How party politics blocked Sutherland becoming Ireland ’s firstpresid entof the EU Commission
ALBERT Reynolds had dozed off in the car, despite the motorcycle outriders’ flashing lights and blaring sirens. The Greek security guards had despatched his car, and that of Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, from the luxury Achellion Hotel, on the sweltering island of Corfu.
But half-a-mile down the road, the limousines were called back. When Mr Reynolds groggily got out of his car, it took him some minutes to realise he was back at the EU summit centre.
It was approaching midnight on June 24, 1994, and the EU leaders were deadlocked over the choice of a successor for Commission president Jacques Delors. Over the previous decade, Mr Delors had transformed his job into one of the most powerful in the western world.
After an inconclusive vote, the summit chairman, ailing 75-year-old Greek prime minister Andreas Papapdreou, had promptly left. Everyone else assumed this meant proceedings were over for the evening.
But Greek foreign minister Theodoros Pangalos took the chair amid some chaos. The departing leaders were stopped and the pair who had already left were summoned back.
Much good it all did. The summit that night, and again the following day, remained deadlocked as British prime minister John Major held to his veto on the appointment of Belgian premier Jean-Luc Dehaene, even though the reluctance of Netherlands, Spain and Italy had been overcome.
Major’s obduracy was fuelled by the Eurosceptics in his own British Conservative Party. Dehaene was deemed “too federalist and too interventionist” and Major was too vulnerable at home.
The deadlock meant the vaguely mooted candidature of Ireland’s Peter Sutherland for the job became more real.
In the following days, signals from several other EU member states, notably Italy and Spain, were that they would back Sutherland, recent hero and leader of successful world trade talks, and a highly rated former EU commissioner.
But for Sutherland to get the presidential job, he would first have to be an EU commissioner, in practice nominated by Ireland.
The sitting Irish EU commissioner, Pádraig Flynn, could have been recalled. He and other Commission members had only been appointed for an interim two-year term from January 1993 as part of the EU changing its structures. But Irish party politics were heavily at play here as Albert Reynolds headed a Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition alongside Dick Spring. Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had always steadfastly seen the EU commissioner appointment as a big political plum to be kept within their own party ranks.
The party politics of the issue in June 1994 were even more heavily loaded and personal. Reynolds’s loyal backer Flynn had been firmly promised a further five-year term after the initial two years expired in January 1995.
Equally, Labour was not at all keen on Sutherland after contacts in two coalitions with Fine Gael in the early 1980s when he was a Fine Gael-appointed Attorney General. And Labour was extremely happy to have Flynn in Euro-exile.
If Flynn was to be recalled, there was even a Labour nightmare scenario of his being appointed to the Seanad and being parachuted back into cabinet.
Fianna Fáil and Labour had diverse reasons to dislike and dismiss the prospect of Sutherland for EU Commission president. They had successfully lobbied for him to become GATT world trade head a year earlier, a job in which he had shone. But this one was a nonstarter.
Both Reynolds and Dick Spring always and ever insisted that Sutherland was not a serious runner for the EU Commission job – and they cast doubt on the level of other member states’ backing for him.
They each brushed aside loud calls from Fine Gael leader John Bruton and Mary Harney of the Progressive Democrats for the coalition parties to “rise above party politics”.
Reynolds offered to make a gesture to break the EU deadlock. He would offer Sutherland as a candidate, but he would also offer Flynn and former commissioner Ray MacSharry.
Had Ireland chosen to lobby hard for Sutherland, it could have succeeded. In fact it eventually went to the hitherto unheard of Luxembourg premier Jacques Santer. His term was singularly unsuccessful and ultimately the entire Commission had to resign in March 1999 after a huge row over financial mismanagement.
THERE is a nice twist to the ending here. The year 1994 closed with a surprise change to a Fine Gael-led Rainbow government and there were some days of speculation that the Rainbow would oust Pee Flynn after all. But the EU Commission presidency issue had been settled and Fine Gael did the “decent thing” and renewed Flynn’s term for five years.
Despite his poor image at home, Flynn did a good job in Brussels, advancing EU social policy and quietly advocating for Ireland on EU grant aid allocations and on farming policy.
But Sutherland as EU Commission president could have dialled down British Euroscepticism as an English-speaker and a pragmatic lawyer from the common law tradition.
An Irish person has never held the prestigious post before or since.