IRELAND JOINED THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC Community in 1973 following a referendum the previous year. It is not clear exactly when Sutherland developed his passion for Europe, but friends say that even from their earliest days at Gonzaga he always had an international outlook. According to Garrett Sheehan, when boys were asked to write their addresses on their school books, Sutherland always went that bit further: ‘Hilmont, The Hill, Monkstown, Dublin, Ireland, Europe, The World’ was imprinted on each one of his books. But then again, his political awakenings were shaped by people who were committed Europhiles.
The first step towards Ireland’s official membership of the EU had been taken at a meeting in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin in 1954, with roughly one hundred people in attendance. That night there were seven signatories to a document formally launching the European Movement in Ireland. Garret FitzGerald, Declan Costello and another barrister named Denis Corboy were among the signatories. Sutherland was close to all three. ‘I don’t think it was any great mystery. The core figures in Fine Gael were all passionately pro-European,’ says Brendan Halligan.
When the European Economic Community was created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, each country had its own reason for joining. Most saw it as means of ensuring that war between member states would never break out again. According to Mark FitzGerald, however, his father’s commitment to Europe stemmed from the shortcomings of the Irish state. ‘He had looked at Ireland as a young man and seen that in 1959, when he was thirty-three, 50 per cent of the people born in Ireland were no longer in Ireland. They either died – we had lost sixty thousand kids between 1932 and 1948 through TB – or the rest had emigrated. Two of his three brothers had emigrated. So what drove people like my father was the fact that the new state had failed dismally. So he bought into the European idea, and went to Brussels himself in 1957 because Lemass and Whitaker had encouraged him.’
Mark goes on to explain that Seán Lemass brought his father, Denis Corboy and a few others into the Department of Industry, where he was the minister in the Fianna Fáil government, that year, encouraging them to strengthen ties between Ireland and Brussels. T. K. Whitaker, the influential secretary general of the Department of Finance, was at the meeting. Lemass’s discussions with FitzGerald had to be kept under the radar at the time because Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, had a natural antipathy to the fledgling EEC and blocked any official contact with Brussels. But after Lemass became leader of Fianna Fáil in 1959, a political consensus formed that Ireland’s strategic interests were tied to EEC membership. That resolve grew from the early 1960s onwards and hardened as the decade progressed.
When Britain voted to leave the EU on 23 June 2016, a view quickly formed among prominent Brexiteers that Ireland would be forced to follow the UK out of the exit door because the two economies were so closely aligned. It was a dated worldview, belonging to an era before Ireland joined the EU. In the 1960s, it would not have been feasible for Ireland to join the EEC unless the UK joined at the same time. Ireland may have been a sovereign country, but economically it was in effect a region of the UK. Over 80 per cent of Irish exports went to Britain and the punt was pegged to sterling. Britain was willing to join but its path was blocked by French President Charles de Gaulle, who spent most of the 1960s saying ‘non’ to Britain’s applications. French resistance thus thwarted any chances Ireland had of becoming a member state.
There is a story that the Department of Finance had put together an application for Ireland’s membership of the EEC in 1961. It presented a comprehensive and rousing argument as to why Ireland should be allowed to join the community. There was just one snag – the submission was sent to the wrong address in Brussels. ‘I think it is an apocryphal story. I have heard it many times, but I don’t believe it,’ says Brendan Halligan, who by that stage had joined the Labour Party. ‘In 1961 we applied along with Britain. The following January, Lemass went to Brussels and gave a presentation to the Council of Ministers. He said “We are not looking for money, and we will join in the defence of Europe if we become a member.” Everything was put on ice because of de Gaulle. I don’t think our application was ever taken seriously at that point. It was put in the desk of a drawer and the drawer was never opened. I wouldn’t make a thing about the wrong address. I’m sure it isn’t true.’
Towards the end of the 1960s, attitudes towards the UK changed and it was agreed that it could join the bloc. Ireland’s application was accepted on the UK’s coattails. By the time the Irish government held a referendum to ratify Ireland’s accession to the EEC on 10 May 1972, Sutherland was becoming active in Fine Gael. He helped in the campaign in support of membership. Although Official and Provisional Sinn Féin campaigned against entry, the mainstream parties, as well as most civic groups, were in favour of Ireland’s membership. The result was never in doubt; 83 per cent of Irish people ticked yes on the ballot paper.
