Brigid Laffan is currently Director and Professor at the
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Director of the Global Governance
Programme and of the European Governance and Politics Programme at the European
University Institute (EUI), Florence. She was previously Professor of European
Politics at University College Dublin. While she was there she was
Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences.

Brigid Laffan Photo: European University Institute

She also is an organiser of the annual State of the European
Union conference in Florence, which has a high power guest list including the
president of the European Commission, president of the European Council and president
of the European Parliament.

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.

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I just want to follow
up on a couple of the things that Brigid said there. The first point to address
is where she said that she wasn’t giving me ‘permission’ to use the interview.
That has no validity whatsoever. I told her very clearly that I was recording
an interview for the podcast, and even if I didn’t, I don’t need permission
from her or anyone else to do so. I can think of a lot of politicians who would
like to withhold permission to report some things they had said. We don’t have
very robust media independence in Ireland, but we’d have none at all if anyone could
veto coverage of themselves.

But on the substantive
point, the Santer Commission, which resigned en masse in 1999, in my view is a
very relevant topic for discussion because the method of nominating
commissioners has not substantially changed since. Each government chooses one
politician who they send to become a commissioner, basically a Europe-wide
minister for something in the way that Phil Hogan is the European Commissioner
for Trade.

As I mentioned to
Brigid, commissioners have immunity from prosecution for any crime in any EU
country. That’s not so surprising when it comes to international officials like
ambassadors, they couldn’t work in other countries if the host government could