SUTHERLAND WAS AT THE HOP AT BELVEDERE Rugby Club one Saturday night in 1969 when a young woman caught his eye. Her name was Maruja Cabria Valcarcel, and she came from a farming background just outside Santander in northern Spain. She had come to Dublin to work as an au pair and to improve her English. Even though connections to the UK at the time would have been much better, many Spanish parents wanted their daughters to go to Ireland – like Spain, a devoutly Catholic country.
Sutherland was smitten with the young Spanish woman. They courted briefly, but the romance was cut short when she had to return home. Undeterred by the distance of half a continent, a daunting prospect in the days before Ryanair and cheap travel, Sutherland put together his backpack and hit the road. Maruja’s father was naturally suspicious of this young Irishman trying to prise his daughter away, but Sutherland’s efforts paid off, and the couple were married in Santander in September 1971. Paddy Kevans, who was courting a Spanish girl at the time, was one of Sutherland’s few friends to make the ceremony.
For some men of power, influence and peripatetic lifestyle, affairs are part of the package. Not so Sutherland. Friends, former colleagues, everybody who knew him, said that if there was one constant in his life, it was his unstinting devotion to Maruja. Theirs was an extremely close marriage. ‘There was never ever any question of him breaking the sixth commandment,’ says Nicholas Kearns, while Niall FitzGerald emphasises the importance of their relationship. ‘The real secret of Peter being successful was Maruja.’
Their first child, Shane, was born in June 1972. Ian followed a couple of years later and Natalia towards the end of the decade, Shane and Ian being named after the two boys Maruja had looked after as an au pair. Shane later studied history at UCD and subsequently law at Buckingham University in the UK, and has since spent most of his career at the European Commission. He has most recently worked in the cabinet of Phil Hogan, when Hogan was European Commissioner for Agriculture, and is at the time of writing a programme manager at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the European Commission. Ian studied law at Trinity and did a master’s at Georgetown University in the US. He qualified as a solicitor and is a senior partner at private equity firm Colt. Natalia studied Spanish and economics at UCD and completed an MBA in Madrid. All three are married, and they have ten children between them.
When the children were young, Sutherland already had a formidable work ethic. During the 1970s, when he was in the process of building up a thriving practice at the Bar, he would rise at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning to clear his paperwork for the week. He also became involved with Fine Gael, and there was rugby at weekends. Shane says that from his earliest recollections, home life was hectic ‘to say the least. There are memories of important people visiting our house in Sydney Avenue in Blackrock. There were ministers dropping by in the evening on the way home. It was the days before mobile phones so people visited a lot more. Garret [FitzGerald] was a regular visitor.’
Sutherland’s hard-line approach to paramilitaries as attorney general during the Troubles in Northern Ireland would have consequences for family life. During his time in office there was a constant Garda presence outside the family home, and he had a Garda driver.
Shane remembers a phone that hung from the wall and was used for official business. ‘Certainly at the weekends there were a lot of calls with a lot of colourful language. My mother would always be telling him to tone it down. Even though my father was very busy, he was also very hands-on. He brought the kids swimming every Saturday morning. He would never get in, he would read the newspapers. But for a man with such weighty issues on his mind he would insist on making sure that our hair was dry. I don’t know whether that was out of a genuine worry we would get pneumonia or because he was afraid of what my mother would do to him.’ Sutherland very rarely spent his free time unaccompanied by his children. ‘Whether it was rugby, or the horse show or a boxing match, he always wanted his kids around him.’
When Shane and his siblings were growing up, Sutherland’s parents sold their home in Monkstown and moved to Foxrock, another middle-class suburb in south Dublin. The entire family would go to the grandparents for Sunday lunch, which invariably ended up in a forceful discussion between Sutherland and his father Billy, and sometimes his brother-in-law David Brennan. ‘They were good-natured discussions but they would become very heated.’
Shane says his father lived for family moments. ‘When you arrived home, it was like the prodigal son had returned. Towards the end he was keeping a physical or mental log of whether the in-laws were getting more time than him. He was making sure he wasn’t being short-changed on holiday time with his children and grandchildren. If he felt he was missing out he would let you know. He would organise boutique hotels that he would take over for family holidays in France, Italy or Spain.’