There had been three Irish European commissioners before Sutherland’s nomination. Former president Patrick Hillery was the first, holding the social affairs brief. He was replaced by Fine Gael nominee Richard Burke, who held the taxation and consumer affairs portfolio. Burke was succeeded by Fianna Fáil’s Michael O’Kennedy, whose stint as commissioner for personnel and administration was short-lived; after nine months he was himself replaced by Burke in what was something of a political stroke on the part of Charles Haughey. Because of the tight Dáil arithmetic he could not risk a Fianna Fáil nominee, which would have triggered a by-election; instead he called on Burke to return to Brussels. According to Francis Jacobs, who joined the European Parliament in 1979 as an official, both Burke and O’Kennedy were underwhelming commissioners: ‘I have to choose my words carefully, but I saw the O’Kennedy and Burke eras as being extraordinarily lacklustre.’
The European Commission is the executive arm of the European Union, in effect the bloc’s civil service. It can formulate policy, and it has the job of implementing policies when they have been ratified by member states. In the first few decades of its existence, the commission was by far the most powerful of the institutions that made up the European Union. There was a double edge to this strength, however. A powerful commission coincided with the relatively smooth functioning of the European Union. But because it is a body of unelected officials, the view arose, especially among Eurosceptics, that the EU suffered from a democratic deficit. Over time, the European Council and the European Parliament have clipped the wings of the commission, but this has led to stalled decision making and the inability to push through necessary reforms.
From the time Sutherland was given the nod by FitzGerald in the summer of 1984, he embarked on military-style preparations. When he joined the commission in 1985, it was at the peak of its power. His first task was to put together a cabinet.
As attorney general he had a number of connections with the New Ireland Forum. Richard O’Toole from the Department of Foreign Affairs, deputy head of Ireland’s diplomatic mission in Switzerland, had been seconded to the forum’s secretariat, returning to Geneva at the forum’s conclusion. Sutherland knew him by reputation, as O’Toole had been head of the Union of Students in Ireland back in the 1960s. Sean Donlon, then a senior official in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, rang O’Toole to tell him that he was being mentioned as a possible chef de cabinet for Sutherland. O’Toole was asked to fly to Dublin, where he met Sutherland in his office in July 1984.
Sutherland told O’Toole that he had been putting a lot of thought into the portfolio he should pursue and added that he was initially attracted to the development aid brief. ‘I said to him very clearly that Ireland had never fully understood the power of the commission,’ says O’Toole,‘and that to my mind the real power lay in the competition area. And I would definitely advise him to go for competition. So I had the impression at the time that he reacted to that.’ Sutherland told O’Toole that a number of other people had also mentioned competition, and the two men had a long discussion about the EU. ‘He had a very good knowledge of the treaties. He was less well versed on the intergovernmental processes. And we had a conversation … I’d say it was due to last for about half an hour, but it lasted for about an hour.’
Sutherland asked O’Toole whether he was free that evening for dinner. ‘He told me at dinner that he wanted me to join the cabinet. And I said okay, but in what position? He said that he hadn’t decided yet, but he was thinking of me as either chef de cabinet or deputy chef.’ Sutherland had also been looking at Liam Hourican as a possible chef de cabinet. Hourican, a former journalist with the Irish Independent, had served in Burke’s cabinet and was highly rated in Brussels. The pair had developed a good relationship when Hourican was government press secretary in the 1981 Fine Gael–Labour coalition.
O’Toole says he would have been happy to take either position. He also told Sutherland that his success as commissioner hinged on putting the right cabinet together. The most effective commissioners in the past had been well briefed not only in their own areas, but across most other portfolios as well.
Following the meeting, O’Toole took a leave of absence from his post in Geneva, while Sutherland made the necessary arrangements to set him up with a desk in Brussels. The plan was that O’Toole would spend the next six months preparing the ground for Sutherland’s arrival. After a month in Brussels, Sutherland rang O’Toole and asked him to be chef de cabinet, informing him that he was going to make Hourican deputy chef.
