This starts with an examination of the perennially destructive Peter Sullivan. about whom in his many profitable reincarnations I have expended much time and energy in the last 20 years. This brings the unsavoury story up-to-date.
But then MES turns to the complete rejection by Brussels of the vast majority of Ireland’s submissions on the content of the Treaty itself. Almost all of these objections could have been made (were they?) by Britain too. They are fundamental and principled objections but so low have politicians’ morals sunk that despite being totally snubbed the same politicians have recommended the treaty’s acceptance with only the fig leaf of a handful of unenforceable promises in exchange.
Ireland doesn’t count in Brussels and now the Irish must know it! Britain doesn’t count either but we have a few more votes - as if they matter!
Christina
IRISH MAIL
7.9.09
Why even the Yes men should say no to a man with links to Libya
Mary Ellen Synon
STAY with me for five short hops, and I will take you from Colonel Gaddafi and Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to the ‘Ireland for Europe’ campaign and questions about who is backing this Yes propaganda outfit being run by Pat Cox. The connections will illuminate the sort of company with which the Yes campaign feels comfortable.
Start at one. The mass-murderer Megrahi has just been set free from prison in Scotland and returned to Libya.
Two, last week Jack Straw, the British Secretary of State for Justice, admitted for the first time that a Libyan oil deal with BP was an essential part of the government’s decision to include Megrahi in a prisoner transfer deal.
Three, the oil deal was worth $900million (E630m) and struck with BP six weeks after Megrahi was included in the prisoner transfer agreement. A report in the British Press at the weekend said that BP had warned the British government that the failure to include Megrahi in the deal could damage BP’s interests, but BP denied actually mentioning Megrahi by name.
Four, up until last Tuesday, the chairman of BP was Peter Sutherland. In 2004, Sir Mark Allen, a Middle East expert, resigned from the British intelligence service MI6 to join Mr Sutherland’s BP for £200,000 (E230,000)a year. Six months before joining BP, Sir Mark chaired a secret meeting with Colonel Gaddafi’s spy chief in London, which included discussion of the Megrahi case. It turns out it was Mr Sutherland’s ex-spook who then lobbied the British justice secretary. He urged his old friend Mr Straw to speed up an agreement over prisoner transfers, which had been expected to lead to Megrahi’s return, to avoid jeopardising a trade deal with Libya worth up to £15billion (E17bn) to Mr Sutherland’s BP.
Five, Mr Sutherland is a patron of Ireland for Europe, of which Pat Cox is campaign director. The organisation’s website does not disclose the extent or source of its funding nor whether Mr Sutherland has contributed financially to the cause.
Me, personally, the only way I could stay in a room with someone who worked to get a deal worth billions resulting in the release of the man who killed 270 men, women and children in a fireball over Scotland is if I were wearing the kind of kit you’d wear to unclog London sewers.
However, Mr Cox and his Yes-to-Lisbon colleagues appear not to mind the smell coming off the BP recently-ex-chairman. I suppose that since Mr Sutherland is now one of the richest bankers on the planet Mr Cox is willing to hold his nose. That is the sort of pass you can get when you are also chairman of Goldman Sachs International, part of the globally-greedy Goldman’s which has famously and accurately been denounced in America as ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. Perhaps, since Mr Cox is a professional Brussels lobbyist running two lobbying firms which he has kept unregistered, maybe he doesn’t notice the smell.
Now, this Libya-Sutherland-Yes lobby connection should have been spotted long ago. I only spotted it when a No-to-Lisbon friend pointed out what the blogger CookieMonster wrote about it on politics.ie.
Until now I have been viewing Mr Sutherland just as a representative for Goldman’s and their tarnished reputation. And I do not forget his history as anon-executive director and member of the remuneration committee of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You will remember Mr Sutherland’s RBS committee: it allowed Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive, to walk away from the wreck of the bank with a pension of £703,000 (E837,000) a year.
