The Globalist

In Sutherland’s last year at UCD, Vincent Browne became the chairman of Young Fine Gael. Browne would later become a prominent journalist and harsh critic of the party. Rugby remained an all-consuming passion for Sutherland at UCD, yet he still found time to increase his circle of friends. Garrett Sheehan, Colm Barrington and other Gonzaga boys had made the same journey from Ranelagh to Earlsfort Terrace, although Barrington, being a year older and in the economics department, spent little time with Sutherland at UCD. Barrington was not a fan of his university experience. ‘UCD felt very old fashioned. Having come from Gonzaga it felt in some ways silly. Girls were not allowed to wear trousers into the library. The pomposity of some of the lecturers was unbearable.’

Sutherland appeared to develop no strong feelings about his time at Earlsfort Terrace. Nicholas Kearns, who also studied law with Sutherland – they both started at the Bar on the same day – would go on to become a Supreme Court judge and president of the High Court. He and Sutherland met the summer before they started at UCD. ‘I first met him when thirty-five lads went to Huntingdon in the UK for a summer to work for Batchelors Peas. Peter quickly emerged as the natural leader of the Irish group that was there. It was eight weeks of night shifts, eight at night to eight in the morning. We were all Irish guys from different backgrounds. If there were any workplace difficulties, Suds [Sutherland] sorted them out. He was big and strong in those days. He had a natural strength and energy. If he wanted something he got it.’ ‘Suds’ was a nickname that would remain with Sutherland for the rest of his life.

Sutherland also studied economics and philosophy in his first year. Garret FitzGerald lectured him in economics, while Desmond Connell, the future archbishop of Dublin, taught him philosophy; according to Sutherland’s eldest son Shane, the experience put his father off philosophy for twenty years. John Blayney, then a barrister and a future High Court judge, taught Sutherland constitutional law.

Declan McCourt, who met Sutherland at UCD, studied law and politics before taking his Bar exams. He enjoyed the experience. ‘I found it very fulfilling. It was the Lemass era. Everything was opening up. It was great. We were in the centre of town. We made friends for life. There were plenty of colourful characters.’ Sean Lemass had taken over as Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach from Eamon de Valera and immediately set about liberalising the economy.

The friendship between Garrett Sheehan and Sutherland developed further at UCD. ‘He certainly didn’t develop a passion for law in UCD. We were lucky if the lecturers turned up and we didn’t mind if sometimes they didn’t. He actually did really well in his final year of law. When he went to the Bar and started practising that is when he absolutely loved it. UCD was great fun. Our social life revolved around the rugby club. The L&H would have been an obvious path, but I think we were so determined to play for UCD.’

Sheehan explains that, contrary to the image of rugby players ‘just being interested in drinking and talking about women, we actually had a lot of good discussions about politics and so on’. Sutherland’s social life revolved around Hartigans and O’Dwyers on Leeson Street and The Pembroke on Pembroke Street Lower. There were also dances, or what were known as ‘hops’. The Belvedere hop was very popular at the time. It was there that, in 1969, Sutherland met a young Spanish au pair, Maruja Cabria Valcarcel. They would marry two years later.

But Sutherland’s time in UCD was mostly taken up with rugby. He played in the Freshman team which won the thirds league and then for the second team, which won the league and cup double in the Leinster league in 1967. Their ultimate aim, says Sheehan, was to be selected for the Leinster team, for which they both had trials. ‘Peter was never far off making it.’ John O’Hagan, who is now Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin, was captain that year, while Sutherland took over the captaincy of the senior team for the 1967–8 academic year. O’Hagan says that the first time the team got together, Sutherland gave an ‘amazing speech. That team had been very successful the previous year. He managed expectations very well. He is the finest speaker of his generation.’

The first game of the year was the annual ‘Colours’ match against Trinity. Press clippings from the time described it as a classic. According to Sean Diffley in the Irish Press on 30 November 1967:

Beyond any doubt the 16th Annual Colours match finds an honourable place among the classic games of rugby. It had everything – drama, excitement, fantastic pace, a high degree of skill and artistry, heroic personal endeavour and, at the end, an element of pathos. On a dull, chilly afternoon, the two student teams revived the glory of rugby. There were no losers really. [For the first UCD try] Grace ran from inside his own half and then launched a huge kick that appeared to be far too much ahead. But the long-striding UCD player managed, remarkably, to field the kick and, despite the presence of several defenders, his momentum and sheer strength carried him to within sighting of the line, and a spectacular dive did the rest.

