European Council president Herman Van Rompuy arrives in Dublin today for talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny. The two men will lunch together in Government Buildings and Mr Van Rompuy will give a speech later on in Dublin Castle.
Who is this man? What job does he do? And what brings him to Ireland?
Mr Van Rompuy was plucked from the relative obscurity of the Belgian prime minister’s office in November 2009 to take command of the European Council, as the assembly of EU leaders is known. With Mr Kenny today, he is likely to discuss Ireland’s long campaign for a cut in the interest rate on its bailout and the wider battle to contain the sovereign debt crisis.
Mr Van Rompuy keeps a rather low profile, preferring to work modestly in the wings than to step forth into the media glare. He is not a creature to overshadow the mightiest European heavyweights but many suspect that is exactly why he was chosen. His supporters deny he is in thrall to the Merkel-Sarkozy axis.
Far from stealing the limelight as an all-powerful leader of leaders, Mr Van Rompuy works more like a chairman who pursues consensus between bigger beasts who sit around his table. Outside the narrow world of European politics, he is virtually unknown and seems to like it that way.
Don’t expect fanfare in Dublin today: the haiku-writing president is a no-frills kind of fellow.
Mr Van Rompuy’s job was newly created under the Lisbon reform treaty to give greater coherence and verve to the work of the council, which brings together heads of government and heads of state from the EU’s 27 member countries. In previous times this role was fulfilled on a temporary basis by the prime minister or president of the country which held the EU’s six-month rotating presidency.
Since the treaty’s enactment in late 2009, however, EU leaders have been confronted with the sovereign debt crisis. This fateful debacle, which stands as the biggest challenge yet to the achievements of European integration, has seen wealthy countries reluctantly come to the aid of errant stragglers like Ireland, Greece and Portugal.
It is not a pretty sight and the affair has served more to emphasise Mr Van Rompuy’s lack of power than to magnify it. Although it falls to him to chair the summit meetings at which EU leaders confront the design flaws embedded in the single currency system, many of the most crucial interventions were not made on his watch.
Mr Van Rompuy’s most bruising moment came last year when Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy embarked on an important new initiative at Deauville, France, at the very same as he was trying to strike a tricky deal on economic reforms with finance ministers in Luxembourg.
He was completely cut out of the Deauville manoeuvre, with consequent damage to his authority. Inevitably, this raised questions about his effectiveness in a job in which he must seek to align the positions of 27 squabbling member states.
The euro zone crisis is intrinsically messy – so many countries, so many institutions, so much debt – and prior declarations by Mr Van Rompuy and others that the battle was won proved wrong.
Although many actors in the drama seem addicted to megaphone diplomacy, he prefers the protection of a finely-wrought script to an open microphone. His speeches tend to be well-crafted and nuanced. His remarks today at St Patrick’s Hall should be no different.