am a unionist", and his successor, Mr Tony Blair, said "I value the union" in order to reassure unionists, it was natural that nationalists would look to the Taoiseach to express his belief in the peaceful nationalist ideal.
The Fianna Fail leader said that those from the unionist and loyalist community that he met knew they were dealing with the head of the mainstream republican party in the South that had no aggressive intent.
"They know I am just as interested in solving economic and social problems that we share in common as the more intractable constitutional ones," he said.