SUTHERLAND WAS THE FIRST COMMISSIONER FROM Ireland to embrace the Brussels lifestyle. He and his wife, Maruja, moved to Brussels with their daughter Natalia, although the two boys, Ian and Shane, were sent as boarders to Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick. Sutherland knew that if he followed the template set by previous Irish commissioners – fly home on Thursday night and back again on Monday morning – he would miss out on the weekend dinner party circuit. This was when the real business was done in Brussels. Most importantly, he did not intend to allow any cliques among other commissioners to develop behind his back.
There was a peculiarity in Sutherland’s first year as a commissioner. With Spain and Portugal due to join on 1 January 1986, the portfolios that were to be allocated to the two new member states were temporarily shared out among existing commissioners. Sutherland was given education. The newly appointed commissioner already had his hands full with the competition brief, so it would have been understandable if he had paid scant attention to education during 1985. On the contrary, he gave it his full attention. As it turned out, education would give Sutherland one of the achievements he was most proud of during his time as commissioner.
In 1985 Hywel Jones was a director for education and training in DG Social Policy, Employment and Industrial Relations. Sutherland had been in the job about a week when he summoned Jones for a meeting. It was a Friday evening and Jones arrived with a sizeable dossier full of the main issues relating to the education portfolio. ‘We met again on Monday morning and he knew the contents of the dossier backwards,’ remembers Jones. ‘He had an astonishing grasp. He was on top of it from the word go.’ Tucked away in the dossier were two related projects that Jones had been working on. ‘I gave him the embryonic outlines of two programmes. One was Comett, which was education training and technology. The other one was Erasmus.’ Comett involved building alliances between education, technology and industry on a pan-European basis, while Erasmus was an exchange programme for tertiary-level students.
Sutherland was encouraged by Michel Richonnier, a member of his cabinet, to take forward the two flagship programmes. He saw the potential in both. If Europe was to move to a fully fledged single market, then the free movement of ideas would be a key building block. But the big member states were very nervous about having a legal basis in the treaty for anything to do with education because it was closely related to the idea of sovereignty.
‘The internal market idea Sutherland was very supportive of. On the back of that we were able to get a lot of impetus behind the two programmes. The year before, the Adonnino report was published by the European Commission, which looked at the idea of European citizenship and how to develop a social Europe: feeling European and seeing the future in European terms. I grew to realise in later years how much of a passionate European he was,’ says Jones.
Erasmus had a very difficult birth, particularly as it seemed to have no legal basis. Thanks to his background, Sutherland knew that without any such basis, it would be impossible to secure financing for Erasmus. Salvation came in the form of Article 128 of the Treaty of Rome, which established common principles in the field of vocational training. The question then arose as to what constituted training and what education. Sutherland, Jones and the rest of the team spent much of 1985 preparing a legal and political basis for Erasmus.
During that year, the Gravier judgment issued by the European Court of Justice profoundly influenced legal debates about the place of education and training in the treaty.[1] A case had been brought by a student, a French national who wished to pursue a course in cartoon design at a Belgian art school. She took the Belgian authority, the City of Lige, to court on the grounds that, as an EC national, she should have been given a place on the same terms as Belgian students and not charged the higher foreign student fee, called the minerval. The European Court had accepted that there should be no discrimination between EC nationals in terms of access to training and that the word ‘training’ should be deemed to cover university education. The result of the case was to have a profound effect on political discussions concerning the legal basis for the EU to promote and finance educational co-operation.
In December 1985, it became apparent that France, Germany and the UK were steadfast in their opposition to the proposal. Even a smaller member state can theoretically block a proposal if the relevant vote needs unanimity; if one or more of the big member states is against anything brewing on the legislative agenda, then it is normally dead on arrival.
‘I witnessed an amazing incident between Peter and Delors,’ says Jones. During a very difficult meeting at the Council of Ministers, ministers from the larger member states had told Sutherland that they would never accept Erasmus. ‘We broke off from the meeting and went to see Delors. It was a very tough meeting. Peter told Delors he had to back it even if it meant going for a majority vote. I think that meeting was Peter at his finest.’