Meanwhile, according to Paul MacWeeney at the Irish Times:

Had there been All Blacks among the spectators they would have acclaimed UCD’s second try as one of their own most precious vintage – no better combined movement is likely to be seen at Lansdowne Road, or elsewhere in Ireland for that matter, this season … From a scrum well inside the UCD half, Cooke served Murphy who sent inside to Bresnihan coming up on the burst. The forwards supported on each side of the man in possession, and at top speed, Deering, Gill, Sutherland and J. O’Hagan flicked passes in and out before Deering burst over near the posts.

Despite the best efforts of UCD, however, Trinity won the game.

In January the focus shifted to the Leinster Senior Cup. Unable to compete in height or weight with the other teams, the UCD students devised a two-man lineout.[fn1] This is how the legendary Con Houlihan described it in a piece for the Irish Press newspaper titled ‘Ingenuity the key’:

The students devised a scheme among themselves to beat Wanderers, then the top scoring side in the country and coached by Ireland’s coach. But coaches, or at least most of them, follow the textbook … But they seem to forget ingenuity. And it was ingenuity which on Saturday made Wanderers wonder what had happened to them. Now as far as I know there’s no rule asking that the two opposing forwards should stand shoulder to shoulder in the line. True, we have had four on each side peeling off, but UCD on their throw-in pulled out six forwards, leaving a couple in the line-out from each side … It was ingenuity, not organised by a coach, but by young-minded chaps.

It had the desired effect. UCD upset the odds to beat a number of more established teams on the way to the Leinster Cup final. The following piece appeared in the Irish Press on 17 April 1968, just a few days before the final, which was against Old Belvedere:

UCD will probably start favourites, and deservedly so, because they were most impressive when ousting Terenure 16–8, Wanderers 11–3 and Old Wesley 11–6, en route to the final. Against Old Wesley, in particular, they gave a magnificent exhibition of fast, intelligent, open rugby. The UCD team is one of the youngest to represent the College in memory – the average age being just under 21. What they may lack in experience they make up with exceptional fitness and attacking ability. A measure of this ability is indicated by the fact that they have scored 82 tries this season, an average of more than 3.5 per match. Another interesting feature of the line-up is that six of the team are studying law whereas the medical faculty has only two representatives this year.

Alas, it was not to be. Old Belvedere beat the students with a last-minute try in what was described as a thrilling final. O’Hagan says that Tom Grace, a member of the UCD team, is still resolute in his belief that the try should have been disallowed. Sutherland blamed the referee, who had given a different interpretation of the rules from that applied in previous games on the way to the final and clamped down on the students’ ‘ingenuity’ (the two man lineout). (A full list of the team sheet for the game can be seen in Appendix 1.)

According to O’Hagan, one of the Old Belvedere trainers who went to the UCD dressing room to perform the customary commiserations suffered a heart attack, and despite the best efforts of Tom Feighery, then a medical student, to save him, he died. The post-match dinner was postponed by a week. Tony O’Reilly, who was coming to the end of his playing career, was the guest of honour. O’Reilly was capped 29 times for Ireland and played for the British and Irish Lions on two tours. He also became the chief executive of Heinz and one of Ireland’s most successful businessmen.

Tony Hickie’s son Denis played for Ireland, as did Tom Grace, Con Feighery and Shay Deering. Frank O’Driscoll got a few B caps for Ireland; although he decided to concentrate on his career in medicine, his son Brian became a rugby player of some note. Joe Cummiskey became a prominent medical consultant and a leading campaigner against doping in sports until his death in April 2018. Fergus Slattery, meanwhile, became one of the legends of the game, touring with the British Lions as well as winning numerous caps for his country.

