As Charlie McCreevy explains to friends and colleagues the nature of his new post as EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, he may recall wistfully Jacques Delors's observation that "you can't fall in love with the single market".
Yet, paradoxically, no-one better understood its importance and centrality to the future of the European Union, and few did more to bring down the myriad barriers, formal and informal, to the realisation of the dream of the founders - an economic level playing field from the north of Finland to Cyprus's southern shore.
Some 2.5 million new jobs and €800 billion in new wealth are directly attributable since 1993 to the efforts to complete the internal market, a responsibility that now passes to Mr McCreevy whose role is central to the Lisbon agenda, the Commission's main strategic objective of transforming the union's competitiveness. His appointment to this heavyweight portfolio is tribute both to his reputation and the impressive record of the Irisheconomy.
Mr McCreevy's predecessor, the controversial Dutch right-winger, Frits Bolkestein, has argued recently that what is needed to launch the Union's next great leap forward is the drawing up of a new "road map", akin to the work of Delors and Lord Cockfield in the late 1980s, setting out the specific steps each member state needs to take internally to complete their share of the Lisbon competitiveness agenda.
That challenge and the need specifically to step up the integration of the market for services will present Mr McCreevy with a massive agenda that will range from air and rail transport liberalisation, to pensions and insurance, to public procurement and red tape, to harmonising copyright provision, to a discussion recently initiated by the Commission on the price of cars .... It is an agenda of huge significance to Ireland's exporting economy.
And, although, unlike his predecessor, he will not be responsible for tax harmonisation, Mr McCreevy's portfolio will ensure that his voice will carry substantial weight on this sensitive issue.
In delivering a Commission which is balanced adroitly between representatives of small and large states, the new and the old, the left and right, and with a record eight women members, its new President, José Manuel Barroso, has shown considerable skills. He insisted yesterday that he had not been pressurised by heads of government who, he said, understood the need for an independent Commission. Whether true or not, his insistence on that independence will be welcome in Dublin, as will his refusal to create formal sub-committees of the Commission that could have become the personal fiefdoms of powerful vice-presidents. And in appointing the talented and user-friendly Swedish Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstrom, as his deputy with responsibility for communications, Mr Barroso has shown a welcome acknowledgment that bridging the gulf with an increasingly sceptical citizenry must be a central priority.