Once Delors got behind Erasmus, it tilted the chances in favour of success. Even there, though, the opposition did not stop. The method of voting the Erasmus programme through was contested by a minority of member states, although when the issue was brought before the European Court of Justice it ruled in favour of Sutherland, allowing the majority decision to be upheld. ‘1985 was the year of setting up the battle and 1986 was the year of winning the battle. I don’t believe it would have been won without Peter and his mastery and drive,’ Jones says. Comett was a parallel programme to Erasmus, he explains, designed to bridge technology and industry. ‘I thought it was more important than Erasmus.’ Then there was a process of rationalisation: Comett was folded into the Erasmus programme. ‘The official title Erasmus, with its historic symbolism and immediate appeal, also worked perfectly as an acronym – European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (or, as I preferred, Studies).’
Once Spain joined the EC at the start of 1986, Manuel Marín took responsibility for the education portfolio. The negotiations which led ultimately to the adoption of the Erasmus and Comett programmes, says Jones, owed a great deal to the determination and dynamic leadership of Sutherland and Marín, both of whom were passionately attached to winning what turned into a difficult confrontation in the negotiations within the Council. Since then the Erasmus programme has gone from strength to strength, with 200,000 students from more than 2,000 educational institutions taking part in exchanges every year.
Sutherland was clear, however, that Erasmus wasn’t only about education; the programme was a tool to further the wider project of European integration. ‘The ultimate objective was the process of integration between Europeans rather than the purely educational advantages that it would give. The reality is that we needed to create a new attitude to the EU, which we still need to do today,’ he said in an interview with the UCD student publication, Connections, in 2010. ‘This requires young people to recognise a common cultural and value-based system the European countries share; and not to feel alien and different from others.’
One of Sutherland’s other main responsibilities during his time as commissioner was relations with the European Parliament. ‘I would honestly say that he was responsible for a qualitative transformation in the commission relationship with the European Parliament,’ says David O’Sullivan. The Single European Act had significantly increased the role of the Parliament in EU affairs. ‘We had to codify those procedures and Peter was heavily instrumental in that, and in taking a very leading approach about how we should deal with the European Parliament.’ Back then, says O’Sullivan, the Parliament was regarded with deep suspicion by most people in the commission and elsewhere. ‘Peter took it very seriously and I think the new procedures that we adopted, although they were a bit boring and bureaucratic, gave the Parliament certain rights and roles.’ These formed, says O’Sullivan, the platform on which the Parliament built its subsequent grab for power through a series of treaties, culminating in the Lisbon Treaty.
Sutherland received the Gold Medal – an award conferred on those who have made an important contribution to European integration – from the European Parliament in 1988.
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Francis Jacobs first came across Sutherland as an official on the secretariat of the Committee for Economic and Monetary Affairs in the European Parliament. The committee dealt with the single market project and competition. The Parliament’s formal role in competition matters was minimal, its main function being to review how the commission had dealt with competition policy in the previous year. The commission would put together an annual report; the Parliament then reviewed the report and published a comment. ‘So we did a report on the report. We did our report in September after the commission report came out in July,’ says Jacobs. ‘Peter made an appearance before the committee once a year. It was always a classic. He would outline the main themes and then take questions on any aspect of policy, including areas that were not in the report.’
The floor was open to members of the committee to ask Sutherland any questions they wished – and they often did. Jacobs says it was not uncommon to hear questions about car dealerships, or even complaints from the Campaign for Real Ale in the UK about tied houses. ‘He would deal with all of that,’ Jacobs adds. ‘One day I was in a lift with him and to my incredible surprise he said thank you very much, Francis, for your report. He had been briefed that I was the ghost-writer.
‘I was thirty and a lowly official. He was thirty-eight and a commissioner. In a very hierarchical structure, where first names were unusual, to be called by my first name by the commissioner, whom I had never been formally introduced to, was a surprise. Some people say he was a stuck-up international tycoon figure. He wasn’t. He had great warmth. The ghost-writer is very rarely acknowledged within the system. It was an incredibly nice touch for me.’
