Suds never once squandered his opportunities or his talents
Mourners heard how the top global figure in politics and finance was tolerant and generous, writes Liam Collins
Sutherland has been called ‘the father of globalisation’ but he was also a strong advocate for unrestricted immigration into the EU
PETER Sutherland, as chairman of petroleum company BP, was sitting beside China’s Jiang Zemin in 1994 during what was scheduled to be a 10-minute photo-call, when they began talking about books to break the ice.
“Some books are so satisfying, you don’t have to eat anything after reading them,” remarked the then Chinese president through an interpreter. “Please, Mr President, can you give me the name of those books, my wife would be very interested in getting them for me,” replied the rotund Mr Sutherland. The Chinese president broke out laughing and they talked for two hours. But crucially, once he got back home, Sutherland had a book the president mentioned but couldn’t read because it was printed only in English translated into Mandarin and sent to the president as a present.
“Peter made and kept friends in UCD school, the Law Library, politics and business,” former school friend and Judge Garrett Sheehan told the congregation containing the serried ranks of all those institutions at Mr Sutherland’s funeral in Donnybrook Church.
Among those in attendance were President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the former prime minister of Italy Mario Monti, president of the Irish Rugby Football Union Phil Orr, Chief Justice Frank Clarke and current Attorney-General Seamus Woulfe.
Peter Sutherland — or Suds, as he was widely known to friends — was a successful barrister, twice attorney general, an “outstanding” EU commissioner, chairman of Allied Irish Banks, first director-general of the World Trade Organisation, and chairman of Goldman Sachs International for 20 years.
“When he was young, if Suds saw something he wanted he would go for it and would get it,” said Fr Noel Barber SJ, who first met him as a fourth-class student and celebrated his Requiem Mass last Thursday. He added that the extent of Sutherland’s philanthropy would never be known and a special message of condolence from Pope Francis was read out before the conclusion of the ceremony.
Peter Sutherland died last Sunday, January 7, 2018, in St James’s Hospital, Dublin, after a heart attack and fall on his way to Mass in London on a Sunday morning in September 2016, from which he never recovered. He was 71.
Born on April 25, 1946, Peter Denis Sutherland was the eldest son of a prosperous insurance broker, Billy Sutherland and his wife, Barbara. He grew up in The Hill, Monkstown, Co Dublin, with his two sisters Jill and Karen and his brother David, who died in 2006. He was educated by the Jesuits at the preparatory and senior schools in Gonzaga College in Ranelagh and as a result remained a committed Catholic and devoted rugby enthusiast for the rest of his life.
He studied law at University College Dublin where he captained the rugby team and was regarded as “pugnacious” on and off the pitch and later played with Lansdowne RFC. He studied law at King’s Inns after which he devilled for Harry Hill, who predicted “Sutherland is going to the top”. He was called to the Bar in 1969.
“Of course it is very difficult to see oneself, but I never thought of myself as pushy,” he once said. “I got important legal briefs at the Bar — not because I was out looking for them or, as one paper suggested, through my family. They came mainly through my own college and sporting connections. Mind you, I don’t pussyfoot around when I am in court, that’s true. I am tough in debate.”
He met “the love of my life” Maruja Cabria Valcarcel at a dance in Belvedere rugby club and they married in September 1971. They had three children — Shane, Ian and Natalia — who grew up in the family’s Victorian home on Eglinton Road, Donnybrook. He also regarded himself as “an honorary Spaniard” by marriage and kept a home there. “To us he was never a globe-trotting businessman, he was our loving father,” said his son Shane. “No matter where he was in the world he would phone every day, beginning the conversation with: ‘Well?’”
He referred to the devotion his mother and father had for each other for almost 50 years. “He would not have achieved what he did without Maruja,” said Judge Sheehan in his eulogy. “Her love was critical to his many accomplishments and he delighted in his children and grandchildren.”
Peter Sutherland was close to Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald and was a particular favourite of his wife, Joan. He later regarded failing to get elected to the Dail as a Fine Gael candidate in the Dublin North West constituency in 1973 as a lucky break (he polled 1,969 votes). “It would have changed my life if I got into the Dail, I would have given up everything.”
He was appointed a Senior Counsel in 1980 and the following June 1981 he was appointed attorney general in FitzGerald’s government, which lasted from June 1981 to March 1982. Apart from a large oil painting of himself, his study contained a framed photograph of that Cabinet — indicating how proud he was of his achievement in becoming the youngest AG in the history of the State. When FitzGerald was re-elected Taoiseach in December 1982, Sutherland was re-appointed to the post, a position he held until December 1984.