Sutherland himself went on to captain Lansdowne in 1970, but retired from playing at the age of twenty-eight. According to O’Hagan he was never a star player as he needed to be bigger, but he has never played with anyone so driven. ‘I have never seen anybody so upset at losing a match. He just saw black. He would descend into a slough of despond, but neither have I ever seen anybody to be so elated when we won.’

3

THE ARMS TRIAL

SUTHERLAND WAS CALLED TO THE BAR IN 1968, and devilled – ‘devilling’ being the period of training that every new Irish barrister has to undertake – under senior barrister Harry Hill along with another ambitious young barrister called Michael Moriarty. Aged thirty-seven at the time, the dapper Hill had a reputation as being one of the finest barristers in the Four Courts. A keen cricketer, who never married, he had a predilection for good food and fine wine.

Sutherland picked up more than the law from his master. About a year after Sutherland had begun practising at the Bar, Fr Noel Barber asked Hill how his former pupil was doing. ‘Too well. I worry about him,’ he replied. A couple of years later, Fr Barber reminded Hill of his concern and he replied that he was wasting his time worrying. ‘Sutherland was going to the top.’

Hill would serve as Master of the High Court between 1984 and 2006, while Sutherland and his former master would remain close friends until the latter’s death in 2006. ‘Harry Hill never compromised his principles, or his opinions. He disliked above all posturing, cant and hypocrisy,’ Sutherland wrote in an appreciation that appeared in the Irish Times. ‘He sought to hide his light under a bushel, but what drove him fundamentally was personal relationships, sport and the Bar, probably in that order. Those who knew him know what a man of true quality he was.’[1]

Sutherland quickly established himself in the Law Library, the regulatory and representative body for barristers. David Byrne, who was called to the Bar in 1970, two years after Sutherland, and would also become attorney general (between 1997 and 1999) and a European commissioner (between 1999 and 2004), says that from the beginning Sutherland was ambitious, hard-working and very determined to be successful. ‘He was excellent. He was a charming, clever man and he had a capacity to make and keep friendships. He minded his friends. He just had that way with people that was very attractive, and as a consequence he was able to build a practice in the Law Library fairly quickly. He’d a very good style in court.’ Nicholas Kearns observed: ‘He [Sutherland] was born with ambition. He was like a heat-seeking missile. No matter what he did he was always going to do well. He was a formidable rival and competitor in court and outside it. If he couldn’t go around a problem he would go through it.’

Sutherland soon built up a lucrative civil law practice, helped in no small part by his father’s insurance business. Insurance defence work would have been the holy grail among barristers. There was much less work around for barristers in the 1970s than there is today, but equally there were many fewer barristers. ‘If you had connections with the law your start would be a lot speedier, and Peter’s father had been involved in the insurance industry. So that gave him a running start, because he would have gotten work in the personal injury area and work from insurance companies. That would have been a good help to him. And then of course he had a wonderful network of friends and people that he knew from school, from rugby and all of that. He was an excellent networker. He identified and made friends easily,’ another colleague from that era said.

According to former colleagues, Sutherland had a good court presence. In the Law Library there is a distinction between advocates and lawyers. Lawyers tend to be more academic, with an interest in how laws are formulated and how they relate to each other. Advocates are more drawn to the theatre of the courtroom and the gladiatorial nature of cases. Sutherland was very much an advocate. ‘Peter would have been much more interested in fighting the case, looking after the client and so far as you can, making sure that you win,’ says Byrne. ‘Therefore, if you were to divide barristers into advocates and lawyers, he would have been in the advocates camp. That isn’t to say he wasn’t a good lawyer. He was of course, but advocacy was his strong point and that isn’t surprising given his later career. He had great ability on his feet.’

John A. Costello, a former Taoiseach, gave a speech at the Law Library annual dinner in the early 1970s. Byrne recalls that, in making reference to the growing number of young barristers in attendance, Costello said, ‘You might be wondering what are the successful characteristics that are necessary to have a successful career at the Bar.’

‘I remember him saying you should fight every case as if it was your own and never write to the newspapers. They were the two bits of advice he gave.’ Sutherland would have followed those precepts without a second thought, says Byrne. ‘I’m not saying Peter was the only one who did that. That’s what barristers did for a living – it was their job. But Peter was quite relentless and had a lot of skill in how he would go about that.’ He was a formidable advocate. ‘You knew, doing a case against Peter, that everything and anything would be used against you for him to win that case.’

