Summary: <br> Brigid Laffan is currently Director and Professor at the<br> Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Director of the Global Governance<br> Programme and of the European Governance and Politics Programme at the European<br> University Institute (EUI), Florence. She was previously Professor of European<br> Politics at University College Dublin. While she was there she was<br> Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences.<br> <br> <br> <br> Brigid Laffan Photo: European University Institute<br> <br> <br> <br> She also is an organiser of the annual State of the European<br> Union conference in Florence, which has a high power guest list including the<br> president of the European Commission, president of the European Council and president<br> of the European Parliament.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> She was the founding director of the Dublin European Institute and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was a member the Fulbright Commission and has been awarded the UACES Lifetime Achievement Award, the THESEUS Award for outstanding research on European Integration, and she’s received the Ordre national du Mérite from the President of the France.<br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I just want to follow<br> up on a couple of the things that Brigid said there. The first point to address<br> is where she said that she wasn’t giving me ‘permission’ to use the interview.<br> That has no validity whatsoever. I told her very clearly that I was recording<br> an interview for the podcast, and even if I didn’t, I don’t need permission<br> from her or anyone else to do so. I can think of a lot of politicians who would<br> like to withhold permission to report some things they had said. We don’t have<br> very robust media independence in Ireland, but we’d have none at all if anyone could<br> veto coverage of themselves.<br> <br> <br> <br> But on the substantive<br> point, the Santer Commission, which resigned en masse in 1999, in my view is a<br> very relevant topic for discussion because the method of nominating<br> commissioners has not substantially changed since. Each government chooses one<br> politician who they send to become a commissioner, basically a Europe-wide<br> minister for something in the way that Phil Hogan is the European Commissioner<br> for Trade.<br> <br> <br> <br> As I mentioned to<br> Brigid, commissioners have immunity from prosecution for any crime in any EU<br> country. That’s not so surprising when it comes to international officials like<br> ambassadors, they couldn’t work in other countries if the host government could<br> harass them with frivolous investigations every time they did something the<br> host didn’t like.<br> <br> <br> <br> But to get immunity in<br> your home country, that’s extraordinary; it does happen to a limited extent in<br> other countries, but it’s normally restricted to preventing legal cases regarding<br> what they do in office – in this case it covers all crimes, including any that<br> were committed before they got the job.<br> <br> <br> <br> Brigid also wrankled<br> at my mention of the corruption of Padraig Flynn, saying that his corruption<br> was not related his work as a commissioner. That’s true, but think about that<br> claim for a moment. Flynn was a corrupt politician, but it was OK for him to be<br> a commissioner because he was already corrupt when he got the job, and we<br> haven’t found any evidence that he used the commissioner job to enrich himself,<br> as he had done when he was a national politician. Is that really where we are<br> setting the bar?<br> <br> <br> <br> And Brigid was flat<br> wrong when she tried to suggest that the only thing wrong with the Santer<br> Commission was that the French commissioner Édith Cresson gave a job to someone<br>
