The Globalist: Peter Sutherland-His Life and Legacy by John Walsh (review)

Abstract

Review Articles The Globalist: Peter Sutherland – His Life and Legacy, John Walsh (London: William Collins, 2019), 336 pages. It may be an exaggeration and not really meaningful for the author of this book, the distinguished journalist John Walsh, to describe Peter Sutherland as ‘arguably the most influential Irish person ever to have lived’, but he is certainly an important figure worthy of an extended biography. In undertaking the task so soon after Sutherland’s death in 2019, the author has the advantage that many are alive with memories of him stretching back to schooldays. That school was the Jesuit Gonzaga College, where young Peter was sent as a day boy from his home in Monkstown at the age of eight in 1954, four years after the school’s foundation. He did not star academically but became a keen debater and was made captain of his rugby team. ‘When young Sutherland wants something’, remarked Fr White, the shrewd Prefect of Studies, ‘he will go for it and get it’. The book may give a somewhat gilded picture of the early Gonzaga, exaggerating its elitism and liberalism; what is true is that Peter was always proud of having been a Gonzaga boy and recalled it as a place where he was taught to think for himself. Archbishop McQuaid (a whipping boy for all who want to sport their liberal credentials), is blamed wrongly for preventing Gonzaga from playing rugby against Protestant schools, and is also given as the reason that ‘Suds’, as he was often called, went to UCD to take a degree in law rather than what the author is pleased to call the ‘academically superior’ Trinity College. In reality, the UCD law faculty was stronger in those years. Sutherland’s father William was a successful insurance broker. So it was that, after an unremarkable performance as a student at UCD (apart from captaining a successful rugby fifteen) and at King’s Inns, Peter got a flying start at the Bar acting for insurance companies defending personal injury cases. Within two years of his call, he achieved minor stardom as a junior counsel behind Tom Finlay in the ‘Arms Trial’ defending Captain Kelly, whose case, skilfully argued, that the importation of arms was authorised by the Minister for Defence, led to the acquittal of all the accused. The author has unearthed from Sutherland’s papers his account of that trial, stating that there was a specific government directive relating to the Studies • volume 109 • number 434 209 preparation and training of the army for incursions into Northern Ireland that had disappeared. Whether he had any evidence for this other than the word of Captain Kelly and his superior officer Colonel Heffron is, unfortunately for historians, not clarified. It is claimed that Sutherland’s cross-examination of the Minister, Jim Gibbons, derailed the case against Captain Kelly when the issues were re-opened before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee. A note from Sutherland’s papers listing infirmities in the Minister’s account is the only material cited in support of this assessment. At the Bar Sutherland was counted more a formidable advocate than a formidable lawyer, probably because most of his cases were personal injuries claims, which seldom turned on points of law. He did not become a Senior Counsel until October 1980, a detail not mentioned in this book, and he practised as such only for a short period before being appointed Attorney General in June 1981. It is not likely, therefore, that he was, as is stated, the highest-earning barrister, although that is a matter that cannot be proven one way or the other. The account of Sutherland as a practising barrister is based on memories of surviving contemporaries and friends. There are hints that his will to win pushed him to the limits of propriety in fighting cases. What is not said is that while he was not unpopular in the Law Library and had friends there, his pushiness and bumptiousness upset quite a few of his brethren, especially his seniors. All that was the background to a degree of surprise and even resentment when the incoming Fine Gael Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald appointed Sutherland Attorney General in June...