Читать книгу The Globalist - John Walsh - Страница 11

SUTHERLAND HAD DISPLAYED VERY FEW POLITICAL inclinations while at UCD. In a choice between rubbing shoulders with the country’s future leaders at the L&H Society and playing rugby, the latter won out every time. But a successful career at the Bar hinges on vaulting ambition as well as cultivating the right sort of political ties. Ireland was a two-and-a-half-party state in the 1960s. For thrusting young barristers looking to make an impression, it was generally a choice between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The two parties dominated the Irish political landscape from the foundation of the state onwards. Fianna Fáil, for most of its existence, was a cultural movement more than an orthodox political party. It was nominally left of centre but, in reality, it attracted people from across the ideological spectrum. What united all of them was the party’s commitment to a united Ireland. Being sound on the ‘national question’ was a pre-condition for membership of the ‘Republican Party.’ Fine Gael was almost the mirror opposite. It was firmly centre right and had a natural antipathy to the sort of nationalism displayed by Fianna Fáil. Its membership tended to be big farmers and the middle classes.

Some young barristers opted for Labour, but their choice was motivated by ideology rather than ambition. Many people, including new entrants to the Bar, cleaved to one party or the other based on civil war considerations. Not so Sutherland. He came from a Fine Gael background, but not because it was the side his grandparents had taken during the foundation of the state.

Sutherland’s grandfather had been the treasurer for Dublin Corporation. When he died in 1921, the family were bereft. Sutherland’s grandmother went to W. T. Cosgrave, the Minister for Finance, and explained her family’s straitened circumstances. She was a qualified public health nurse and Cosgrave ensured that she was put on the public payroll. According to Sutherland, Cosgrave’s benevolence was one of the reasons why he was affiliated to Fine Gael. But then again, Fine Gael would probably have been a natural home for the Sutherlands. They were after all a prosperous south Dublin family.

Sutherland was also drawn to the party thanks to Declan Costello’s 1965 policy pamphlet, ‘Towards a Just Society’. Costello cited the grinding poverty and poor housing conditions in his Dublin North West constituency as one of the main reasons for writing the document. ‘Share the resources of economic recovery fairly and, when an ill wind blows, prioritise the protection of the weak and the vulnerable,’ was one of its main themes. In calling for much greater economic planning and more government intervention in the economy, it was an attempt to address the shortcomings of an increasingly sclerotic Irish state.

Garret FitzGerald also joined Fine Gael because of the pamphlet. FitzGerald, who had struck up a good rapport with Sutherland at UCD, was another Jesuit-educated middle-class boy from Dublin. His parents came from a mixed marriage: his mother, Mabel McConnell, was from Northern Ireland and had converted to Catholicism upon her marriage to Desmond FitzGerald, the Minister for External Affairs in the first Irish government.

A schism developed within Fine Gael around the late 1960s. A Dublin-centred liberal wing had formed around Costello, whereas a more rural, law and order wing remained loyal to party leader Liam Cosgrave. Sutherland and FitzGerald were firmly on the liberal wing, while future Taoiseach John Bruton was in the Cosgrave camp. According to party sources, Sutherland and Bruton, while very respectful of each other, never developed a close relationship. On the other hand, Sutherland’s relationship with FitzGerald, probably more than any other in his life, would have profound consequences. But then again, while he remained loyal, he was not unaware of FitzGerald’s otherworldliness.

‘All of us had an ambivalent relationship with Garret – he could drive you bananas,’ says Gemma Hussey, a former Fine Gael minister. ‘I mean I was a great friend and an admirer of Garret’s. He was a good, honest, clever internationalist, but he was very scattered. And he’d have his mind changed very easily.’ If she was going to meet FitzGerald about something, her husband Derry would tell her that it might be a good idea to find out who the last person FitzGerald had spoken to was, because that person would have changed his mind. ‘I think it probably drove Peter a bit mad.’

