Máire set to be first female commissioner

IRELAND’S nominee for European Commissioner, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, will be the country’s first woman in the job and is tipped to get the prestigious budget portfolio.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen made the expected announcement after a Cabinet meeting yesterday morning saying that her experience and qualities make her particularly suited to the new role.

He offered her the job 12 days ago in a phone call and the former Fianna Fáil TD of 22 years said she accepted immediately, having thought about the possibility over the past months of speculation.

Her nomination avoids the Government having to call a virtually unwinnable by-election if they selected a sitting TD for the post and fulfils a request for more women to be appointed to the important European Union.

A former finance minister who is presently a member of the EU’s Court of Auditors, she has already had discussions with the Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

But she insists that while she made it clear to him during their hour-long meeting in Brussels last week that she wanted a substantial post, the final choice would be up to him.

The 59-year-old Galway woman will join a small band of eight or nine women in the 27 member Commission and her experience with the Luxembourg-based Court of Auditors for the past nine years would qualify her well to look after the EU’s €2 billion a week budget.

However, Ms Geoghegan- Quinn will have to be approved by the European Parliament during hearings early in the New Year.

They are bound to ask her about her connections with the anti-Lisbon treaty campaigner Declan Ganley.

She said she did part-time consulting when she left politics 12 years ago and helped him promote telecoms in emerging markets, explaining to companies how privatisation was done in Ireland, she said.

“We parted company – I had come to the end of the road with the work I was doing with the company and was not interested in continuing,” she said.

Responding to criticism that she ran a parallel justice system while minister, reducing fines and sentences at the behest of other politicians, Ms Geoghegan- Quinn denied that she abused her position or did anything illegal.

“I did not do anything that would in any way be an abuse of power or contrary to the law. I operated an appeal system operated by all my predecessors in governments from every political shade.

“When a retired judge took a case and the court found as it did, the decision was implemented immediately then and has operated since,” she said.

Appointed the first female government minister by Charles Haughey, who she supported for Fianna Fáil leadership, he fired her for, she said, being too outspoken, but within months he had been forced to resign.

Later she was made justice minister by Albert Reynolds and she decriminalised homosexuality, and was in the public eye during the Brendan Smyth paedophilia case that led to Mr Reynolds’s resignation.

Tipped to get the commissioner’s job 10 years ago, she lost out when older party members opposed her appointment because she retired from politics and the party lost the seat she held in Galway West for 22 years and which had been her father’s before that.

The Taoiseach thanked outgoing Commissioner Charlie McCreevy for his significant contribution during his five years in the role. Because of delays in ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, he will remain in the role for three months longer than usual until February.