Nial Fennelly, a Supreme Court judge between 2000 and 2014, was a colleague of Sutherland at the Bar and acted with him on a number of cases. ‘I can’t remember him being on cases that made huge advances in law. He wasn’t on the human rights side of things like the late Donal Barrington [the former Supreme Court judge].’ But, says Fennelly, ‘He had a reputation of being very forceful as a barrister. He was always popular and well liked, but he was forceful and even aggressive as a young barrister making his way. He made a name from an early age at the Bar.’

The Law Library often appears a highly competitive environment, one that is riven with egos. A number of colleagues from that era say that Sutherland was one of the most competitive of all. Indeed, some of his tactics were legendary. One case pitted him against John Quirke, who would later become a High Court judge. They were good friends, but when Sutherland entered a courtroom friendships were left at the door. He and Quirke were appearing on opposite sides in a dispute between a landlord and a tenant, in a case heard in the Circuit Court by Noel Ryan. At one point, while the expert witness was giving valuations and evidence in the witness box, Quirke was on his feet, holding in his hand a report which he claimed vindicated his client, the landlord, and waving the report about with ever-increasing vigour.

The theatrics were getting too much for Sutherland. He leaned across, grabbed the report out of Quirke’s hand and sent it in the direction of the nearest bin. ‘The judge’s response was amusement and he didn’t admonish him. There was no row about it. Peter wouldn’t have done it out of aggression; it was more of a playful act. He got away with a lot of things by reason of his own charm, yet at the same time he would use his charm to get away with a lot of things,’ says David Byrne.

Alan Dukes, a former Fine Gael finance minister, recalls that even though Sutherland wore his ambition on his sleeve, his self-deprecating sense of humour had a disarming effect. Dukes recalls one story Sutherland told him about when he appeared before Judge Frank Roe defending a woman accused of shoplifting, not long after Sutherland’s less than successful attempt to win a seat in the 1973 general election. The defendant claimed that she was unable to feed her children because she had no home. ‘Frank Roe asked the woman would it help if she had a house. She said yes. He pointed his finger at Peter and said, “That man might be able to help you because he is a failed politician.”’

One of the first cases that gave Sutherland a national profile was the so-called Arms Trial. The backdrop to the case was the flare-up in troubles in August 1969. Since the establishment of Northern Ireland, Catholics in the province had been treated as second-class citizens, while state-orchestrated gerrymandering – until 1968 the system of property ownership had conferred greater voting rights on the Protestant population – had ensured that Catholic communities were politically under-represented. The nascent civil rights movement across Northern Ireland in the late 1960s demanded equal voting rights, among other basic conditions. The ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in Derry in August 1969, when residents of one of the most deprived areas in western Europe engaged the security forces in a week-long stand-off, is regarded as one of the seminal moments in the onset of the Troubles.

The ensuing violence was the worst that had erupted even by the turbulent standards of Northern Ireland. Simmering tensions mutated into a widespread and open conflict between the Catholic community and the forces of the state. As skirmishes escalated, the Loyalists’ response was one of implacable resistance, and they turned on their Catholic neighbours. Nationalist communities were displaced and many were forced to seek refuge south of the border. For the first time, the Troubles had become a hugely emotive and political issue in the Republic. Although the exact details remain controversial and unresolved, the Irish government’s response was to trigger a chain of events that would change the political landscape in the south.

Jack Lynch was then Taoiseach of a Fianna Fáil government. He set up a cabinet sub-committee to monitor events in Northern Ireland and co-ordinate a contingency plan in the form of emergency relief and assistance. The sub-committee had a budget of IR£100,000. Charlie Haughey, then Minister for Finance, and a future leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach, took charge of the sub-committee alongside Neil Blaney, Minister for Agriculture. Deciding that there had to be a military component to the Irish government’s response, the pair enlisted the help of military intelligence to formulate a plan. Captain James Kelly, originally from Bailieboro in County Cavan, was instructed to liaise with a number of defence committees established by nationalists in Northern Ireland, and meetings took place from October 1969 onwards. It has been established that senior members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – an illegal paramilitary organisation – were in attendance.