It was the blogger who showed me I now have to see Mr Sutherland also as someone who is happy for his firm to deal with Libyan killer, Colonel Gaddafi, the man who provided the Provos with all that Semtex. But as CookieMonster says: ‘We won’t be seeing the Prime Time “Citizen Sutherland” programme, and we won’t be seeing any of this reported in the Irish Times, and we won’t see any Yes-siders spitting feathers about having Peter Sutherland, chairman of the prisoner release-profiting BP, on their side.’
Which is not to say that the Yes campaign isn’t fastidious in its own way about just whom they believe should be allowed to join in the Lisbon debate. Yesterday in the Irish edition of the News of the World, the Defence Minister, Willie O’Dea, told the London-based Open Europe think tank to ‘butt out’ of the Lisbon debate here.
He was reacting to research just released by Lorraine Mullally, director of Open Europe, which showed that during negotiations on the original text of the Lisbon Treaty, between 2002 and 2004, the Irish government objected to many of the treaty’s most important elements – but failed in the overwhelming majority of the amendments it tried to make to the text.
According to the research, Dick Roche, the Government’s representative to the European Convention, made 149 proposed amendments, but only 36 resulted in changes to the text, meaning three out of four attempts by Ireland to get the text changed failed.
This wasn’t minor stuff that the convention ignored. Mr Roche objected to the appointment of a permanent EU president. He wanted to stick with the present rotating presidency, and who can blame him: at least under the pre-Lisbon system, Ireland was sure to take the presidency eventually.
Mr Roche also wanted to stick to the present voting arrangement, but failed. Now the new voting weights will dilute Ireland’s power to influence or block legislation. According to Open Europe’s research, Mr Roche opposed many of the moves to abolish the national veto, including in the area of social security policy, on EU definitions of criminal offences and sanctions, on decisions relating to the European Defence Agency, and much else. He failed to change the text on these and other issues. Because of Mr Roche’s failures, Lisbon will now abolish our national veto in 60 areas of policy.
Mr Roche also failed to stop the creation of a European Public Prosecutor, even though the official Irish position was that there was ‘no convincing or compelling case’ for one and that the proposed arrangements ‘do not respect the different legal traditions of the Member States.’ Mr Roche and the Government also failed in their attempt to let national parliaments have a say in the election of the Commission President.
And on and on, and you can only admire the depth of research Open Europe is willing to put into this issue. However, all Mr O’Dea can say to Open Europe and Miss Mullally is, ‘Butt out,’ and claim they form some part of a British tradition of underestimating the Irish people. Note first of course that Mr O’Dea did not dispute the findings of the Open Europe research, all of which show how absurd it is for the Government to pretend we have some great influence in shaping the future of the EU. We don’t.
All Mr O’Dea offered by way of reply to the research was an attempt to paint Miss Mullally and her works ‘British’ and therefore be ignored. Yet of course Miss Mullally is Irish, with family in Dublin. And Open Europe itself is full of people from different European nationalities.
More than that, you would have thought a Fianna Fáil man such as Mr O’Dea would have recognised the name. Miss Mullally is the grand-daughter of the late Martin Mullally, a Drangan, Tipperary man and a founder member of An Bord Bainne.
This Irish-speaking Mullally grandfather also fought in the War of Independence as a member of the 7th Battalion of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the IRA. Between 1919 and 1924, he was in and out of nine jails, took part in two hunger strikes, one in the Curragh and the other alongside Terence MacSwiney in Cork.
Miss Mullally’s family is run-through with men who fought for the Republic – and indeed helped build Fianna Fáil. Her great-uncle James served with republican forces in the Civil War, and was later appointed first secretary of the Fianna Fáil cumann in Drangan. Yet all Mr O’Dea can say to this Irishwoman is, ‘Butt out.’
He’d rather get butt in with Peter Sutherland. He may have to wait his turn, of course. Mr Sutherland is busy being butt in with Colonel Gaddafi.
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