Sutherland took his two sons to the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament, and to the Rugby World Cup in Australia. He never returned home from work trips without a gift, although that presented its own danger. ‘He came through Dublin airport once with toy guns that looked very real. They were snaffled, but he managed to get them released because he was attorney general at the time.
‘He was very hands on when he was here,’ says Shane. ‘He would read us stories before bed. He was always encouraging us to take up new sports, whether that was tennis or rowing or whatever. When he was present you always felt like numero uno. You could go to him with any problem. He had very simple rules. He never wanted us to lie. It is something that stuck with me through the years.’
Decades later, Sutherland rang Fr Barber in panicked tones to say that Paul McEnroe, his son-in-law, and his daughter Natalia, were veering towards sending their son Patrick to St Mary’s College in Rathmines. He enlisted Fr Barber’s help to successfully change their minds. Patrick started at Gonzaga in September 2018.
It didn’t matter where his father was in the world, says Shane, there would always be a phone call. ‘They were invariably at the wrong time for us, but he always got through. He would get quite annoyed if he couldn’t.’ Even though, Shane adds, such calls would usually end with ‘My flight has been called, you’ve served your purpose,’ or ‘My car has arrived, buzz off.’
Later acquaintances also remember Sutherland’s phone habit. Rory Godson, who now runs the strategic communications company Powerscourt, was a close friend of Sutherland from the 1990s onwards. He recalls that he would often have six missed calls from Sutherland over a space of twenty minutes. The messages usually started with a simple request to call him back, but Sutherland would grow increasingly exasperated with each missed call, and his last message was usually a mixture of anger and despair. Godson would ring in a panic thinking that something awful must have happened, only to find Sutherland nonplussed by his sense of urgency. ‘I only rang you because I was bored,’ usually came the reply.
Sunday mornings, says Shane, were spent going to mass with his father. ‘We would always go to mass with him in Booterstown. My mother would always be busy doing the roast. It wasn’t forced down our throat.’ It was a source of regret for Sutherland that Shane’s children were not baptised while Peter was alive. ‘He would lament this when the issue arose. But we agreed not to discuss it. We went through the motions at school. It was not rammed down our throats. But it fundamentally guided him in everything he did, whether it was popular or not.’
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Sutherland battled with his weight for most of his life. Before he went to parties when he was a child his mother, Barbara, would stuff him with rice pudding to ensure his appetite was sufficiently sated that he would leave enough food for other kids. When he got older, Barbara would be forced to hide the Sunday roast that she had prepared on a Saturday night in case Sutherland returned from the rugby and the subsequent hop and decided to devour the whole thing.
Sutherland was well aware of the problem. When he once met with the chairman of the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) on a visit to the country, the two men had a conversation that extended well beyond business interests. They found that they shared a passion for reading, and the chairman told Sutherland he found some books so interesting that he would forget to eat. Sutherland asked him to pass on the names of these books, ‘as my wife would be very interested’.
In later years, travelling and receptions would take a toll on Sutherland’s health. He was always a moderate drinker, but he smoked cigars. His physical appearance in later years was moreover often used against him. Unfortunately for him, he became the public epitome of a ‘fat cat’ banker. Over his last decade any media profile of him usually contained a sly reference to his girth. ‘We worried every day about his health. You’d implore him to eat less and exercise more. This was a constant refrain. At times the situation improved. We would ask him to eat less and look after his diet. But he would tuck in anyway. Every time he was away on a business trip we would ask him to bring a pair of trainers or swimming togs, but it never happened. Every day at the back of my heart I had a feeling something was going to happen. My grandfathers lived to a very old age. I think he thought he would live forever. He had warnings. His lifestyle was aeroplane food and receptions. He ate everything put in front of him,’ says Shane.
Even though Sutherland was a very wealthy man, he enjoyed a relatively modest lifestyle. There was no private jet, fleet of luxury cars or trophy villas. That is not to say that he embraced ascetic values. There was a family home on Eglinton Road, Dublin; a house in London; a house in Goleen in west Cork, and another house in Spain. But they were all used. One of the highlights of his year was the trip to west Cork every August. His forebears were from Cork and, according to Shane, ‘he claimed to be related to half the county’.
