Sutherland, a man with all the luck, some fame and finally a fortune

Tuesday, August 11th. Day Two, as a wry colleague put it, in the "Where did the rest of us go wrong?" saga. That old pixie dust showered on Peter Sutherland at birth had turned to pure gold. Suds's Luck - as opposed to the usual Sod's Law - had struck again.

Monday, August 10th - Day One - had brought confirmation of the Goldman Sachs decision to float on Wall Street, making its chairman, managing director and partner of less than three years - Mr Sutherland - richer by around £70 million.

Day Two saw him emerge shirt-sleeved and smiling into bright London sunshine, a central figure in the stunning coup that had just produced the biggest industrial merger in history and made him co-chairman of the new monolith, BP Amoco plc - a company with a higher turnover than Ireland's GDP.

And the man is only 52 years old.

So where did the rest of us go wrong? Some say, ironically, that Peter Sutherland's world-beating week holds a positive message for losers everywhere. By this theory, he owes it all to the voters of Dublin North West who 25 years ago refused to entertain his Dail ambitions when he trailed behind Fianna Fail's Dick Gogan for the last seat. Cast into political darkness, he took his deposit, his pride and his pixie dust back to the Law Library and his native south city, and from there in a straight path to world fame and fortune.

If he hadn't been defeated, the theory goes, he could never have become Attorney General. If he hadn't become Attorney General, he might never have been considered for European Commissioner. If he hadn't been a European Commissioner, he might never have been so attractive to all those lip-smacking multinationals who now defer to him as "one of the most respected world leaders". As Garth Brooks fans are wont to warble, "Sometimes God's Greatest Gift is Unanswered Prayers".

To his credit, he has never denied that luck has played a part: "I've been very lucky; I've been very lucky all my life", he said a few years ago.

Still, the notion that dumb luck alone has led Peter Denis Sutherland onto the world stage and kept him there is looking a little threadbare. To be born into privilege, educated by the liberal Jesuits of Gonzaga and become defence counsel for Capt James Kelly at the Arms Trial at the tender age of 24 can be attributed to luck. To become Ireland's then youngest Attorney General - twice - and then the youngest European Commissioner might be ascribed by green-eyed cynics to croneyism.

But to become the first Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO); to be described by Jacques Delors as "the real author of the new Europe"; and to be headhunted by world leaders as the one man capable of breaking the US/EC deadlock to a world trade deal signifies a rather more proactive character.

After all, this is the man who had his nose broken nine times while captaining UCD's rugby team and still continued to play rugby. Although one expert claims that Sutherland wasn't particularly inspired as a player, he recalls that he showed real leadership qualities and - crucially - was "a filthy bastard" when required. In short, an excellent man to have on your side in a tussle. In fact, there is a suggestion that rugby training has played a significant part in Sutherland's famous negotiating strategy.

It's quite simple. He opens by stunning opponents with a show of aggression, then dazzles them with legal argument. This, by all accounts, is how a good rugby team operates: kick off with a display of brute force and once the opposition is gibbering with shock and exhaustion, revert to a more strategic approach.

He was only 38 when he became a European Commissioner in 1985, and whatever the old cynics might have been whispering, this was a man who knew exactly where he was headed. The late John Healy spotted it straight away: "The berth did nothing to spoil Hillery's game of golf. On the contrary, Sutherland, however, has given up rugby . . . He is about the business of power . . ."

"Pugnacious" and "provocative" are two adjectives used to describe him. "Fearless" is another. "The fact that he was so young, and had no political experience mattered not one iota. In fact, the absence of political experience probably made him more fearless. He was totally into straight talking and never flinched at any challenge," says one source.

"At Commissioners' or Council of Ministers' meetings so gung-ho would he be on obtaining a result that it would be a mix of cajoling and blasting them out of it. He is tough, tough. But people respect that. It's helped by the fact that he has a good sense of humour."