With his chef de cabinet in place, Sutherland pursued the competition portfolio with his trademark intensity, enlisting all the help he could get. Ireland held the rotating presidency of the European Council for the first six months of 1984. Even though Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher had sparred openly over Northern Ireland, they had good personal relations, and FitzGerald was able to persuade Thatcher to accept Jacques Delors, a French socialist, as the next president of the commission. When his nomination had been formally ratified, Delors visited FitzGerald at his home in Palmerstown Road in Dublin, where the Taoiseach asked Delors for Sutherland to be given the strongest possible portfolio.
Competition was mentioned but nothing was agreed. So Sutherland went on his own charm offensive, making direct contact with Delors and visiting him twice in Paris. At the outset the two men seemed like uneasy bedfellows: Delors was a socialist with a trade union background. Then they discovered they had both attended Jesuit schools and were practising Catholics, and that helped cement the relationship.
While Sutherland lobbied Delors for the competition portfolio, he also went about striking up relationships with the newly minted commissioners. ‘As he said himself, if there were going to be any cliques, he was going to be in the most important ones,’ says Garrett Sheehan. Sutherland invited the commissioners to Dublin at his own expense for a series of bilateral meetings. ‘He developed a genuine friendship with a lot of the other commissioners and they with him. And I think that stood the test of time during his term of office. Even when they had differences on views, a very good personal relationship was maintained with the commissioners at all times,’ says O’Toole.
Delors held a meeting in the Château de Rambouillet in the north of France in November 1984 to finalise his team of commissioners. Sutherland went to bed on the Saturday night knowing that he was a strong contender for the competition portfolio. On Sunday morning he went to mass at the Church of St Lubin of Rambouillet. Delors was there, and he gave Sutherland a gentle nod to say that he had prevailed.
The focus now turned to putting the rest of the cabinet together. David O’Sullivan, who was then working in the EU embassy in Tokyo, was the first name on the list. O’Toole rang O’Sullivan in early December to say that he was going to be Sutherland’s head of cabinet and ask whether O’Sullivan would be interested in joining. ‘He said I think you could be a good fit, and I said that I would be very interested. And then a few days later, he rang me and said no, it’s not going to work out, we only have a limited number of places.’ O’Sullivan headed off with his wife on a long trip to New Zealand and Australia. ‘Then just before Christmas [1984] we were staying in a rather grotty hostel-type place with no telephone or anything near Ayers Rock. And there was a sort of hand-scrolled message literally nailed to the door saying, “call Richard O’Toole”.
‘We didn’t know where to find a phone, so we went off and found a Sheraton Hotel a few miles away and I asked could I make a foreign phone call, which you can imagine in those days was quite complicated.’ O’Sullivan eventually called O’Toole, who told him there was now a very live possibility that he would be given the position, but he needed an answer more or less immediately. ‘It was typical Richard. So I said, will you give me a half an hour with my wife. We went into the bar and had a quick chat.’ O’Sullivan was due to leave Tokyo in the summer of 1985, so his departure would be coming six months early. ‘But on the other hand I had nothing in particular lined up, so this was an exciting opportunity, so I decided to take it.’
When O’Sullivan told the head of the EU delegation to Japan he was leaving early to take up a role in Brussels, he was accused by his boss of being duplicitous. ‘He did all he could to try and delay my departure and I know that Richard had some epic discussions with Emile Noel, the secretary general of the European Commission, insisting that I be brought back very quickly.’ O’Sullivan returned to Brussels in the middle of January, leaving his wife to sort out the move from Tokyo. ‘I remember it was snowing very heavily when I arrived in Brussels, and I remember treading the streets trying to find somewhere temporary to live and then somewhere more permanent to set up house.’ O’Sullivan says his first meeting with Sutherland did not go as he had hoped. ‘He was slightly intimidating when you first met him, when he was in his “I’m the man in charge” mode he could be quite assertive.’ Sutherland told O’Sullivan that he had taken him into his cabinet ‘on the word of Richard’.
