More Things That Are Wrong, just plain wrong

Tim_Riggins · November 9, 2015, 6:53pm

Which conspiracy website did you find all that nonsensical rubbish?

balbec · November 9, 2015, 6:57pm

Fiannafail.ie

Fagan_ODowd · November 9, 2015, 7:00pm

ironmoth:

Peter Sutherland - notes I’ve gathered over the years, and not my own views. All of this is well-documented online in text and interviews.

Staying away from his involvment in BP / Goldman Sachs and the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Disaster. That makes for truly unnerving reading.

Bare in mind that nobody gets into a senior level of government / corporation / military, unless they are regarded as a “safe pair of hands”

Irishman by accident of birth. He is an arch-globalist and is at the heart of globalism.

Peter Sutherland is an insider’s insider. He is on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, he is an Honorary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission (2010-present), he was Chairman of the Trilateral Commission (Europe) (2001–2010) and Sutherland was Vice Chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists (2006–2009). Sutherland was also the former head of the World Trade Organization and the related GATT. Sutherland is the ultimate insider.

He has manipulated events that have brought about the absolute demise of Ireland as a Sovereign State.

He has gone on record to say that “the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine” any “sense of our homogeneity and difference from others”.

Meeting of Sept. 2008 – Dermot Gleeson, Chairman AIB; Paul Gallagher, AG; Brian Cowan and Brian Lenihan – 2 Bilderbergers and 2 politicians. Sutherland most likely behind it (his marks all over it) and instructed Gleeson and Gallagher to instruct Cowan and Lenihan to underwrite all the liabilities and the assets of the Irish banks by the Irish taxpayer. For 6 months that seemed like a good idea, but to anybody who knew what was going it was the death-knell of the Irish economy.

Ireland today is nothing more than a colony of the EU.

Brian Lenihan – in early 2009 – said that because of Ireland’s dire financial situation, we need 200,000 people to leave the country. Closer to 500,000 young people have left.

The goal was to depopulate Ireland so the globalists could come into Ireland and pillage the phenomenal natural resources that sit within Irish territorial waters.

Ireland’s territorial waters, which extend 200 miles beyond its borders) account for 23% of all the EU’s territorial waters. (Norway is not part of the EU).

Another example of the destruction of the National economy

The Irish fishing waters were sold to the EU for a one-off payment of €6bn. Today, Ireland can fish 15% of its own territorial waters. The rest is open to the EU fishing fleet.

Raymond Crotty – farming in Kilkenny in the late 60s / early 70s, and he could see that the common agricultural policy of the EU was going to destroy Irish farming. He went to University and studied Agricultural Economics, because he realised that nobody was going to listen to a farmer from Kilkenny. With all the EU subsidies, farmers were getting incredibly lazy – they were not rotating crops, etc. – and that within a few generations Ireland was going to become a net importer of food. Crotty was vilified in Ireland and spent a lot of his career working with people in Latin America and the Far East. He must also be remembered as the man who gave the Irish people referenda on whether or not to remain in the EU. Crotty understood that one of the main aims of the EU was subjugate sovereign nations. In 1986 (Crotty v. An Taoiseach) he took the Irish Government to court for their attempt to hand power to the EU without putting it to the people.

That’s nuts in fairness. Sutherland is clearly one of the illuminati and part of an international Masonic conspiracy but a lot of the stuff you have posted there is just paranoid supposition.

ironmoth · November 9, 2015, 7:17pm

Clearly. All of the above was told to me in confidence by my good friends Jim Corr and Alex Jones. Thanks for pointing out my paranoia on the internet. It takes e-pals to keep a chap in line.

ironmoth · November 9, 2015, 7:22pm

I looked up “conspiracy” in the dictionary and there was a picture of Jim Corr. But Jim Corr was holding up a picture of Peter Sutherland. I shit you not.

