AS A COUNTRY IRELAND HAS ALWAYS PUNCHED above its weight. Irish people have at various times been world leaders in the fields of arts, sports, literature, international affairs and academia. Freddie Boland, Sean McBride, John Hume, Mary Robinson, John Bruton, Bertie Ahern, Bono, Catherine Day, David O’Sullivan, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit and Denis O’Brien are just some of the Irish men and women who have made an impact on the international stage.
But Sutherland is unique in terms of his spheres of influence. A roll call of his achievements speaks for itself. He received sixteen honorary doctorates and was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was made a Chevalier of the French Légion d’Honneur and a Papal Knight of St Gregory, while his other awards include an honorary knighthood, the Gold Medal of the European Parliament (1988), the first European Law Prize (Paris 1988), the David Rockefeller International Leadership Award in 1998 and the Robert Schuman Medal for his work on European integration.
He became attorney general at the age of thirty-five; he was one of the most successful European commissioners ever; he is widely regarded as the best president the European Commission never had; he brokered the first global multilateral trade agreement; he shaped the global migration debate, possibly more than any other individual; he was chairman of the third largest company in the world, and chairman of the international arm of one of the most successful investment banks in the world. He had access to world leaders like no other Irish person. He was one of the headline acts at Bilderberg. He was the European chairman of the Trilateral Commission between 2001 and 2010. In fact, he is among the most influential international powerbrokers of the last thirty years or so.
Indeed, the tributes paid to Sutherland in death were widespread and generous. Irish and international civic and business groups issued statements. Fianna Fáil and Labour joined Fine Gael in extending sympathies on his passing, and in acknowledging his achievements. European and world leaders as well as the pope acknowledged his many accomplishments.
Yet he spent the latter years of his life the subject of unrelenting attacks. With the exception of George Soros, there is probably no other individual who was such an effective lightning rod for disaffection from the hard left and the hard right. He was a very late adapter to social media and it was not a forum to which he paid too much attention. It is probably just as well. He wasn’t spared even in death.
The attention he received from the traditional media was much harder for him to ignore. Over the latter years of his life, he was the subject of a series of ad hominem attacks. Strangely, for somebody who championed free trade and open markets, he became something of a bête noire for the British right-wing press. The Daily Mail stuck the boot in on a number of occasions. In Ireland too there were a number of bruising encounters. Fintan O’Toole wrote two critical pieces about Sutherland, one in 2010 at the height of the financial crisis and one in the immediate aftermath of his death.
There were common themes to the attacks on Sutherland. In no particular order or ranking they were: That there were double standards between his highly lucrative business career and his public service, particularly in the area of migration. That he worked for Goldman Sachs. That he worked for BP. That he had been on the board of Royal Bank of Scotland when it had to be rescued. That he was partly responsible for Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump, because the type of globalisation he advocated fuelled rampant inequality in the developed world. That his zest for deregulation and support for the financial sector had contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008. That his failure to show leadership when he was chairman of AIB spawned a banking culture that seriously harmed the country. That the migration agenda he pushed had politically destabilising consequences for many countries.
Sutherland first entered the public eye during the Arms Trial in 1970. For the next forty-eight years until his death, he was never far from the public eye. His career was multifaceted. There were a number of high-powered positions across the public and private sectors. It would have been inconceivable for him not to have encountered controversies along the way. In some cases, criticism is merited; in others, not so. Very often there is a yawning chasm between the facts and supposition.
What is crucial to understanding Sutherland’s legacy is the changed landscape over the past decade. The tectonic plates have shifted. Before 2008, globalisation had its discontents, but Sutherland’s worldview broadly chimed with the prevailing economic orthodoxy in the West. The globalisation of trade in the 1990s presaged a period of unprecedented global prosperity. Traditionally left-wing and right-wing parties moved to the centre. Leaders eschewed ideology and instead focused on managing the economy and spreading the fiscal gains, although with more regard to the ballot box than to shaping society.
The collapse of the western economy in 2008 exposed the growth chimera of the previous decade. Wealth had very often been based on the accumulation of debt. During the recession, governments were forced to consolidate; the consequent painful belt-tightening caused a real drop in living standards for most countries, and for Irish people in particular.
Grievance with growing inequality – real or otherwise – has only heightened the level of disaffection. Globalisation has pitted communities that have lost out to lower-cost locations against alleged elites.
Since the economic downturn, there has been a backlash against globalisation, migration, Europe and big business – the financial sector in particular. Sutherland was associated with all of these. It was inevitable that he would become a bogeyman. But many of the charges laid against him need to be put in context.
For example, what about the claim that if he had intervened in the DIRT scandal it might have changed the course of Irish banking and steered it on a more virtuous path? The scandal was indeed a shameful episode in Irish banking. But AIB was rumbled. It was hauled over the coals in a very high-profile Public Accounts Committee investigation. Findings were made against individuals. The bank had to pay over €90 million in restitution, and public opprobrium was heaped upon it. Politicians lined up to give it a kicking.
The Irish Central Bank pledged that nothing like this would happen again – except it did, with far more devastating consequences. The banking sector brought the country to the brink of national bankruptcy. There was a change of personnel at executive level across all the banks, and public acts of contrition. And yet over the past few years there has been the tracker mortgage scandal. Roughly 40,000 customers have been either wrongly taken off or denied a tracker mortgage, which could cost the banks up to €1 billion in restitution and fines. In other words, only an appropriate regulatory framework and a sufficiently robust regulator will keep banks on the straight and narrow.