Sutherland had a reputation as being a market liberal. The most important elements of his portfolio were the dismantling of state aid and the removal of distortions in competition, and his approach was hated by the left. But at the time there were no attack dogs similar to John Prescott. ‘Certainly in the UK context, it was the period when [Neil] Kinnock was wrestling Labour back from the hard left. The party was so riven by internal struggle I don’t think they were bothered by what was happening in the committee,’ says Jacobs. ‘Sutherland was a very capable performer. Style can be as important as substance. He was very charming. He called people by their first names. He was respectful but forceful. He was generally liked by the committee.’
The committee’s main focus was the single market, so they were broadly positive towards anybody who was pushing this agenda. And Sutherland would have been at the forefront. ‘My main recollection is that in a hierarchical environment he seemed like a breath of fresh air,’ observes Jacobs. ‘Sutherland gave Ireland this dynamic image which was utterly lacking previously. Burke was pompous and not impressive. O’Kennedy just didn’t want to be there. He was appointed late by Haughey, he was given the leftovers and he seemed ill at ease in the commission. Ireland at the time was seen as this strange little country with no left and two centre-right parties.’ According to Jacobs, Ireland was seen at the time as friendly and pragmatic, leaning to the centre right but not particularly ideological. It supported the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) but that was hardly a liberal measure. ‘That is why Sutherland wouldn’t have been targeted as much by the left.’
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When Sutherland came to the end of his period of office in 1989, many people in the commission thought he should be given a second term. He was certainly interested in remaining in Brussels. After all, his friend and mentor, Jacques Delors, was staying on as president. But domestic politics would deal Sutherland’s prospects a fatal blow. Charlie Haughey was now Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil was in power. Haughey may have crossed the floor once to appoint a Fine Gael nominee as commissioner, but he certainly wasn’t going to do it a second time. In some ways, Sutherland had become the victim of his own success. He had lifted the currency of being a commissioner. Previously it had been seen in Ireland as having little relevance to political life, but Sutherland had shown that in the right hands, it was a powerful lever at the disposal of the government. When Haughey sent Ray MacSharry to Brussels, MacSharry turned out to be a very effective Commissioner for Agriculture, and introduced sweeping changes to the CAP.
Sutherland went about ensuring that his cabinet were taken care of before he left office. Catherine Day joined the cabinet of Leon Brittan, the incoming Commissioner for Competition, while Liam Hourican became chef de cabinet for MacSharry. Eugene Regan went back to Ireland and trained as a barrister. Richard O’Toole joined aircraft leasing company Guinness Peat Aviation, whose board Sutherland had also agreed to join.
On leaving the commission, Sutherland returned home and went back briefly to the Law Library before taking up the role of chairman of Allied Irish Bank (AIB). But the commission never left Sutherland. From 1990 onwards he plotted his return one day as president. Rated very highly as he was both within the commission and among member states, his ambition was not without foundation.
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His chance appeared to arrive in 1994. The process of replacing Jacques Delors was initially a fiasco. At the Corfu summit at the end of June 1994, the expectation had been that Ruud Lubbers, the Dutch prime minister, would become the next president. He was seen as having the right credentials and background: he was a Christian Democrat from one of the core member states; more importantly, he had the backing of the big member states. But then, weeks before the summit which was supposed to be his coronation, the German government had a change of mind and backed the Belgian candidate, Jean-Luc Dehaene. The Germans persuaded the French to also throw their support behind Dehaene. It now looked as if the Belgian would succeed Delors. But then John Major, the British prime minister, came out very publicly against Dehaene, saying his objection was based on how the contest was being conducted. Or that, more importantly, it was a power grab by the Franco-German axis.
Major was also under pressure from the Eurosceptic wing of his party. Dehaene had a reputation as an arch-federalist, while the Conservative Party at that stage was already on the way to self-immolation over Europe. Any suggestion of a push towards federalism heightened the party’s Euro-neurosis. Major was pushing for Leon Brittan to become the next president, but his candidacy secured very little support among other member states.
Going into the Corfu summit, Sutherland was seen as a credible but outside choice to succeed Delors. But as political horse-trading got into full swing and his rivals were eliminated, Sutherland came into the frame. Having just successfully concluded the Uruguay Round of trade talks, his stock had risen at an international level. Major was known to be an enthusiastic supporter.
