Former Fine Gael minister and ceann comhairle Se\u00e1n Barrett has died at the age of 81.<\/p>\n
Mr Barrett was a TD for D\u00fan Laoghaire in south Dublin for 34 years, having first been elected in 1981. He retired in 2002, but was elected again from 2007 to 2020.<\/p>\n
He was twice Government chief whip – firstly under Garret Fitzgerald and later under John Bruton in the 1994 rainbow coalition.<\/p>\n
Mr Barrett also served as ceann comhairle from 2011 to 2016, and as Minister for Defence and Minister for Education.<\/p>\n
He was originally from Dalkey and was educated in CBC Monkstown Park, Presentation College in Glasthule, and the former College of Commerce in Rathmines.<\/p>\n
He is survived by his wife Sheila, children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n
T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris described Mr Barrett as a “distinguished parliamentarian” who dedicated much of his life to public service.<\/p>\n
He said he was “witty, intelligent, sincere, and a man of deep convictions”.<\/p>\n
“In his role as ceann comhairle he exuded fairness, authority, and a firm but measured approach in the chair,” Mr Harris said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Fine Gael minister and ceann comhairle Se\u00e1n Barrett has died at the age of 81. Mr Barrett…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-385137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}