‘He said to me, “I hear good things from Richard, but I want to be very clear above all else, I need loyalty.” It was a very gruff encounter and I came away thinking okay, this is going to be interesting.’ But the next day, when O’Sullivan met Sutherland again, quite by chance, he apologised for being so abrupt, saying, ‘I think I was a bit aggressive with you yesterday, don’t take me wrong. I’m pleased you are here and I’m sure you’ll do a great job.’
‘And that was Peter. I always found him to be the warmest and most considerate human being. But it was always mixed with this ability to be tough and sometimes quite abrasive. But usually with a reason behind it – it wasn’t just that he was being bad tempered. He wanted to assert himself and I understand when I arrived, he wanted to be clear that he was the commissioner, I was the member of cabinet. We had never met before, this was going to be on his terms, and I accepted that.’
As soon as they started talking about substantive issues, says O’Sullivan, he knew instinctively that Sutherland was intent on making his mark as a commissioner. ‘It was clear that he was extremely intelligent, he had an amazing grasp of detail.’ O’Sullivan attributes this to Sutherland’s training as a barrister, whereby he had gained the ability to grasp detail and digest it, to simplify it and identify the essence of an issue. ‘I was very impressed and I quickly formed the view that this was someone who was going to do something with his life. I think the remarkable thing about Peter is that he established himself in the commission very quickly as a force to be reckoned with.’ Sutherland, says O’Sullivan, worked very hard to establish himself; competition was a hugely impressive portfolio for an Irish commissioner to have obtained, particularly one so young and with no real political background.
O’Sullivan worked on social policy in his first year at the commission, before taking on relations between the commission and the European Parliament. ‘Richard was an outstanding head of cabinet. They were a remarkable team because Peter was the front office and the one who put it all together, but Richard did a fantastic job in understanding what he needed and in getting the rest of us to deliver it for him.’
Catherine Day was next on the list. The Trinity-educated economist, who prior to meeting Sutherland had been in Dick Burke’s cabinet, joined the European Commission in 1979 following an open competition. When she had breakfast with Sutherland at the hotel where he was staying before his move to Brussels, Day says her initial impression was that he was extremely focused. He asked her what she knew about his fellow commissioners. Day had already been offered a post in the cabinet of Grigoris Varfis, the incoming commissioner from Greece. ‘So I strongly suspect that Richard had advised Peter not to make any opening offer to me. He wanted Peter to meet me and see. I still am not very tactical, and I certainly wasn’t then, but I was trying to brief Peter as much as possible because I felt comfortable I had another option.
‘So I was interested in working with him but it wasn’t my only option. But I was also trying to fill him in on different people who were his colleagues, and so I said to him that I had an offer from Varfis that I was thinking of accepting.’ By the end of breakfast Sutherland had told Day he would like her to be on his team. ‘And Richard then came and joined us, and I interpreted from Richard’s face that this was not Richard’s plan but Peter had jumped the gun.’ It was typical of Sutherland, says Day, to decide on his own gut instinct. ‘But what was very obvious from the start was that Peter was determined to make his impact.’
Sutherland had a very powerful portfolio, observes Day, and he was determined to make his presence felt. But he also had to learn about the continental way of doing things and about diplomatic procedures: ‘I’d say the first half dozen meetings that he had with different people who came to discuss state aid or competition cases were in and out in ten minutes.’ Sutherland would make up his mind, listen to them and say yes or no. He had to learn to make meetings last half or three-quarters of an hour; he grew into such ways, because he realised he had to. But, says Day, ‘He could still be very punchy when he needed to.’
Eugene Regan had worked in the Brussels office of the Irish Farmers’ Association in the late 1970s. With a background in agriculture, he wrote to Sutherland when he was made commissioner to put himself forward for the agriculture role in his cabinet. ‘He had done the rounds before he came to me. He was very well briefed. I met him at his home in Blackrock. I found the interview very intimidating and tough. He wanted to know what school I went to. I think he wanted to know did I go to Gonzaga or Blackrock, that sort of thing. I told him I went to the Christian Brothers in Glasnevin. Anyway, I got the job. He didn’t know agriculture very well, but he made it his business to understand it.’ Regan went on to develop a very good working relationship with Sutherland, while Michel Richonnier, a Frenchman, completed the team. Richonnier was an economist who had spent years working in the French civil service. He joined the cabinet of Manuel Marín when the Spanish commissioner took over the education portfolio at the start of 1986.
