Brigid Laffan is currently Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Director of the Global Governance Programme and of the European Governance and Politics Programme at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. She was previously Professor of European Politics at University College Dublin. While she was there she was Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences.

Brigid Laffan Photo: European University Institute

She also is an organiser of the annual State of the European Union conference in Florence, which has a high power guest list including the president of the European Commission, president of the European Council and president of the European Parliament.

She was the founding director of the Dublin European Institute and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was a member the Fulbright Commission and has been awarded the UACES Lifetime Achievement Award, the THESEUS Award for outstanding research on European Integration, and she’s received the Ordre national du Mérite from the President of the France.

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I just want to follow up on a couple of the things that Brigid said there. The first point to address is where she said that she wasn’t giving me ‘permission’ to use the interview. That has no validity whatsoever. I told her very clearly that I was recording an interview for the podcast, and even if I didn’t, I don’t need permission from her or anyone else to do so. I can think of a lot of politicians who would like to withhold permission to report some things they had said. We don’t have very robust media independence in Ireland, but we’d have none at all if anyone could veto coverage of themselves.

But on the substantive point, the Santer Commission, which resigned en masse in 1999, in my view is a very relevant topic for discussion because the method of nominating commissioners has not substantially changed since. Each government chooses one politician who they send to become a commissioner, basically a Europe-wide minister for something in the way that Phil Hogan is the European Commissioner for Trade.

As I mentioned to Brigid, commissioners have immunity from prosecution for any crime in any EU country. That’s not so surprising when it comes to international officials like ambassadors, they couldn’t work in other countries if the host government could harass them with frivolous investigations every time they did something the host didn’t like.

But to get immunity in your home country, that’s extraordinary; it does happen to a limited extent in other countries, but it’s normally restricted to preventing legal cases regarding what they do in office – in this case it covers all crimes, including any that were committed before they got the job.

Brigid also wrankled at my mention of the corruption of Padraig Flynn, saying that his corruption was not related his work as a commissioner. That’s true, but think about that claim for a moment. Flynn was a corrupt politician, but it was OK for him to be a commissioner because he was already corrupt when he got the job, and we haven’t found any evidence that he used the commissioner job to enrich himself, as he had done when he was a national politician. Is that really where we are setting the bar?

And Brigid was flat wrong when she tried to suggest that the only thing wrong with the Santer Commission was that the French commissioner Édith Cresson gave a job to someone she was having an affair with. A later inquiry found that she quote “failed to act in response to known, serious and continuing irregularities over several years”. She was found guilty of hushing-up irregularities where vast sums of money went missing.

And it wasn’t just her and Flynn. There were serious allegations of corruption and incompetence against the Spanish commissioner Manuel Marín González as well.

But my real beef is not with the individuals, it’s with the system. We can take Flynn as an example, because we know how Irish politics works. He was appointed European commissioner by Albert Reynolds in 1992 – at the time Reynolds had only recently replaced Haughey as leader of Fianna Fáil and Reynolds was looking to shore up his power base. Flynn was a major political figure at the time, and in a position to make trouble Reynolds. Sending Flynn to a big job and a big salary Brussels was a good solution for that problem.

And there were rumours – which turned out to be true – of industrial-scale corruption at the top of Fianna Fáil. Everyone in political circles at the time knew that, at the very least, Flynn was a person of interest in that. So, again, sending him to a job where he had immunity from prosecution was a solution to a domestic political problem, rather than a high-minded appointment of the best person for the job.

Another nakedly political appointment was that of Richard Burke, by Charlie Haughey in 1982. Burke was a Fine Gael TD and, Haughey calculated, correctly as it turned out, that Fianna Fáil would win Burke’s seat in the resulting bye-election, shoring up Haughey’s minority government.

And Ireland is not unique in using plum jobs in Europe as a way to solve domestic political problems.

Brigid said that some fine individuals served as European commissioners, and that is certainly true, but some have been appointed for the wrong reasons, because the system incentivises that, and that is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Brigid is absolutely right that there are people out there trying to talk down the EU in an effort to destroy it. But the solution to that is not to hide or deny the problems; if you want the EU to thrive, the best thing to do is to shine a light on those problems, and solve them.

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