The facts of that summit are still not clear. There is a question mark over whether Sutherland had the support of the French government. John Major said in his autobiography that François Mitterrand was opposed to Sutherland because he viewed him as too Anglo-Saxon. If Paris was not on board, that would scupper his chances. But his prospects were dead in the water already if he didn’t have the backing of the Irish government. At the time another Fianna Fáil–Labour coalition was in government and Albert Reynolds was Taoiseach. Two senior EU sources have confirmed that at the Corfu summit a consensus formed among member states that Sutherland could emerge as a compromise candidate. Both sources have said his candidacy was withdrawn because he did not get the backing of the Irish government.
Dick Spring, who as Minister for Foreign Affairs attended the summit, says that his only memory of the event is that the Irish and British governments were at loggerheads over Northern Ireland. He claims to have no recollection of being asked to support Sutherland’s candidacy. ‘I honestly do not recall. It is a very long time ago.’ Spring is adamant, however, that Sutherland did not canvass the Irish government for support in the run-up to the summit. Reynolds, who died in 2014, also played down the possibility that Sutherland was in contention. ‘He has not been ruled in. There is no substance in stories that there is support for Sutherland,’ he said at the time.[2]
There are a number of possible reasons why the Irish government failed to row in behind Sutherland. The most basic is the tribal nature of Irish politics. Fianna Fáil simply would not support a Fine Gael candidate. There are other reasons, however. According to Brian Cowen, the Minister for Transport in 1994, Sutherland’s candidacy was never raised at cabinet level.
Fianna Fáil minister Pádraig Flynn was a controversial figure. During the 1990 presidential election campaign he sparked an enormous controversy when he made offensive remarks about Mary Robinson, the Labour Party’s favoured candidate, on a programme on RTÉ radio. Flynn lashed out at Robinson in comments that were laced with misogyny, making reference to her new clothes, new hairdo and new look, ‘and a new interest in her family, being a mother and that kind of thing. But those of us who knew Mary Robinson in previous incarnations never heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother.’
According to Brian Cowen, Labour had raised objections about Flynn during talks with Fianna Fáil to form the 1992 coalition. The agreement hammered out in the talks at the end of 1992 was nevertheless that Flynn would be sent to Brussels as commissioner. If the coalition had backed Sutherland, then Flynn would have had to return to Ireland and domestic politics. At the time larger member states had two commissioners, whereas smaller member states such as Ireland had only one. If Sutherland had become president of the commission, that would have counted as Ireland’s commissionership. That was not something either party wanted to deal with.
Modesty was not a character trait commonly attributed to Flynn, if ever. When asked about the possibility of Sutherland becoming president of the commission, he responded, ‘I’m sure there will be a lot of people looking for the job of commission president and there may well be more than one Irishman. I am always available to serve in whatever capacity Ireland requires of me.’[3] Flynn’s period as commissioner was, however, underwhelming.
There was speculation at the time that Dick Spring had his own reasons for blocking Sutherland. Ten years previously, in 1984, Sutherland had lobbied against the appointment of John Rogers to replace him as attorney general. Relations between Spring and Sutherland had been good up to that point, but Spring and Rogers had been very close since their student days in Trinity and Spring felt betrayed by Sutherland’s move against Rogers. Some believed that ten years later he still bore a grudge. Spring says that ‘there is absolutely no truth in that. I remember there was an issue with the appointment of John Rogers but it did not affect my relationship with Peter Sutherland.’
Jacques Santer emerged as the compromise candidate to become President of the European Commission, although he was forced to resign in 1999 along with his entire team of commissioners following allegations of corruption.
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Sutherland left public office in 1995 and went on to have a very rewarding career in the private sector, becoming chairman of Goldman Sachs International the same year. Sutherland told Eugene Regan that around the time he was making the transition from the public to the private sector, he went to his childhood mentor, Fr Joe Veale, for advice. Even though he was very tempted by the private sector, he had a deep commitment to public office. He also harboured a desire to land another international role. According to Regan, Sutherland took great enjoyment from Veale’s response: ‘I have the perfect solution. You take the job and give the money to the church.’ Sutherland would make an estimated €120 million from the flotation of Goldman Sachs in 1999.[fn1] However, one of his close friends says it was never about the money. ‘If he had a choice between Goldman Sachs and everything that brought him, or the president of the commission, he would have picked the commission every time.’