KinvarasPassion · November 10, 2015, 6:32am

This yoke was seen off Bellmullet again this week

ironmoth · November 10, 2015, 6:41am

Don’t upset the status quo with your conspiracy rubbish. That vessel is only looking to get a few hundred kilos of pollock for a small Lithuanian village. It is being operated on a not-for-profit basis and we could send them a message on facebook chat at any time and ask them to leave. The EU is 100% positive. Sutherland is a nice man. He’s probably volunteering on board to help them make fish fingers for hungry children in that small Lithuanian village.

caoimhaoin · November 10, 2015, 8:36am

You are very naive sometimes for a smart individual. Has history not shown you that fact is often alot stranger than fiction and that power hungry unscrupulous people just get worse and worse and greedier and greedier?

I’m assuming you have met plenty, but have you ecer sat down and talked to either these really powerful well to do fellas and/or politicians? After a few drinks many are well able to expose themselves and give you a real insight into themselves. Their contempt for people can be extraordinary (although completely ordinary within their own circles).

The vast majority of us, humans, are not great with power. Humans get greedy easily and we get addicted to anything that gets us a pat on the back, releases endorphines, general acceptance or finds favour with people we admire. These cunts are exactly the same but the problen is their actions affect far more than themselves.

People like Sutherland see Ireland as a toy,or maybe a bit of land he has a share in like someone might have with their siblings or a mate. Thats the reality. Everything up there is no doubt very close to true, but i would say only tge tip of the iceberg in terms of the scandlous shot these cunts get up to.

TheUlteriorMotive · November 10, 2015, 8:59am

All over Ranelagh. Madness.

If he survives what sort of extreme sports will the kid need for an adrenaline rush.

Tim_Riggins · November 10, 2015, 9:00am

caoimhaoin:

You are very naive sometimes for a smart individual. Has history not shown you that fact is often alot stranger than fiction and that power hungry unscrupulous people just get worse and worse and greedier and greedier?

I’m assuming you have met plenty, but have you ecer sat down and talked to either these really powerful well to do fellas and/or politicians? After a few drinks many are well able to expose themselves and give you a real insight into themselves. Their contempt for people can be extraordinary (although completely ordinary within their own circles).

The vast majority of us, humans, are not great with power. Humans get greedy easily and we get addicted to anything that gets us a pat on the back, releases endorphines, general acceptance or finds favour with people we admire. These cunts are exactly the same but the problen is their actions affect far more than themselves.

People like Sutherland see Ireland as a toy,or maybe a bit of land he has a share in like someone might have with their siblings or a mate. Thats the reality. Everything up there is no doubt very close to true, but i would say only tge tip of the iceberg in terms of the scandlous shot these cunts get up to.

Howya Jim

Bandage · November 10, 2015, 9:26am

Saw the Gardai stopping a guy cycling a version of one of these this morning. Difference was there a kind of long tube thing going from the back of the father’s bike connecting to his son’s bike. The son, about 5, was cycling away on his little bike and being dragged along by the father. The tube was about 5 or 6 yards long.

Julio_Geordio · November 10, 2015, 9:26am

I’m a big fan of conspiracies but my major problem with most of them is that they attribute super human abilities to these lads running the show.

There is no doubt that there is a corporate elite running the World but it’s not some big secret conspiracy. They openly bribe US politicians for example, and media bias etc. is blatantly obvious.

By making everything overly fantastic the conspiracy theorists actually knock out any credible stuff they could achieve. Highlighting campaign donors in the US election for example and what favours they got after.

The likes of Sutherland is probably a very smart bloke who rose fast in important circles and as such is well in with the elite and acts as a kind of a power broker. I’d say he believes in the EU not in a conspiracy way but like all of these Neo-Cons he believes capitalism is the one true God. He is a very wealthy man and as such his interests are in the very wealthy being protected. Hardly Lizard people stuff. He’s not omnipotent or anything and probably like a lot of others thought the blanket guarantee on bank deposits was a genuinely good idea.
Those that advance the idea that the super wealthy somehow caused the recession have little appreciation for how close the capitalist world came to collapse or how the likes of Goldman Sachs are still suffering from the fallout. Stuff like further EU integration would have gone a lot smoother if it wasn’t for all this austerity. If anything the recession may have advanced the breakup of the EU rather than consolidated it’s grip on Europe.

anon61956325 · November 10, 2015, 9:45am

Only reading this now…not ashamed to say the eyes filled up. Dreadful, just fucking heartbreaking stuff. What was the sentence passed?

myboyblue · November 10, 2015, 9:47am

7 & a 1/2 years. He’ll probably be out in 4. The mother most likely wont even be walking properly yet at that point, if ever.