Who knew about the meetings, and the decisions that were subsequently taken, became a constitutionally loaded question. In early 1970, Captain Kelly made contact with groups in Hamburg, Germany, with a view to importing arms. He was sent to Hamburg that April to organise a shipment of guns, earmarked for nationalist resistance groups in Northern Ireland, to the Republic via Dublin airport. Coincidentally, Jack Desmond – the father of Dermot Desmond, a businessman who would strike up a friendship with Sutherland in later life – was the customs officer in charge at the airport.

Peter Berry, then Secretary General of the Department of Justice, and éminence grise of the Irish state, had become aware of the scheme, which he described as a subversive plot. He ordered that the arms be impounded upon arrival at Dublin airport. When Liam Cosgrave, the leader of Fine Gael, the main opposition party, learned about the smuggling operation, he demanded a response from the government.

Lynch publicly sacked Haughey and Blaney. Both men, along with Captain James Kelly, Belfast Republican John Kelly, and Albert Luykx, a Belgian national who had acted as an intermediary in the deal, stood trial in May 1970 on charges of illegal arms smuggling. Sutherland, who had just turned twenty-four, was retained as a junior counsel on Captain Kelly’s defence team, under senior counsel Tom Findlay. There was initial surprise in the Law Library at the choice of Sutherland: his speciality was civil law and he did not have a reputation as a criminal lawyer. He did however have a relationship with Fitzpatrick’s, the firm of solicitors who represented Kelly.

To the outside world Sutherland would also have seemed politically an odd choice for Kelly’s defence team. He had a deep antipathy to paramilitaries of any hue, and one of the early factors attracting him to politics was his opposition to Haughey and all he stood for. However, there is a long-standing tradition in the Law Library to retain barristers from ‘the other side’.

Patrick Connolly, the future attorney general, acted for Haughey, with a young Dermot Gleeson, who would also go on to become attorney general, as his junior counsel. Captain Kelly’s defence was that he was not a rogue operator and had not acted outside legal channels. His case was that Jim Gibbons, Minister for Defence at the time, had been apprised at all stages of the work of the cabinet sub-committee, including the intention to import arms. Captain Kelly had been following orders at all times, it was argued. Gibbons denied that he had been aware of the plot. Crucial to Kelly’s defence was the evidence of Colonel Michael Hefferon, the head of Army Intelligence at the time.

When, a few years before his death, Sutherland put together his private papers, they included extensive writings about the Arms Trial. According to Sutherland’s account, Hefferon was regarded by the prosecution team as a significant witness in support of their case. However, the opening statement by Seamus McKenna, senior counsel for the prosecution, outlining the nature of the state’s case, had a profound effect upon him. Hefferon met Frank Fitzpatrick, solicitor for Captain Kelly, and told him that Kelly was innocent of the charges and that he could not with a clear conscience give evidence to support a case to the contrary. Fitzpatrick conveyed this conversation to McKenna in the belief that it would halt proceedings. Instead, according to Sutherland, it changed the prosecution’s stance towards Hefferon and the deployment of what had been intended as their strongest witness. Hefferon had headed the original witness list. But as the first trial progressed he was held back and was only called as the twenty-first witness, long after Gibbons had given evidence. Nevertheless, as Sutherland recalled in his account of the trial, ‘his contribution was crucial to the tenor of the case’. Sutherland continues:

Hefferon’s evidence to the first trial (28 and 29 September 1970) confirmed that: The State was engaged in training [Northern Ireland] civilians from Derry in the use of arms at Dunree (something Gibbons had emphatically denied in the Dáil on 9 May 1970). There was an active military policy for the defence of minority population in the North (as articulated by Jack Lynch’s broadcast on 13 August 1969 and elaborated in the Army directive of 6 Feb 1970).There was a specific and explicit Government directive relating to the preparation and training of the Army for incursions into Northern Ireland. When the prosecution attempted to indicate that no such directive could be located, Hefferon was very precise as to where copies were available within military files and was able to affirm that he had had the contents of that directive confirmed to him by serving staff officers (at this point Hefferon was retired from service).