John Walsh - The Globalist

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © John Walsh 2019

Cover photograph © Getty

John Walsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008352127

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008327620

Version: 2020-08-28

For my wife Mary, my sons Hugh and Dominic,

and my parents, Tom and Maura.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

EARLY YEARS

1. Gonzaga and childhood in Monkstown

2. Student days at UCD

3. The Arms Trial

4. Fine Gael

PUBLIC OFFICE

5. The Eighth Amendment time bomb

6. The Troubles: negotiating the Anglo-Irish Agreement

7. Getting Competition: becoming a European Commissioner

8. Shaping EU competition policy

9. President of the European Commission?

10. Brokering the Uruguay Round and setting up the WTO

11. Globalisation and its discontents

CORPORATE CAREER

12. Allied Irish Bank: the DIRT scandal

13. Flying high – then crashing – with GPA

14. Goldman Sachs

15. Clipping Goodwin’s wings at RBS

16. The longest serving chairman

A SENSE OF DUTY

17. Migration: UN Special Representative

18. The biggest crisis of our time

19. A turbulent relationship with Ireland

20. Brexit: a nightmare unfolds

21. Faith and philanthropy

22. Family

23. Legacy

Picture Section

List of Illustrations

Appendices

Footnotes

Endnotes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

ON THE MORNING OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2016, Aseventy-year-old Irishman suffered a heart attack and collapsed on a footpath in London. He had been walking to mass, as he had done every Sunday throughout his life.

A number of people rushed to his aid. He was carrying no identification. During the nine minutes it took the ambulance to arrive, those who attended to the stricken man could scarcely have realised who lay before them.

It was Peter Sutherland. ‘The father of globalisation’ and ‘God’s Banker’ are among the soubriquets he had collected during his career. He was possibly the most influential Irish person ever and a key figure in world history over the past few decades.

In many ways, he was the personification of the changing relationship between Ireland and Britain. As a European commissioner for competition he had taken on the British government and prevailed. He would later become chairman of BP, one of the UK’s largest companies.

He operated at the heart of the British establishment, yet he remained an outsider. He was a fiercely proud Irishman. And even though his influence spanned continents, he never strayed too far from his roots.

PETER DENIS SUTHERLAND WAS BORN INTO Aprosperous family in Dublin on 25 April 1946. His parents, Billy and Barbara, lived on The Hill in Monkstown, a middle-class village in south Dublin. Ireland had remained neutral during the Second World War, but memories of two painful conflicts that marked the birth of the Irish state over twenty years before were still an open sore; the country was economically underdeveloped and would remain so for another five decades. But Dublin retained characteristics of its former imperial past. There was the city’s grandeur, its private schools and private clubs. This was the Dublin into which Sutherland was born, and which would mould his formative years.

Peter had two sisters, Karen and Gill, and a younger brother, David, who predeceased him in 2006. But it was his father who was a strong and enduring influence on his life. Billy Sutherland – along with the father of Peter Mathews, the late Fine Gael TD (Teachta Dála, a member of the Dáil) – was a partner in the insurance firm Mathews, Mulcahy and Sutherland.

William Sutherland and his two sons, William Jr (Peter’s great-grandfather) and George, arrived in Ireland from Wick in Scotland around 1850. They were coopers by trade. William Jr, a Scottish Presbyterian, married Sarah Cooke, a Roman Catholic in Dublin in 1857. Five years later the couple moved to Cork, and George followed his brother to the city, where the two of them opened their own businesses. Records from 1870 show that George was a fish merchant at The Coal Quay, while William is listed as a publican at 27 Cook Street. By 1880 – when William and Sarah had eleven children – William and George are both listed as fish merchants with substantial commercial and residential property in Lavitts Quay.

Between 1880 and 1887, William moved to Newcastle in England on his own. He returned to Sarah shortly before his death, whereupon he converted to Catholicism. Sutherland’s grandfather, also called Peter, was born in 1862. He moved to Dublin and became the Treasurer of Dublin City Council, marrying Mary Fitzpatrick in 1906. Sutherland’s father, William George Anthony, was born in 1914.

Sutherland was educated at Gonzaga College, a Jesuit school in the affluent Dublin neighbourhood of Ranelagh. Even though Gonzaga had only opened its doors in 1950 – four years before Sutherland started – it had already established itself as the school of choice for Ireland’s upper middle classes. It would soon eclipse the handful of other private schools in Dublin.

A former colleague of Sutherland’s at the Law Library who attended Blackrock College described Gonzaga as ‘Dublin 4 elitist … It had a “We will educate the next leaders of the state” mentality. Blackrock might have had pretensions but the Holy Ghost fathers were basically fellas building churches in Nigeria. There would have been a lot of boarders, farmers and merchants’ sons in Blackrock – the sort of boy you wouldn’t get at Gonzaga.’

Gonzaga profoundly shaped Sutherland. Colm Barrington – the son of Tom Barrington, the first director of the Institute of Public Affairs, and nephew of Donal Barrington, the former Supreme Court judge – was a contemporary of Sutherland’s at Gonzaga. They subsequently became good friends. According to Barrington the Gonzaga boys had no idea how cloistered their existence was, ‘because we didn’t know any different. The Jesuits would make you feel that you were special rather than privileged and that Gonzaga was special and that you would go on to do special things.’ Barrington said his father was at a parent-teacher meeting at which Garret FitzGerald, the former Taoiseach, asked Fr Hughes, the rector, if the school should put more emphasis on the sciences. Fr Hughes wryly responded that at Gonzaga ‘we teach our boys to be the leaders of scientists’. Gonzaga instilled in Sutherland a lifelong passion for learning, although according to his friends and former teachers, the acquisition of knowledge was not one of his main priorities for most of his time at the school.