Tim_Riggins · November 10, 2015, 9:52am

Suds is transparent in his beliefs. He believes in migration, global trade and less barriers for business.

He therefore annoys all sides. He is an unapologetic capitalist but he isn’t confined to conservative dogma.

Again, he isn’t trusted in Ireland because his achievements were largely overseas.

Tim_Riggins · November 10, 2015, 9:56am

Great profile of Suds;

It was just another Goldman Sachs Christmas party in London. Then the distinctive “dancing man” Guinness music began, and the figure of Peter Sutherland skipped across a screen to the cheers and laughter of the assembled investment bankers.

“It was classic Suds,” a friend recalled. “This is a guy with huge intellectual capacity, really liked and respected in Goldman. He has achieved so much on the world stage, but he is also prepared to poke fun at himself.”

Last week, after 20 years as chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Sutherland announced that he would retire from the investment bank at the end of June. Near the end of a stellar career, he now faces his biggest challenge as the special representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations for Migration and Development.

Sutherland was described last week, by a friend of 30 years, as “the best networker of his generation. He has a larger life than personality. He has the ability to rub along with everyone, while being forcible and prepared to seize the moment when he sees it”.

A leading Irish businessman said: “He knows everyone. He is great company. The sort of person you could sit beside on an 11-hour flight to San Francisco and never get tired of listening to. However, you’d need a wheelbarrow to carry all the names that he’d dropped!”

Behind the gregarious personality, there lies a steely determination that has taken Sutherland to the top.

Born in 1946, he received a Jesuit education in Gonzaga, the private south Dublin school. His passions in school were rugby and debating. An old friend recalled him as being popular but down to earth. When he drove his friends to teenage discos, he would often ask them to split the petrol bill.

After leaving school, Sutherland studied law in UCD (where he later funded, and fundraised for, the Sutherland School of Law), as well as captaining his university rugby team, before going on to play for Lansdowne Rugby Club.

Sutherland remains close to his schoolfriends, who include Garrett Sheehan, the High Court judge, and the late Barry Bresnihan, who toured with the Lions before becoming a professor in rheumatology. Ardagh boss Paul Coulson is also a friend, albeit of a later Gonzaga vintage.

“Peter is very loyal to his friends. He is very charitable, and has helped people in hard times. He also has a huge amount of time for young people, and has given hundreds of them career advice down the years,” said a source who previously worked with Sutherland. “At Goldman, he supported Irish people like Richard O’Toole or Basil Geoghegan.”

But that still lay ahead of him. After shining as a barrister, in 1982 he was made Ireland’s youngest ever attorney general by the then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

Like FitzGerald, Sutherland supported the 1960s ideas of Declan Costello, the politician behind Fine Gael’s defining manifesto of the time, Towards A Just Society.

In 1985, Sutherland went to Brussels, where he took the Irish seat on the European Commission. His was a liberal agenda, as he set about breaking down economic barriers and increasing competition.

He also established the Erasmus programme, which allows students around Europe to study in other universities. “He really redefined this role in Europe,” a former senior civil servant said. He was tipped for greater things, and was considered a potential candidate as president of the European Commission.

Sutherland, who married the Spanish-born Maruja, came home to become chairman of AIB from 1989 to 1993. Later, it would emerge that Tony Spollen, a friend of Sutherland since school in Gonzaga, but by then the head of internal audit in AIB, had written an internal memo pointing out to his superiors that the bank had a contingent liability of about £100 million in respect of unpaid Dirt tax.

In 1999, when the matter was investigated by the Dirt inquiry, Sutherland claimed the bank’s response had been “rapid”.

“We did everything possible to examine the situation, and concluded that there was no past liability, on the basis of what the bank believed had been agreed with the Revenue Commissioners,” he said.

Boardroom challenges

By the time of the Dirt inquiry, Sutherland’s career had gone international again. He was an impressive director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt, later the World Trade Organisation) until 1995, when he began to move back into the private sector.

That year, his presence on the international stage was rewarded with a job that would not only boost his profile, but substantially add to his fortune when he became general partner and chairman of Goldman Sachs International. The venerable Wall Street partnership was on the up, with a stock market listing in the offing.