He used his burly rugby build, strong character and charisma to create a flurry from day one at the Commission, pushing points, stretching boundaries, scrutinising briefs, and doing unheard of things such as chatting to members of other cabinets and other countries in the lifts and common areas, informally scooping up information and fans along the way.

This was no vapid self-promotion project. In his role as Commissioner for Competition Policy, he took on the cosy airline cartels and won, imposed record-breaking fines on a polypropylene price-fixing cartel run by 15 of the EC's leading chemical companies, and forced the repayment of record amounts of illicit state aid paid to a French textiles group. By some accounts, it seems that this drive and toughness sprang from nowhere circa 1985. And yet, to look back on his periods as Ireland's Attorney General, they were anything but peaceful. He involved himself personally in extradition proceedings to the extent of conducting the State's case against Seamus Shannon, who was extradited to the North. As a result, his name is said to have wound up on a blacklist maintained by the Border Fox, Dessie O'Hare. His second stint as AG coincided with the abortion referendum. "Of all the political events in public life I've gone through," he told The Irish Times a few years ago, "this was the most traumatic. Passions ran very high on an extremely complicated, emotive issue which I never believed could be resolved by a constitutional amendment - unless it was to keep the courts out of the matter completely and leave it to the legislature. It was unfair; it was unclear and ambiguous and too open to extreme interpretation. I don't take much satisfaction from being proved right."

Though "totally opposed" to abortion, he paid for his reflectiveness by being pursued one Sunday by pro-amendment campaigners to see if he attended Mass.

Ironically, he looked for neither appointment as AG. Nor did he put himself forward for the job of Commissioner - it is said that the latter was put to him at the suggestion of Joan FitzGerald, the then Taoiseach's wife. Even when the US's Mickey Kantor and Britain's Sir Leon Brittan came with the offer of GATT Director General he turned them down initially because he had no wish to disrupt his family again. Only after repeated requests from Jacques Delors did he agree to take it.

But when the only job he ever badly wanted was there for the taking, the support he needed from his own countrymen was strangely absent. To mere onlookers, the post of President of the EU seemed a natural progression for the man who only months before had masterminded the globalisation process that was GATT. Other candidates had been knocked out by national interests. After Delors, it was the turn of a small country and the Christian Democrats; Sutherland was an obvious choice. To this day senior figures close to Europe maintain doggedly that approaches were made at the highest levels by other member states to senior Irish politicians, offering their support for Sutherland's nomination. Names are named and countries listed. Sutherland himself has admitted to being sounded out by member countries. Yet the Reynolds / Spring-led Government of the time insisted that they detected no support for Sutherland in Europe and refused to nominate him. It is a measure of Peter Sutherland that in a week which for others would be the high point of their working lives people close to him maintain that if he could be granted one wish from the pixie dust merchant, he would drop everything to take on the EU presidency.

There is little doubt that he is still a major player behind the EU scenes, underlined by regular speeches and articles on the subject. Only a few months ago, with Delors and other European heavyweights, he was proposing direct elections for the EU presidency as opposed to appointment by heads of government.

Meanwhile, he has somehow managed the feat of remaining a good family man. Wherever he is in the world, Peter Sutherland makes Herculean efforts to be back home in Eglinton Road - in the large Victorian house for which he paid £355,000 in 1988 - by Friday night, to his Spanish-born wife, Maruja, and their three children, the youngest of whom is now in her late teens. "It was a wonderful romance", he said recently about his marriage to Maruja, "and it still is."

As a man who is said to be most at home among his rugby friends, he is a regular fixture at Lansdowne RFC at the weekends. Current improvements being undertaken at the club have led to the inference that its most famous fan has contributed some of his by now famous wealth to the project. It's possible. One man who has worked with him decribes him as a loyal friend - "the sort of guy who rings out of the blue and asks `how're things?' The money will make no difference to him except as a measure of achievement. He's still the sort of guy you'd like to have a pint with . . ."