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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
C
ATHERINE Day is the current
Secretary-General of the European
Commission. She followed another
Irish person, David Sullivan, into the
role, to the chagrin of some of our European
friends. Day has been in that position since
during the whole of the Barroso Commission,
having previously been the Director General for
the Environment.
Catherine Day was born in Dublin in ,
brought up in Mount Merrion and educated at
Mount Anville private convent-school. She has
a BA in economics and an MA in International
Trade and Economic Integration from University
College Dublin and went on to be the loan officer
at the Investment Bank of Ireland in . The
following year she became EC Information Officer
at the Confederation of Irish Industry. Much of
Some Day
michael smith
Irish EU Commission chief is market-oriented and not environment-friendly
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PROFILE
taking on French state-aid policy. Before becom-
ing head civil servant she served as head of the
Environment DG.
Apart from her short fuse, colleagues speak
well of Day.
Despite Day’s workaholism in the Commission,
there’s no shortage of people willing to describe
her as “adorable” or “clever” or “helpful”.
Inevitably she is reputed not to suffer fools.
Although she proudly declares she has no hob-
bies whatsoever, she apparently enjoys going out
for meals and concerts.
While well disposed to the sort of Christian
Democrat policies that prevail in Ireland – and
at one stage having been one of the forces that
wanted mitigation of the Commission’s stringent
approach to EU environmental-law breaches,
she is also – as the whole Commission is obliged
to be – independent of national bias.
No doubt in this spirit of impartiality in
Day noted that “people do not believe the Irish
are good Europeans anymore”. She said “the
perception is that the more prosperous Ireland
became, the more arrogant it became, and the
less it engaged. It shouldn’t be a fair-weather
engagement”. Equally brutally she showed little
sympathy for Ireland’s self-inflicted predicament:
“I understand that Irish people feel the burden of
debt is enormous and wish that they could just
shrug it off, but life isn’t that simple”.
Recently she has found herself repeatedly
embroiled in controversy with some who pur-
port to defend the public interest. For example,
she intervened twice in in the regulation
of tobacco products, delaying strengthened
EU legislation on the subject. She sent a letter
to Paola Testori Coggi, Director General of the
Commission’s DG for Health and Consumers,
which “could easily have been sent by a tobacco
industry representative”, according to Germany’s
Der Spiegel magazine, which investigated the res-
ignation in October of John Dalli, former
EU Commissioner for Health and Consumers.
The affair ultimately led to more than ques-
tions from MEPs. Appearing before the European
Parliament in January, Day sought to justify
her interventions on the basis that she did not
want the text of the revised Tobacco Products
Directive to leak.
She has since turned her attention again to
environmental policy.
In recent weeks, several stories have leaked
to the EU press regarding Day’s personal inter-
ventions in respect of EU environmental policy,
an area she knows well after that spell as head of
the Commission’s DG Environment from
until , during which she drew the enmity
of many environmentalists.
In March she blocked a legislative pro-
posal to cut the use of plastic bags, restricting
Environment Commissioner Potočnik’s room
for manoeuvre to bring forward a green paper
on plastic waste. She is also said to be behind
the delayed publication of a long-expected
green paper on the sustainable management
of phosphorous, and reportedly wants the
Environment Commissioner to postpone pro-
posals on ‘green infrastructure’, on moving
beyond GDP as an economic indicator, and on
environmental inspections. Media reports sug-
gest Commissioner Potočnik is willing to fight for
the green paper on phosphorous, at least.
As Secretary General, Day has the practical
power to block proposals from any part of the
Commission by preventing or delaying them
being put to inter-service consultation.
Day is said to believe that the Commission’s
work should currently be focused on growth and
the euro, with a spokesperson commenting that
the Commission is “often obliged to prioritise
between the many proposals made by all of the
Directorates-General”. Dutch MEP Gerben-Jan
Gerbrandy said many in Brussels were uncon-
vinced by the argument that this is not a good
time for new environmental measures. Stronger
environment policies are “especially needed now,
when we are trying to refocus our economy”, he
has said.
In early March, it was reported that Day had
been behind the European Commission’s deci-
sion to appeal rulings of the EU’s General Court
which highlighted deficiencies in the EU’s leg-
islation on access to justice. NGOs reacted with
fury: “It is pure hypocrisy that on the one hand
the Commission proclaims that will be the
European Year of Citizens and at the same time
launches appeals against Court rulings that would
give those same citizens greater rights to chal-
lenge violations of the law”, said the Secretary
General of the European Environmental Bureau
which tracks Commission environmental pol-
icy, Jeremy Wates. “This comes on the heels of
the Commission’s equally disgraceful attempts
to weaken the transparency requirements per-
taining to information held by EU institutions”,
he added.
“Is this a case of Catherine Day being more
spinned against than spinning?” asked a spokes-
person for An Taisce at the time. “We don’t think
so: her damaging influence over areas such as
health and the environment - issues of central
importance to Irish and EU citizens – are of major
concern to us, and they are making her posi-
tion increasingly untenable”, he added. For the
moment, however, zeal for the environment is
not a prerequisite for the Commission Secretary-
Generalship. Perhaps some day.
her ethos seems to have been forged by this time.
She joined the European Commission in
and the cabinet of Ireland’s Richard Burke in
at the age of , staying for a term with his
Irish successor, Peter Sutherland, competition
commissioner. She then transferred to the cabi-
net of the UK’s Leon Brittan, a Tory, for two terms,
when he was responsible for external economic
affairs and trade policy. She returned to work
for him in as director for relations with
third-world countries. Day became deputy direc-
tor in Chris Patten’s external relations where she
was deeply involved with the enlargement of the
Union from countries to today’s .
After this, Catherine Day (not to be confused
with Estonia’s national holiday, ‘Catherine’s Day’)
was part of a reshuffle among the Commission
which promoted liberal economic reformers.
She had become notable in the Commission for
People do not believe the
Irish are good Europeans
anymore. The perception is
that the more prosperous
Ireland became, the more
arrogant it became