It was unusual for the Wall Street titan to appoint an outsider, but its then chief executive, Jon Corzine, said Sutherland was “the right person at the right time for Goldman Sachs”.

He did not move to London straight away, instead commuting from his home in Donnybrook during the week to the bank’s London base in Fleet Street, in the Art Deco building that once housed the Daily Express. Sutherland still comes home to Eglington Road regularly for rugby matches, and to see his grandchildren here.

As the main man for Goldman Sachs in Europe, he benefited from the decision in 1999 to end its partnership. With a stake of 0.52 per cent, Sutherland was one of 221 partners whose fortunes would be worth in the tens and hundreds of millions.

Sutherland was also chairman of British Petroleum from 1997 to 2009. He faced challenges in the boardroom, but his experience as an adviser to Tony Ryan, in his groundbreaking aircraft leasing GPA days and everywhere else, made him adept at dealing with them.

Within BP, Sutherland was seen as an effective chairman, but all his skills were needed to deal with the resignation of the company’s chief executive, John Browne, after a scandal following Browne’s admission that he had lied in court.

As his career has unfolded, Sutherland has been festooned with awards; he accepted an honorary knighthood in Britain, but has declined to use the title. He has also advised the Vatican on its financial affairs.

The only real mark on his career was his role as a non-executive director of British bank RBS from 2001 to 2009. The collapse of RBS under its disgraced former chief executive Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin cost the British taxpayer £36 billion.

Sutherland also played a role in Ireland’s financial crisis, both publicly and behind the scenes. In January 2008, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told an Irish Times reporter that he remained optimistic about Ireland and the world’s prospects.

“It is a very serious crisis, but I don’t think it’s Apocalypse Now,” he said. “We should be able to come out of this, unless we talk ourselves into an even deeper recession.”

Irish businesses, he said, had to bring their costs “seriously under control”, but he concluded: “I don’t think Ireland is suddenly going to fall back to the position that it occupied before our recent series of very successful years.”

Even with his near-unique access to information, Sutherland, as we now know, got it badly wrong. Within nine months, Ireland was well on its way to needing a giant economic bailout.

Notably, Sutherland was among the high-rolling investors in bank funding company ISTC which lost €60 million when the business collapsed, becoming the first big victim of Ireland’s financial crash. Other investors included Denis O’Brien, Lochlann Quinn and Johnny Ronan.

During the financial crisis, Sutherland was one of a number of people who were sounding boards for Brian Lenihan, the then minister for finance. He had the Rolodex to connect Lenihan to anyone in the world. After Fianna Fáil focused domestically during the prolificacy of the boom, Lenihan listened to his big-picture view.

In September 2010, Sutherland gave a speech to the Institute of Directors in Dublin, where he said that an “air of fatalism, consistently nurtured by negativism” had taken over Ireland.

Sutherland told the IoD that the Financial Times and others were wrong to make the “classical market economist case” that the Irish government should burn the bondholders in failed banks.

He said that while he agreed with this in principle, “to remove such protection now in the case of Anglo Irish Bank might not well be a wise course of action”.

He added that, by September 2010, Ireland had already paid off most bondholders in Anglo, leaving only €5.1 billion left to burn.

“The risk of taking any such action is that the price would then be paid by the remaining Irish banks which still require external capital and funds, and by the government itself, which then needs to deal with the increased losses arising from a more immediate wind-down of Anglo Irish Bank,” he said.

Sutherland’s advice, while unpalatable, was close to unavoidable by the time he came out with it. He said Ireland had to reduce its spending drastically, a policy which his old party Fine Gael implemented when it came to power the following year.

In Fine Gael, Sutherland is spoken about with a degree of reverence and awe — perhaps the grandest of the party grandees. The greatest taoiseach the party never had, say many. And though an intellectual, he is keenly aware of the tribal nature of much of Irish politics. He was once asked (perhaps half in jest) to buy a table at a Fianna Fáil fundraiser. “Ah, come on,” he replied. “You know I can’t do that.”

