Aged 60, Brennan who had been suffering from cancer had only stood down as a cabinet minister in May, when he asked new Taoiseach Brian Cowen to relieve him of ministerial responsibilities while he recovered from illness.
Though small in stature, Brennan was a titan in Ireland’s largest political party. Personable and charismatic, he was seen by political friend and foe, and by journalists too, as a man of the deepest political honor.
Though loyal to the party throughout, he was of the old Fianna F_il school, and was untainted by any of the corruption which enveloped his former leader – and adversary – Charlie Haughey, or the controversy surrounding Bertie Ahern and his finances which eventually unseated him as Taoiseach in May.
Brennan had studied U.S. politics, and introduced razzmatazz such as balloons and music to party conferences and election campaigns, after his appointment as the party’s youngest-ever general secretary at 24 by leader Jack Lynch. He transformed the party from one which almost assumed power in elections in the de Valera years to one which had to fight for it, after he took on the job in 1973 to rebuild the party from the wreckage of a disastrous general election defeat that year.
Brennan was a key strategist in the party’s landslide return to power in 1977, using PR techniques such as T-shirts and slogans honed in his first-hand study of President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign, but was firmly in the anti-Haughey camp after he took over from Lynch in 1979.
While an outcast in the Haughey era, he remained a willing servant when called on by his party.
His wit and humor infected his political life: when asked at short notice by Haughey to supply music for his grand entrance at a party conference, Brennan showed resourcefulness getting a school brass band to play. Haughey could call the band but not the tune: his entrance was to the strains of “Money, Money, Money”, an impish act of heresy if intended as a musical comment on Haughey’s unexplained personal wealth at the time.
Ideologically, while soft on social issues, Brennan – an accountant by profession – was economically radical and on the right as an enthusiastic free-marketeer.
He gave protection to the fledging and struggling Ryanair in the early 1990s, allowing it exclusivity on a route to London, breaking the Aer Lingus monopoly on Irish Sea routes. The move was a lifeline to the struggling carrier, which could have gone out of business otherwise, something not forgotten by chief executive Michael O’Leary, more accustomed to attacking Fianna F_il ministers than praising them.
“It is no exaggeration to say that without S