Sutherland decided to dip his toe into the bearpit of elected politics. Friends are divided as to whether by doing so he was merely laying down a marker to be used as leverage when Fine Gael got into government, or whether he was intent on pursuing a career in the Dáil. He ran for Fine Gael in Dublin North West in the 1973 general election. Comprising as it did the working-class areas of Ballymun and Cabra, this would have been far from his natural constituency. ‘I have often wondered why he did it,’ Gemma Hussey says. ‘But then you have to throw your mind back to the times.’ Sutherland, she believes, would have felt strongly that a Fianna Fáil government with Charles Haughey in its ranks would not be good for the country. ‘He did it out of a sense of duty. A lot of things that Peter did were out of a sense of duty, I think.’

Michael Sweetman had originally been selected to run for Fine Gael in Dublin North West. One of Ireland’s first committed Europhiles, Sweetman had spearheaded the 1972 referendum on Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community, having helped Declan Costello put together ‘Towards a Just Society’. Tragically Sweetman was one of twelve Irish businessmen killed in an air crash on 18 June 1972. The group, who were among the most prominent industrialists in the country, were on their way to Brussels to set up a bureau to lobby on behalf of Irish businesses following accession to the EEC. The plane went down near Staines, west of London, shortly after taking off from Heathrow. All 118 people on board were killed.

Mary Robinson, then a Senator, and Garret FitzGerald were among those who paid tribute to Sweetman. In many ways he had foreshadowed Sutherland – he had advised Fine Gael on Europe and Northern Ireland – so it was perhaps fitting that Sutherland should take his place in the election.

Costello had been the TD in Dublin North West from 1951 until 1969 when he stood down, although he contested the 1973 election in the Dublin South West. He would serve as attorney general in the Fine Gael–Labour coalition between 1973 and 1977, and as a judge in the High Court between 1977 and his retirement in 1998. According to Peter Prendergast, head of elections for Fine Gael in the 1973 election, the rationale for running Sutherland in Dublin North West was that the seat had been held for eighteen years by Costello, who was also a barrister and came from a similar social background to Sutherland. However, friends say Sutherland was well aware that his personal circumstances jarred with his putative constituency and that is why he put Carraig an tSionnaigh, the Irish version of his address, in his campaign leaflets to disguise the fact that he lived in Foxrock.

Hugh Byrne was Sutherland’s running mate. A somewhat eccentric character with colourful and controversial views, when François Mitterrand, the former French president, was on a visit to Ireland, the Department of Foreign Affairs was staggered and dismayed in equal measure that he wanted to meet Byrne, who he had met at a EU council meeting years earlier and found to be a very agreeable companion. ‘He was normally kept well away from civilised company,’ says one Fine Gael source.

In 1973 Byrne was a Fine Gael councillor in the area, with well-established links in the community: he was a GP and a member of the local boxing club. Although the odds were heavily stacked against him, Sutherland took the election very seriously. ‘Anybody who runs thinks they are in with a chance,’ says Prendergast. The constituency may not have been Sutherland’s natural territory, yet he took to the campaign trail with the same vigour he displayed on the rugby pitch. The dashing young barrister with an abundance of charm soon began to make an impact on the doorstep. One of the peculiarities of Irish politics is that there can often be more rivalry between party colleagues running in the same constituency than between candidates from opposing parties. The electoral system is based on multi-seat constituencies with TDs elected through a system of proportional representation by a single transferable vote. The logic is that there is a much better chance of unseating an opposing candidate in a subsequent election, than unseating a party colleague.

This particular dynamic has given the normal cut and thrust of electioneering an added edge. But even by the standards of campaign subterfuge that have prevailed in Ireland, what happened in Dublin North West in 1973 has attained a unique place in the pantheon of strokes and cute hoorism. Social media has raised (or lowered) the dark arts of campaign interference to a highly sophisticated level. Before the era of mass communications, however, political parties intent on undermining a rival candidate had to resort to much cruder tactics. Byrne’s camp, who as they entered the election had estimated Sutherland’s chances at somewhere between nil and zero, became alarmed at the feedback they were getting from the doorsteps.