Sutherland was very much of the metropolitan, liberal wing of the party — much more Garret FitzGerald than Enda Kenny. He is not thought to be close to Kenny, though sources say he has been consulted regularly by Michael Noonan, and by Phil Hogan in Brussels.

Hogan’s directness and reputation as a political bruiser have often seen his political skills underestimated. But he has an appreciation of how power works that Sutherland would recognise. Sutherland’s son Shane, a senior official in the European Commission, works in Hogan’s cabinet there.

Sutherland operates at the very apex of the global financial and political elite, and he continues to open doors for Ireland. “If Noonan had a problem with the ECB, he could ring Peter. Peter could ring Draghi. That’s the level he works at,” said one source who knows him.

‘Indelible impression’

Last year, Sutherland was given a lifetime achievement award by Ernst & Young at the annual entrepreneur of the year awards. In a short film introducing the award, a series of business leaders paid tribute to him: Michael O’Leary, Hugo MacNeill, UCD president Hugh Brady, and so on. EY’s Frank O’Keeffe presented the award, telling attendees: “When the history of Irish enterprise is written, Peter Sutherland will have etched an indelible impression.”

Sutherland, recalls one person who was present, spoke brilliantly and enthralled the audience, “even down to the feigned embarrassment at receiving the award”. Like the Jesuits who educated him, Sutherland is one of the best in the world at humility.

His decision last week to give up the power of Goldman Sachs was not taken lightly, and he is determined to devote himself to his new UN role.

“The fundamental issue here is saving people who are drowning in the Mediterranean . . .” he said earlier this month. “This is not about getting into battles about quotas when we are facing a humanitarian crisis.”

“He is going to have a very hard job trying to persuade politicians to agree,” one senior source said. “Peter doesn’t have a background in social affairs. This is a very complex issue, with no easy answers. Lives are at stake. How do you create a sustainable policy that is satisfactory to all? This is by far the greatest challenge that Peter has ever faced.”

Sutherland now must use all of his skills of persuasion to devise a solution that is acceptable politically on one of the world’s most pressing issues.

Ireland’s ultimate insider now finds himself as point man for the ultimate outsiders: the poor of the world seeking a better life elsewhere.

Fagan_ODowd · November 10, 2015, 10:29am

Tim_Riggins:

Great profile of Suds;

It was just another Goldman Sachs Christmas party in London. Then the distinctive “dancing man” Guinness music began, and the figure of Peter Sutherland skipped across a screen to the cheers and laughter of the assembled investment bankers.

“It was classic Suds,” a friend recalled. “This is a guy with huge intellectual capacity, really liked and respected in Goldman. He has achieved so much on the world stage, but he is also prepared to poke fun at himself.”

Last week, after 20 years as chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Sutherland announced that he would retire from the investment bank at the end of June. Near the end of a stellar career, he now faces his biggest challenge as the special representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations for Migration and Development.

Sutherland was described last week, by a friend of 30 years, as “the best networker of his generation. He has a larger life than personality. He has the ability to rub along with everyone, while being forcible and prepared to seize the moment when he sees it”.

A leading Irish businessman said: “He knows everyone. He is great company. The sort of person you could sit beside on an 11-hour flight to San Francisco and never get tired of listening to. However, you’d need a wheelbarrow to carry all the names that he’d dropped!”

Behind the gregarious personality, there lies a steely determination that has taken Sutherland to the top.

Born in 1946, he received a Jesuit education in Gonzaga, the private south Dublin school. His passions in school were rugby and debating. An old friend recalled him as being popular but down to earth. When he drove his friends to teenage discos, he would often ask them to split the petrol bill.

After leaving school, Sutherland studied law in UCD (where he later funded, and fundraised for, the Sutherland School of Law), as well as captaining his university rugby team, before going on to play for Lansdowne Rugby Club.

Sutherland remains close to his schoolfriends, who include Garrett Sheehan, the High Court judge, and the late Barry Bresnihan, who toured with the Lions before becoming a professor in rheumatology. Ardagh boss Paul Coulson is also a friend, albeit of a later Gonzaga vintage.

“Peter is very loyal to his friends. He is very charitable, and has helped people in hard times. He also has a huge amount of time for young people, and has given hundreds of them career advice down the years,” said a source who previously worked with Sutherland. “At Goldman, he supported Irish people like Richard O’Toole or Basil Geoghegan.”

