Politics & Power Quote by John Bruton

Bruton’s sentence is doing the quietly aggressive work of reframing a culture-war issue as an evidence-based economic boast. The key move is the phrase “by our own example”: he’s not arguing in the abstract about European integration; he’s inviting the listener to look at Ireland’s recent trajectory and treat it as a case study that settles the debate. It’s a politician’s version of “don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers,” designed to sound pragmatic rather than ideological.

The subtext sits inside his careful bundling of “E.U. freedoms” with a politically charged one: “the freedom...to come and work here.” By nesting labor mobility within a broader, almost constitutional-sounding set of “freedoms,” Bruton elevates immigration from a policy choice to a principle. That matters because it preempts the most common counterargument: that opening the labor market is a concession forced by Brussels. His grammar even softens agency; “has enabled us” implies empowerment, not imposition.

Contextually, this reads as a pro-European intervention aimed at a domestic audience tempted by restrictionism or sovereignty talk. It’s also a pitch to business-minded voters: migration isn’t framed as charity or multicultural virtue-signaling but as capacity, the workforce as infrastructure. “Expand our economy” is deliberately broad, leaving room to hear tech growth, construction booms, and export competitiveness without naming any one sector - and without inviting scrutiny of distributional downsides. The intent is not to win a moral argument; it’s to make the opposing position sound like self-sabotage.