Locals were taken with the handsome young barrister with the silver tongue. When moreover, rumours began to circulate that Sutherland had a beautiful and exotic wife, the Byrne camp collectively decided that a more interventionist approach to their party rival would have to be taken.

Sutherland spent one evening knocking on doors around Cabra, to a generally positive response. Meanwhile a team of volunteers in the Byrne camp had reputedly found a Nigerian student from the Trinity medicine faculty. Asked to accompany them to the same houses that Sutherland had visited the previous evening, she was introduced as Mrs Sutherland. The consensus formed among Byrne’s volunteers was that in early 1970s Ireland, proof of an interracial marriage was enough to break any fledgling political career.

Prendergast insists that Byrne had no direct role in the underhand tactic. But whether he played an indirect role remains one of the great unanswered questions in Irish political life. According to Nicholas Kearns, Byrne and Sutherland ‘were made for each other. He [Sutherland] wouldn’t have minded that. He would have expected it.’

In the event, Sutherland lost the election. He secured 1,969 votes, or 6.24 per cent of the votes cast and promptly lost his deposit. Overall, though, it was a respectable performance. He had come sixth out of ten candidates: Jim Tunney of Fianna Fáil came first, Byrne took the second seat, David Thornley of Labour took the third and Fianna Fáil’s Richard Gogan took the fourth. It was one of the few setbacks in Sutherland’s career. According to Garrett Sheehan, however, losing the election did not greatly distress him: ‘If it was a disappointment, it was a very brief one.’

Mark FitzGerald, Garret’s son and the owner of auctioneering firm Sherry FitzGerald, the biggest in the country (FitzGerald sold Sutherland’s Foxrock home when he moved to Sydney Avenue in Blackrock in 1976), had politics in his blood; indeed it was one of his main passions in life. In an illustration of the tight-knit social circles in Dublin, Mark FitzGerald first met Sutherland at a party thrown by the latter’s sister Karen in 1974. Mark, who was there with one of his good friends Gerry Sheehan, a younger brother of Garrett Sheehan, says that Sutherland harboured a desire to have another go at seeking election and that he probably regretted that the opportunity never arose, but his career took a different path. ‘But I think when he got involved later in life and the whole migration thing, the commitment to public service was definitely about that. His business career was about giving him the financial independence ultimately to go back into public service. That’s what I felt about him. That’s what my father felt about him,’ adds Mark.

Happenstance played a prominent role in Sutherland’s career trajectory. Exploring alternative scenarios in the lives of public figures can throw up some interesting counter-narratives, and in Sutherland’s case more than most. For example, what would have happened if Sutherland had been elected in 1973? One former colleague said he wouldn’t have had the patience to sit on the backbenches. It is also doubtful he would have relished the endless constituency clinics and funeral attendances required to ensure re-election. Nor, if elected, would he probably have become attorney general in the next Fine Gael government. And it was because of Fine Gael’s wafer-thin majority at the time that Sutherland got the nod to go to Brussels as Ireland’s European commissioner. That was the launch pad for international stardom. On the other hand, the one role Sutherland prized more than any other in his life was to become president of the European Commission. It is normally a pre-condition that candidates for this position have been elected to office.

When Fine Gael and Labour formed a coalition following the 1973 election, Sutherland went back to the Bar and worked on what was now a thriving practice. The next general election in 1977 was not a good one for Fine Gael; it went from fifty-five seats down to forty-three, while Fianna Fáil surged from sixty-five to eighty-four seats and was able to form a government. Liam Cosgrave stood down as leader of Fine Gael and was replaced by Garret FitzGerald.

Sutherland may have stood back from the political fray in the mid-1970s, but his relationship with the FitzGerald family blossomed over that period, Mark FitzGerald recalls. ‘They had a very close relationship and Peter and Maruja would have come to dinner a lot. They got on with my mother. Peter got on particularly well with my father, but my mother also. He was very close to my mother.’ Sutherland’s relationship with Joan FitzGerald would play a crucial role in one of his most important career moves.