But that still lay ahead of him. After shining as a barrister, in 1982 he was made Ireland’s youngest ever attorney general by the then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

Like FitzGerald, Sutherland supported the 1960s ideas of Declan Costello, the politician behind Fine Gael’s defining manifesto of the time, Towards A Just Society.

In 1985, Sutherland went to Brussels, where he took the Irish seat on the European Commission. His was a liberal agenda, as he set about breaking down economic barriers and increasing competition.

He also established the Erasmus programme, which allows students around Europe to study in other universities. “He really redefined this role in Europe,” a former senior civil servant said. He was tipped for greater things, and was considered a potential candidate as president of the European Commission.

Sutherland, who married the Spanish-born Maruja, came home to become chairman of AIB from 1989 to 1993. Later, it would emerge that Tony Spollen, a friend of Sutherland since school in Gonzaga, but by then the head of internal audit in AIB, had written an internal memo pointing out to his superiors that the bank had a contingent liability of about £100 million in respect of unpaid Dirt tax.

In 1999, when the matter was investigated by the Dirt inquiry, Sutherland claimed the bank’s response had been “rapid”.

“We did everything possible to examine the situation, and concluded that there was no past liability, on the basis of what the bank believed had been agreed with the Revenue Commissioners,” he said.

Boardroom challenges

By the time of the Dirt inquiry, Sutherland’s career had gone international again. He was an impressive director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt, later the World Trade Organisation) until 1995, when he began to move back into the private sector.

That year, his presence on the international stage was rewarded with a job that would not only boost his profile, but substantially add to his fortune when he became general partner and chairman of Goldman Sachs International. The venerable Wall Street partnership was on the up, with a stock market listing in the offing.

It was unusual for the Wall Street titan to appoint an outsider, but its then chief executive, Jon Corzine, said Sutherland was “the right person at the right time for Goldman Sachs”.

He did not move to London straight away, instead commuting from his home in Donnybrook during the week to the bank’s London base in Fleet Street, in the Art Deco building that once housed the Daily Express. Sutherland still comes home to Eglington Road regularly for rugby matches, and to see his grandchildren here.

As the main man for Goldman Sachs in Europe, he benefited from the decision in 1999 to end its partnership. With a stake of 0.52 per cent, Sutherland was one of 221 partners whose fortunes would be worth in the tens and hundreds of millions.

Sutherland was also chairman of British Petroleum from 1997 to 2009. He faced challenges in the boardroom, but his experience as an adviser to Tony Ryan, in his groundbreaking aircraft leasing GPA days and everywhere else, made him adept at dealing with them.

Within BP, Sutherland was seen as an effective chairman, but all his skills were needed to deal with the resignation of the company’s chief executive, John Browne, after a scandal following Browne’s admission that he had lied in court.

As his career has unfolded, Sutherland has been festooned with awards; he accepted an honorary knighthood in Britain, but has declined to use the title. He has also advised the Vatican on its financial affairs.

The only real mark on his career was his role as a non-executive director of British bank RBS from 2001 to 2009. The collapse of RBS under its disgraced former chief executive Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin cost the British taxpayer £36 billion.

Sutherland also played a role in Ireland’s financial crisis, both publicly and behind the scenes. In January 2008, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told an Irish Times reporter that he remained optimistic about Ireland and the world’s prospects.

“It is a very serious crisis, but I don’t think it’s Apocalypse Now,” he said. “We should be able to come out of this, unless we talk ourselves into an even deeper recession.”

Irish businesses, he said, had to bring their costs “seriously under control”, but he concluded: “I don’t think Ireland is suddenly going to fall back to the position that it occupied before our recent series of very successful years.”

Even with his near-unique access to information, Sutherland, as we now know, got it badly wrong. Within nine months, Ireland was well on its way to needing a giant economic bailout.

Notably, Sutherland was among the high-rolling investors in bank funding company ISTC which lost €60 million when the business collapsed, becoming the first big victim of Ireland’s financial crash. Other investors included Denis O’Brien, Lochlann Quinn and Johnny Ronan.