Pascal Lamy was Jacques Delors’ chef de cabinet. ‘For a commissioner in Brussels Peter was incredibly young,’ observes Lamy. ‘This sort of position is usually given to people who have a more senior career or at least track record. Delors had very quickly developed a very good impression of Peter. He thought he was a very straight guy who was quite to the point and rather ambitious. He thought this was a big move in Peter’s career. Hence this idea of giving him competition.’
According to Lamy, Sutherland was the ‘real junior’ compared with the other commissioners, who had all held senior political posts in their home countries. ‘But Delors’ intuition was that this guy had real talent.’ Sutherland’s legal training was useful, according to Lamy, because at the time the competition portfolio was more legal than political. He was able to convince Delors of his value – although, says Lamy, ‘that is not enough in my view. So it was a big bet and it worked.’ Competition is one of the few portfolios that is almost exclusively a competence of the European Commission. That means that other commissioners had to be on good terms with Sutherland. ‘Peter could be quite bold. He could be pretty authoritarian and sometimes a bit arrogant. But he had, you know, the Irish temper,’ says Lamy.
Sutherland described those early meetings with Delors at a speech he gave in London in 2011:
Jacques Delors became a crucial part of my life when I was nominated. Probably, like Sir Thomas More, I was a turbulent priest who was to be moved out of Ireland after a turbulent time as attorney general, but I was asked by my Prime Minister to become the Irish commissioner in Brussels. The four years that I spent there, with Jacques Delors, were a vitally important part of my life.
Sometimes people wonder here why it is that those who are sent to Brussels go native, as so many have done. Every commissioner that has gone from this country that I can recall, on his return, after four years, is a transformed personality in terms of their attitude to Europe. The reason for me why it was important was that I saw a nobility of purpose, however ineffective it may be in practice, in taking on and challenging nationalism, which is the core rationale for the existence of European integration. It was founded following the Second World War on a philosophical base.
I was struck, when I went first to Paris to meet Jacques Delors, before he became president or before I became a commissioner, but in the immediate aftermath of our selection. I had lunch with him in a restaurant called Chez Edgar, off Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and he asked me whether I was a European and I replied that I was. I remember him telling me that he had been inspired by a Christian philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier, and Jacques Maritain, another philosopher, who wrote immediately following the Second World War, who, in turn, had inspired, at that time, the founders of the European movement – Jean Monnet, De Gasperi, from Italy, Adenauer, from Germany, and Schuman, above all, from France.[1]
Francis Jacobs says Sutherland’s cabinet is regarded in Brussels as one of the best ever put together by any commissioner. David O’Sullivan went on to be secretary general of the European Commission between 2000 and 2005, and was more recently EU ambassador to the US from November 2014 until his retirement in September 2018. Catherine Day succeeded O’Sullivan to become the first ever woman secretary general of the European Commission, serving two terms between 2005 and 2015. There is a school of thought that Ireland sent its brightest talents to Brussels in the early days as a tactical strategy to get the most out of its membership. Certainly, O’Sullivan and Day are regarded as among the top operators in Brussels over the past few decades.
Colm Larkin, who had been working as an official at the European Commission, replaced Liam Hourican halfway through the term. Hourican was on holiday in Kerry with his family in the summer of 1993 when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of forty-nine. Sutherland was about to board a flight for Geneva when he heard the news, and it affected him deeply. He had developed a very close bond with Hourican and his family when they were in Brussels. Hourican left behind a wife and six children; his daughters Emily and Bridget are both journalists.
Regan trained as a barrister when he returned to Dublin and is now a judge at the European Court of Justice. O’Toole and Sutherland would maintain a lifelong working relationship; after Sutherland joined him on the GPA board O’Toole went to Geneva, with Sutherland as his number two, when he took up the role of head of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1993.