The light-touch approach to regulation, which Ireland heartily embraced in the early 2000s along with a raft of other countries, was a central component in the subsequent economic crash. It was a political choice made by a Fianna Fáil government which won three successive elections based largely on its management of the economy. Sutherland, moreover, was chairman of AIB, not an elected public official. His job was to do what was in the best interests of the bank. He was given information that the DIRT issue had been resolved through an agreement with Revenue. It is highly unlikely that any chairman in existence would have insisted that the bank instead pay a €100 million liability and make a public act of contrition when no arm of the state, and certainly not Revenue, was looking for such a move.
That is not to say Sutherland is without blame. Not only was he chairman of AIB when the DIRT scandal was in full flow, he was a board member of RBS when the bank had to be bailed out by the British taxpayer, and chairman of Goldman Sachs when the bank was charged in 2010 with securities fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in relation to the subprime crisis. There was never any evidence of Sutherland’s culpability or impropriety, but as an executive he shares responsibility.
However, there is little evidence that Sutherland favoured the sort of casino capitalism that wreaked so much damage. The EU has introduced a series of reforms over the past few years in the area of banking and has achieved much closer fiscal union. If these reforms had been introduced in Ireland and elsewhere a decade earlier, then the worst ravages of the financial crisis could have been avoided. Sutherland was always an enthusiastic supporter of this sort of integration.
He certainly believed in competition and open markets, but he believed too in fair trade. More than any other European commissioner he dismantled barriers to competition across the EU which helped develop the single market. The vision for the EU is closely aligned with the centre-right European People’s Party, the largest bloc in the European Parliament. To take aim at that is a political charge.
Take, for example, the claim that as an Irishman he failed to show leadership when it mattered, with grave consequences for the governance of the country. It is important to note that apart from the role of attorney general, Sutherland never held public office in Ireland. From January 1985 onwards, he contributed to public life solely on a voluntary basis. People were free either to take heed of his public pronouncements or to ignore them.
Sutherland was a fiercely proud Irishman, whose success never diminished his Irishness. He was motivated by the best of intentions. He cared passionately about Ireland. He wanted the best for his country. He believed the only way Ireland could emerge from the economic crisis was if it recognised the importance of fiscal consolidation. However, in an era of austerity, anybody who had risen as high in the corporate world as Sutherland was going to be a target. He recognised that belatedly.
For the last decade of his life he showed immense leadership with respect to one of the most crucial issues of these times. It was Sutherland, possibly more than any other individual, who improved the lives of migrants and fought tirelessly to alleviate their plight. He cajoled governments into action. He committed his own money to the cause. He didn’t do this because he had a successful business career. He did so because it was consistent with his personal values. He believed in the free movement of goods and people in a regulated environment.
The type of globalisation that he helped shape lifted 500 million people out of poverty. It is true that in the last years of his life, there was a backlash against Europe and globalisation. Perhaps he was naive about the impact of globalisation. But again, it would be fanciful to pin the pitfalls of globalisation on the shoulders of one man. Globalisation created wealth. It was up to governments to use the proceeds to ensure that developed countries could adjust and compete in the new world. They didn’t. That is why Donald Trump became the forty-sixth President of the US.
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Assessing Sutherland’s legacy will take time. The things about which he felt most passionately are still a work in progress. What can be said with certainty is that it is unlikely that any Irish person will match his achievements again.
A memorial day for Sutherland was held at the Sutherland Law School in UCD on 29 March 2018. Former colleagues and friends gathered to pay tribute to him. Bill Swing, the head of the IOM, flew in from New York for the day. ‘In the field of migration, Peter Sutherland will be remembered as a giant. And I shall remember him as a faithful friend and a companion in arms in a noble fight for the rights of migrants. If migrants’ lives, rights and prospects are better in future years than they are today, if fewer migrants die in the sands of the Sahara or in the depths of the Mediterranean, this will be due largely to Peter Sutherland and his great humanity, compelling advocacy and strategic thinking.’
Others have spoken about Sutherland’s legacy – not just the one he leaves to the world, but also on a more personal level. For Roddy Kennedy, he still has a great deal of respect and affection for Sutherland. ‘I admired him for his kindness and his sense of humour, which came into play even at the trickiest of moments. He was deeply regarded by everyone who worked with him. All of the secretaries and personal assistants he had at BP and Goldman Sachs flew to Dublin at their own expense for his funeral.’
Adrian Jones has said that Sutherland had a hugely positive impact on his life. ‘For him to take such a personal interest in me was incredible. We would have dinner every couple of weeks. We had a very nice, easy relationship. He was a fundamentally decent human being. He was highly moral and extraordinarily loyal. I spent time with men his age who had gone to school with him who were up the creek. He was helping sort their finances. He had a loyalty to his faith. The migration role was a gift to him. It allowed him to use his talents in an area that he felt passionately about. I think he felt hurt and frustrated in the negativity he faced. I think he felt his voice was stymied by the fact that he was now a very wealthy man. He was frustrated by that. Just as he was by the tribalism and the peevishness of the Irish press. He would work through it and move on. It is how you deal with people. There was a moral compass at his core and he never compromised that.’
Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh had a working and personal relationship with Sutherland for over thirty-five years: ‘My personal view is that Peter was one of the most morally upright people I have ever met. There was a deep, deep morality to the man and a deep concern for humanity.’
In an interview with the UCD magazine in 2010, Sutherland said the most important thing in life to him was that he was a good husband and father. According to his son Shane, Sutherland achieved this – and then some. ‘When he was around we always felt safe. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for us. He meant the world to us.’