In 2004, Sutherland was back in the frame. This time it was a combination of domestic politics and his professional ties that scuppered his chances. At the time, Ireland held the rotating EU presidency. Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach at the time, had been given the responsibility of finding a replacement for Romano Prodi. ‘There were at least ten names floating around. Peter didn’t figure early in the campaign. He came in around March when he saw there was no strong runner. After a good bit of wheeling and dealing the frontrunner clearly became Guy Verhofstadt.’ Ahern insists that the Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democrat coalition was firmly behind Sutherland’s candidacy. ‘I supported him both publicly and privately at the [European] Council. I had a very good relationship with him. Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney were also very enthusiastic supporters.’
But, says Ahern, Sutherland failed to drum up enough support from other member states. ‘[Tony] Blair had a bit of interest in going himself, but he would also have been happy enough with Sutherland.’ After Blair ruled himself out of the running, a period of negotiation, largely in Ireland, took place around the time of the enlargement ceremony in May which welcomed the accession of the so-called ‘A10’ countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. ‘When the French and Germans rolled in behind Verhofstadt, everybody thought it was a done deal,’ Ahern continues. ‘I think we would have got a bit of support for Peter but everybody thought it was Verhofstadt. He had ten or twelve member states.’ The problem for Verhofstadt was that he didn’t have the backing of London, and the British government vetoed his candidacy. He was seen as an arch-federalist who would have taken the EU down a road unacceptable to British interests. Indeed, when Verhofstadt was the president of the European Parliament between 2014 and 2019, he would take a very vocal and critical position against the British government in Brexit negotiations.
‘There was nobody else on the list strong enough. The process was suspended in June 2004 because of a lack of consensus. I was asked to see if there was anybody who wasn’t on the list who would get sufficient backing. That’s how José Manuel Barroso’s name came into the ring. The problem with 2004 was that Peter’s star had faded. It was a new generation. I wasn’t supporting Verhofstadt for two reasons. I knew the Brits were going to veto him and he was far too integrationist. Peter was in there until the end, but it was a decade after he had been in the limelight.’
There were other reasons as well. David O’Sullivan, secretary general of the European Commission in 2004, was at a dinner in Paris for EU diplomats when a senior French official, whom O’Sullivan knew well, approached him and asked if he was working for Sutherland’s presidential campaign. ‘And I said no I’m not, I’m secretary general of the commission. He said yeah, but we all know that you are very close to Peter and you would like him to be president.’ O’Sullivan replied that he thought Sutherland would make a very good president, but that O’Sullivan would probably lose his job if Sutherland was appointed. ‘I’m Irish and if we got an Irish president I would presumably have to move. I don’t know whether I’m working for my own career suicide.’
‘We all know what you are doing,’ said the Frenchman. ‘I have a message for Peter Sutherland from President Chirac I’d like you to pass on.’
‘I do speak to Peter,’ said O’Sullivan, ‘and I can give him the message.’ France, he was told, would never accept that a chairman of Goldman Sachs could become president of the commission. It was utterly unacceptable and could never be acceptable under any circumstances; that was the absolute position of the French government, and Sutherland needed to know it. ‘To which I replied, to the best of my knowledge Jean Monnet was an investment banker! But this didn’t appear to change his mind very much.’
O’Sullivan believes that Sutherland’s career trajectory after he left public office made it increasingly unlikely that he could be a credible candidate. ‘I think Liam Hourican was probably right to say in 1989, that Peter Sutherland had to make a choice.’ If Sutherland wanted to come back to a good European career, says O’Sullivan, he had to go back to the nitty-gritty of domestic Irish politics, become a cabinet minister again and be a national politician in order to have a springboard back to the European theatre.
Ahern met Tony Blair in London just before the decision was made to appoint Barroso, after which he sent a message through diplomatic channels to Sutherland. It said: ‘Tell Peter it can’t be done.’ Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, was elected president in 2004. He would serve two terms. Ironically he would replace Sutherland as chairman of Goldman Sachs International when he retired from the commission.
Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson, the head of Goldman Sachs in 2004, and subsequently US Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, had meanwhile developed a close relationship with Sutherland. ‘I remember that,’ Paulson says. ‘We all worked to try and make that happen for Peter and it would have been very good if it had happened. Peter talked to me a lot about how to make it happen. I don’t know the extent that it was Goldman Sachs, because this was well before the financial crisis, so investment banks were not as discredited then as they are now. I think the French wanted an excuse and they did not want an Irishman running the European Commission. You could not have found someone who was more ecumenical when it came to Europe than Peter. The strange thing is that he helped France. We held a board meeting in Paris in 2004. We were one of only four firms that helped the government in a mega bond deal.’
Adrian Jones also worked with Sutherland at Goldman Sachs. ‘He had no issues with the French response. He felt it was the rational response from the French. It was a power play. They saw what was happening and closed it down. He had no animus for them. I do think that he would have loved to have seen more support from Ireland [in 1994]. He felt we were unnecessarily tribal and petty.’
Niall FitzGerald, a former chief executive and chairman of Unilever, was another close friend of Sutherland. ‘He deeply regretted he never became commission president. He could have made a difference. I think it was the single major disappointment of his life.’ He would have been a great president, says FitzGerald. ‘He was a consistent voice for a liberal market regime. He was one of the most persuasive voices for the ongoing integration of Europe. He was absolutely fearless and uninhibited.’
Cowen agrees that Sutherland would have made an excellent commission president. ‘He had a track record and standing that was as good as any prime minister.’ There are two approaches to running the European Union, he says: the Franco-German view, which means that Paris and Berlin hold the whip hand over legislation and the direction of travel for the bloc, and the communitaire view, which means a much more consensus-based approach and is obviously more amenable to the wishes of smaller member states such as Ireland. ‘Sutherland had the independence of mind to stand up to the big guys and do the right thing. Look at Sarkozy, he tried to throw his weight around and tell everybody what to do, including the governor of the ECB. The commission is the originator of policy. Then it should be up to the communitaire system about what is implemented. It is the protector of the small member state if it is working properly. That is why you need a really good commission president. I don’t think Prodi had it and I don’t think Barroso had it.’ Sutherland, says Cowen, would have been very good at arguing his case, in part because of his legal training. ‘The president of the commission has to have political personality. Sutherland was in jobs that were sufficiently complex and still managed to get political backing. Also the Irish are generally seen as honest brokers. The Irish presidencies have generally been very good, including when we got the draft constitutional treaty through. It was a very proud day to see how the Irish pulled that together, particularly seeing as how much of a mess the Italians had made of it.’
Sutherland retained an intense interest in European affairs after his second failed attempt to become president. He didn’t have to look far to find out what was happening in Brussels. After all, O’Sullivan and Day, who had been in his cabinet, were in charge of the European civil service between 2000 and 2015. Day says that Sutherland kept in frequent contact.
‘He was frustrated with the commission. I would try to explain to him that the whole European landscape had changed since he had been commissioner, but of course he was too intelligent not to understand that. But emotionally he didn’t want to accept it. He thought the commission should be much tougher with member states. Now I think that myself, but I had to accept that the member states had taken back a certain amount of power and that the commission, certainly in the post-Lisbon architecture, could never be the powerhouse that it was from 1985 up to 1989. But he was terribly frustrated by it.
‘I think he thought the power of the argument and a sufficiently strong intervention could carry the day. Now he would say it’s erosion by a thousand cuts or whatever, but I just think the landscape changed and there was much more collusion between member states.’ This is in part thanks to innovations like the mobile phone, she points out: in the past member states didn’t really talk to each other. It was necessary to pre-book a phone call, and have an interpreter standing by. ‘Now they all have each other on speed dial.’ The member states started setting up contact among themselves, away from the Brussels machinery, to the frustration of foreign ministers and ambassadors alike. ‘So it changed, and I don’t think the commission could or should have stopped that. And part of the backlash was because the commission was seen to be a relentlessly federal machine and I don’t myself think that’s the right direction. I think we have to be federal on a limited number of things but actually to give up on quite a lot of other stuff.’
That, she claims, frustrated Sutherland. On paper the commission had power to make proposals and get them through, ‘but the mood had changed. Maybe it has gone too soft but also you can only force a certain number of things. If you keep forcing it there will be a backlash.’