During the financial crisis, Sutherland was one of a number of people who were sounding boards for Brian Lenihan, the then minister for finance. He had the Rolodex to connect Lenihan to anyone in the world. After Fianna Fáil focused domestically during the prolificacy of the boom, Lenihan listened to his big-picture view.

In September 2010, Sutherland gave a speech to the Institute of Directors in Dublin, where he said that an “air of fatalism, consistently nurtured by negativism” had taken over Ireland.

Sutherland told the IoD that the Financial Times and others were wrong to make the “classical market economist case” that the Irish government should burn the bondholders in failed banks.

He said that while he agreed with this in principle, “to remove such protection now in the case of Anglo Irish Bank might not well be a wise course of action”.

He added that, by September 2010, Ireland had already paid off most bondholders in Anglo, leaving only €5.1 billion left to burn.

“The risk of taking any such action is that the price would then be paid by the remaining Irish banks which still require external capital and funds, and by the government itself, which then needs to deal with the increased losses arising from a more immediate wind-down of Anglo Irish Bank,” he said.

Sutherland’s advice, while unpalatable, was close to unavoidable by the time he came out with it. He said Ireland had to reduce its spending drastically, a policy which his old party Fine Gael implemented when it came to power the following year.

In Fine Gael, Sutherland is spoken about with a degree of reverence and awe — perhaps the grandest of the party grandees. The greatest taoiseach the party never had, say many. And though an intellectual, he is keenly aware of the tribal nature of much of Irish politics. He was once asked (perhaps half in jest) to buy a table at a Fianna Fáil fundraiser. “Ah, come on,” he replied. “You know I can’t do that.”

Sutherland was very much of the metropolitan, liberal wing of the party — much more Garret FitzGerald than Enda Kenny. He is not thought to be close to Kenny, though sources say he has been consulted regularly by Michael Noonan, and by Phil Hogan in Brussels.

Hogan’s directness and reputation as a political bruiser have often seen his political skills underestimated. But he has an appreciation of how power works that Sutherland would recognise. Sutherland’s son Shane, a senior official in the European Commission, works in Hogan’s cabinet there.

Sutherland operates at the very apex of the global financial and political elite, and he continues to open doors for Ireland. “If Noonan had a problem with the ECB, he could ring Peter. Peter could ring Draghi. That’s the level he works at,” said one source who knows him.

‘Indelible impression’

Last year, Sutherland was given a lifetime achievement award by Ernst & Young at the annual entrepreneur of the year awards. In a short film introducing the award, a series of business leaders paid tribute to him: Michael O’Leary, Hugo MacNeill, UCD president Hugh Brady, and so on. EY’s Frank O’Keeffe presented the award, telling attendees: “When the history of Irish enterprise is written, Peter Sutherland will have etched an indelible impression.”

Sutherland, recalls one person who was present, spoke brilliantly and enthralled the audience, “even down to the feigned embarrassment at receiving the award”. Like the Jesuits who educated him, Sutherland is one of the best in the world at humility.

His decision last week to give up the power of Goldman Sachs was not taken lightly, and he is determined to devote himself to his new UN role.

“The fundamental issue here is saving people who are drowning in the Mediterranean . . .” he said earlier this month. “This is not about getting into battles about quotas when we are facing a humanitarian crisis.”

“He is going to have a very hard job trying to persuade politicians to agree,” one senior source said. “Peter doesn’t have a background in social affairs. This is a very complex issue, with no easy answers. Lives are at stake. How do you create a sustainable policy that is satisfactory to all? This is by far the greatest challenge that Peter has ever faced.”

Sutherland now must use all of his skills of persuasion to devise a solution that is acceptable politically on one of the world’s most pressing issues.

Ireland’s ultimate insider now finds himself as point man for the ultimate outsiders: the poor of the world seeking a better life elsewhere.

Classic Irish hagiography.

artfoley · November 10, 2015, 10:43am

Seem like a circle jerk for cunts

croppy_boy · November 10, 2015, 10:43am

Ranelagh is bad enough to cycle through with the way they allow cars to park in the cycle lanes in the evening.

Fucking lethal sometimes.

myboyblue · November 10, 2015, 10:48am

24 hour parking on the side streets, fine to park on the main street after 6/7. Gobshties.