The 1973–7 government contained some heavyweight figures. Garret FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs, Justin Keating Minister for Industry and Commerce. Michael O’Leary was appointed Minister for Labour, Conor Cruise O’Brien Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and Peter Barry Minister for Transport. Historians of that era generally agree that there has rarely been more intellectual heft sitting around a cabinet table. But that was too little to put the country on the right path. The government was a victim of unfortunate timing: Ireland had experienced a rare spurt of economic growth in the early 1970s, but by 1977, the oil crisis had tipped the economy back into recession. The government reconfigured every constituency boundary in the country in ways that allegedly benefited Fine Gael and Labour. Despite the best efforts of the coalition to rig the election in its favour, Fianna Fáil swept to a crushing victory.

After the 1977 election, Peter Prendergast took over as Fine Gael’s national secretary and initiated a party-wide restructuring. A steering committee was set up to formulate party policy, its members including Sutherland alongside Derry Hussey, Jim Mitchell, Peter Barry and some senior unelected party members. ‘Peter was a very valuable member, to put it mildly,’ says Gemma Hussey, who first got to know Sutherland around this time.

According to Prendergast, Fine Gael’s grassroots organisation was in a parlous state. A two-pronged strategy was proposed to put the party back in power. First was the establishment of structures that would put Fine Gael on a much more competitive footing before the next election. Running parallel to this process was the creation of a coherent policy platform. Sutherland was a key player in putting the party’s manifesto together. The preparation paid off: Fine Gael reversed many of its losses in the 1981 general election.

Brendan Halligan first met Sutherland in the late 1960s. An economist by education, Halligan had a lifelong association with the Labour Party. He was a TD, an MEP and the party’s secretary general over a period of three decades. Another committed Europhile, he set up the Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA), a think tank, in Dublin and developed a close personal and professional relationship with Sutherland. Halligan attributes Fine Gael’s success at this period to a particular skill: ‘There was a culture in Fine Gael of being extremely good at drafting, a combination of politics and law and sometimes economics. It was part of the organisational culture of Fine Gael that goes back to the foundation of the state. They did after all draft the first constitution.’

He continues: ‘The best drafter in the English language I have ever come across was Jim Dooge.’ Widely considered a polymath, Dooge served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1981; he was also an engineer, a climatologist and an academic. Halligan and Dooge had written Fine Gael and Labour’s joint 1973 manifesto together. ‘Then there was Alexis FitzGerald, whom I wrote the 1977 election manifesto with, and also Declan Costello. On top of that Garret FitzGerald was also very talented. Peter [Sutherland] was part of that culture,’ Halligan says.

It was a training that would serve Sutherland well in later years. His ability to draft a contract in a very short period of time saved the Uruguay Round of trade talks from collapsing at the eleventh hour.

Any time a new government is formed there is always intense speculation about the identity of the new cabinet, and 1981 was no exception. According to one senior legal source who was in the Law Library at the time, the expectation in legal circles was that Nial Fennelly would be appointed attorney general. A former Law Library colleague of Sutherland’s has said that ‘Fennelly’s reputation as a lawyer was superb and he went on to be advocate general in the Courts of Justice in Luxembourg and a Supreme Court judge, and an excellent Supreme Court judge at that. He was a top-class lawyer, one of Ireland’s best lawyers in the last forty years. So there probably was a little bit of surprise that – well, certainly the feeling was that Peter came on the outside and overtook Nial on the line.’

On 26 June 1981, Garret FitzGerald appointed Sutherland attorney general. Still only thirty-five, Sutherland was by far the youngest man to occupy the role in the history of the state, a record that still stands. At the time he was also the highest-earning barrister in the Law Library. ‘I suppose his name would have been in the ring but Peter wouldn’t have had a reputation for being a lawyer. His reputation was as an advocate. I suppose at that time the feeling was that somebody who had a very strong legal reputation would be the one who might go in as AG. Of course Peter was charming. He was excellent at tactics, he was a good advocate, he knew how to win, he knew how to campaign for something and therefore he obviously conducted a campaign for himself to become the attorney general, and he was successful,’ the same former Law Library colleague stated. But Sutherland mounted a very effective campaign. ‘He would have gone to every Fine Gael Árd Fheis [party conference]. He was deeply involved with the party in terms of putting policy together. He did the hard yards. Fennelly did not, and ultimately that was the difference between them.’