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Friendships meant a great deal to him. Garrett Sheehan, John Arrigo and Paddy Kevans were lifelong friends going back to Gonzaga and Monkstown while Nicholas Kearns was another close friend from the time they met at UCD. He stayed close to people.
Sheehan and Sutherland spoke most days. ‘There was a private, very generous side to Peter that he didn’t want to publicise. He wasn’t that thick-skinned. He was actually quite sensitive.’ But, as Sheehan notes, Sutherland had an extraordinary capacity to move on. ‘He didn’t dwell on things. He was never depressed. How he managed to keep up so many friendships I do not know.’
Loyal, generous, kind, humorous, empathetic and passionate are the words most often used by friends, former colleagues and associates to describe Sutherland. They joke that he was an outrageous name-dropper. He could also be very direct. He could sometimes deliver a very blunt assessment if he thought somebody had made a wrong decision, either in a professional or a personal capacity.
He was also very sensitive. He needed constant validation. It was not uncommon, in the aftermath of a speech or a TV appearance, for him to ring close associates to get their feedback. He might ring the same person a number of times in one evening.
John O’Hagan was friendly with Sutherland at UCD, but they saw little of each other for the next thirty-five years. It was only in the mid-2000s that they picked up where they left off. ‘He didn’t like to be criticised. He could be very insecure. When in public he was very confident but in private he could be insecure. I never got the impression he was at ease despite his amazing success. That’s the hallmark of a lot of great people. He was always striving.’
‘The thing about Peter is who else has done what he has done,’ says Gregory Maniatis, who is now a director of the Open Society Migration Initiative, funded by the philanthropist George Soros. ‘I only fell out with him three times in eleven years and that was always momentarily. He always knew instantly if he was in the wrong. He was very aware of the power he exerted when he walked through a room. In that world he was peerless. He even made prime ministers fade into the background. Everybody stood up and took notice of him. He was a businessman. He was a lawyer. He negotiated GATT. He became the UN special representative on the key issue of the past decade. So he had this aura. But he was totally down to earth about his place in the world. He was not bombastic, he was not hubristic. He had that ability to connect with people. He was profoundly respectful of institutions. He respected the rules and procedures. He recognised the importance of individuals but it had to be about the institution – the person cannot be bigger than the institution as it would weaken the institution. That applied to the EU, the UN or whatever.’
Richard Gnodde, from Goldman Sachs, says his abiding memory of Sutherland is being ‘extremely compassionate’.
‘The migration story will support that. But he was also extremely competitive and driven. If he wanted something he would bash down doors to get it. He had a fantastic sense of humour and was a great raconteur. He always stayed very well connected. He made an enormous contribution to everything he touched: to Ireland, Europe, the world, through WTO and migration, to us, to BP, and the Vatican. In that sense he was extremely self-deprecating. He was always happy to laugh at himself. If someone was in trouble, financially or in any way, he helped a lot of people out. That was the thing about Peter, he was a globalist, a European and most importantly an Irishman. I look around me today and I wonder why people have to make a choice.’
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In 2009, on a family holiday, Maruja noticed a lump at the side of her husband’s neck. He had it checked out immediately, and the family’s worst fears were confirmed. It was throat cancer.
Sutherland underwent immediate surgery, followed by aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy. But he never fully recovered from the treatment. He suffered afterwards from throat ulcers, which meant that he couldn’t eat certain types of food or drink wine. Yet he didn’t let up on his punishing regime of travel and work commitments. His passion about migration, in particular, ensured that he pushed himself beyond his physical capabilities. On the bright Sunday morning of 11 September 2016 he left his house in London to go to mass. He would never return home. He spent the first year in a private hospital in London. The family hoped against the odds that he would make a recovery, but the heart attack he had suffered inflicted too much damage.
Friends visited, but because Sutherland had been larger than life it was hard to see him in a reduced state. He was eventually transferred to a private nursing home in Rathgar, where he became prone to infections. He finally succumbed to a chest infection in St James’s Hospital on 8 January 2018, aged seventy-one.