“He was one of the most attractive characters around the Cabinet table,” said fellow Cabinet member Gemma Hussey, who praised his ability to get to the point concisely. He was also unusual in modern times in that he continued to practise at the Bar — and other government ministers were astonished to find him sometimes conducting legal consultations in an antechamber off the Cabinet room.
As attorney general he unsuccessfully opposed the wording of the Eighth Amendment, giving equal rights to the mother and her unborn child. “It was unfair, it was unclear and ambiguous and too open to extreme interpretation, I don’t take much satisfaction from being proved right,” Sutherland said later, when it gave rise to the X Case.
When in 1985 he was appointed Ireland’s EU Commissioner, instead of a round of celebrations he began immediately brushing up on his French and Spanish and took a crash course in German. He then arranged to meet the other commissioners before taking up his post in Brussels.
“At a lunch in the St Stephen’s Green Club he told me that if any cliques were forming, he was going to be in the most important one,” said Judge Sheehan.
He was put in charge of Competition Policy under Jacques Delors. Not only was Sutherland then the youngest-ever commissioner, but he quickly became one of the most influential figures in Brussels — and the Sutherland Report on the completion of the internal market was regarded as a blueprint for the development of the EU.
On leaving the commission in 1989, he returned briefly to the Irish Bar before he was appointed chairman of Allied Irish Banks, regarded by many as the pinnacle of corporate achievement. He was chairman of the bank during 1990/91 when it became embroiled in what would later become known as “the Dirt scandal” when the Sunday Independent revealed that the bank had €600m worth of bogus non-resident accounts on its books — all maintained by Irish residents who claimed to be living abroad in order to avoid paying Dirt tax.
Mr Sutherland managed to sort out what was an ugly internal situation and after “sealing in the smell” (as one observer put it) he resigned from the board in 1993 to pursue international interests.
He became directorgeneral of the world trade talks, known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and now known as the World Trade Organisation. Under his stewardship the Uruguay Round — the biggest international trade agreement ever negotiated — was concluded, with Sutherland using his unrivalled connections with presidents, prime ministers and other influential figures to get the agreement over the line.
This led to him being described by the American politician Mickey Kantor as “the father of globalisation”. Perhaps referring to this and comments made in the wake of Sutherland’s death, Fr Barber told the congregation at his funeral Mass: “Perhaps his enthusiasm for the real benefits of globalisation may have obscured his view of the downside, but he rightly emphasised its benefits to the poorer countries of the world.”
If he appeared to live a gilded corporate life it was nothing to what was to come, when in 1995 he was appointed chairman of Goldman Sachs International, a subsidiary of the international financial services company. When it was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1998 he is believed to have made £70m. He was also cochairman of the oil giant BP when it joined Amoco in the biggest industrial merger of the time.
However, he was also asked to resign as a director of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) after it was bailed out by the British government as a result of the disastrous £71bn purchase of ABN Amro. Sutherland said the deal was concluded “when the world was falling off the back of a bus”.
Peter Sutherland was also chairman of The Ireland Fund of Great Britain from 2001 to 2009; he was a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation; chair of the London School of Economics Council; and served on the advisory board of the University of Navarra in Spain.
In January 2006, he was appointed by UN General Secretary Kofi Annan as Special Representative for Migration.
A strong advocate for unrestricted immigration into the European Union, in 2012 he wrote: “Mainstream politicians, held hostage by xenophobic parties, adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric to win over the fearful public while the foreign born are increasingly marginalised in schools, cities and the workplace.”
In one interview, he described Ireland’s response to the Syrian migration crisis as “pathetic”.
“He was a force for good on every board that he served, his lamp was always lighting, he did not squander his opportunities or talent,” said Judge Sheehan in his eulogy. “He brought all of those qualities to the migrant crisis, visited camps in Europe and around the world, he no longer belonged to himself, he was constantly searching for a way to improve their situation.”
During the banking and construction crisis of 2009, he became a staunch supporter of the beleaguered Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan and publicly encouraged “brave little Ireland” not to renege on the national debt. He was one of the few people Lenihan told of his terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer shortly before Christmas 2011.
He was also a member of the Bilderberg Group, honorary chairman of the Trilateral Commission and vice-chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists. In 2004, he was awarded an Honorary Knighthood by Queen Elizabeth and he was awarded a long litany of doctorates and honours from universities and corporate bodies at home and abroad.
Despite these, he told one interviewer: “I would like my legacy to be that I was a good father.”