Fennelly declines to comment on whether he was linked to the post. But he says: ‘Don’t forget there is an unavoidable political element to the role. Peter was a good lawyer with good instincts. He wasn’t noted for his academic approach to the law. He wasn’t noted as a writer of learned articles. But the AG is the legal adviser to the government, and is equipped with an office staffed with experts. It wasn’t a surprise at the Bar. He was noted for being active in Fine Gael. Peter had huge political clout and had a huge self-confidence about him.’

According to Mark FitzGerald, his father was conscious of the fact that he had been elected Taoiseach for the first time at the age of fifty-five. And that is why he made a conscious decision to appoint as many young TDs to the cabinet as possible. Alan Dukes, Michael Noonan and John Bruton, who were all in their thirties, were given cabinet positions. It was in that spirit that he picked Sutherland, says FitzGerald, adding that his father was also conscious about promoting women into senior positions, but that in 1981 there was a dearth of suitable candidates. Eleven female TDs were elected to the 166-person chamber that year, and there was just one female TD in the cabinet: Eileen Desmond, the Labour Party Minister for Health.

‘Was Peter then natural choice as attorney general? Well, I think he was young to be attorney general and I don’t think it was necessarily an absolute given, but I think that the work Peter did with my father was very important. They quickly got themselves on a wavelength. My father was full of policy ideas and Peter was a pragmatist who could see how they could be executed, and the fact that they did that work on the manifesto showed the depth of his brain,’ says Mark.

It was certainly a bold move on his father’s part. According to Alan Dukes, the role would have been agreed between FitzGerald and Dick Spring, the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and leader of the Labour Party. ‘There was never any tension in government about Peter’s political background. The protocol with the AG is that he or she attends all cabinet meetings but speaks only when spoken to. It was obvious Peter had things to say outside the strict remit of the AG. He always managed a way of being requested to speak.’

Towards the end of the summer of 1981, when Sutherland was invited to speak to the Irish American Lawyers Association at a meeting in Dublin, he used the opportunity to address the issue of the need for constitutional change. He set out a clear manifesto calling for a thorough review of the constitution and for a programme of social and institutional change that would reflect and implement what was becoming, for some, the uncomfortable reality of plurality. A constitution ‘is made for people of fundamentally differing views’, according to Sutherland.

Pluralism, he said, was the essence of the Republican ideal; the state had an obligation to protect the rights of individuals in the context of diversity of belief and take cognisance of the rights and the sensibilities of non-nationalists in the North. The following is an edited extract of that speech:

Promote pluralism, reconciliation and peace; our constitution had provided stability and coherence to civic society and it had allowed it to flourish and to function.

But a constitution should not give cause for alienation; rather it should assist in the process of reconciliation. For fifty years, the Irish constitution had served us well, it had provided stability and coherence, based on the rule of law, but in the process it had, understandably, acquired an aura of immutability.

But it is vital that we did not permit our reverence for that authority to blind us to some of the inadequacies or shortcomings that were now becoming apparent as society developed and changed. Debate and an openness to change are positive for a democratic republic. The mystique and excessive reverence accorded an iconic text, such as a constitution, can only serve to damage its long-term sustainability and its integrity.

Informed and healthy debate ensures that the constitution remains a living, vital expression of the rights and liberties of each individual in the specific context of the complexity of their relationship with society. Debate protects the citizen just as it preserves the authority of the constitution.[1]

The speech generated significant publicity. In response, the Fine Gael–Labour coalition set up a constitutional review commission and a working group comprised of leading academic experts, together with a number of legal practitioners. The group met on a number of occasions. Having established its terms of reference and a work plan, it produced a series of detailed working papers in which consideration was given to areas of particular complexity such as citizen rights, the right of referral and review and the jurisdictional extent of the courts.

This presaged a decade of social, political and constitutional upheaval.