THE SATURDAY PROFILE: The son of a Dublin watchmaker is poised to land the top job in the European Parliament. Pat Cox, the former journalist and PD TD, is respected perhaps more than he is liked. Denis Staunton, in Brussels, profiles him
When the 626 Members of the European Parliament elect a new president in Strasbourg on Tuesday, they will vote in secret for one of five candidates. The vote will be close, but few doubt that the outcome will see the Munster MEP, Pat Cox, emerging as the first Irishman to lead Europe's directly-elected parliament.
For the 49-year-old watchmaker's son, Tuesday's election will be the crowning achievement of an extraordinary political career. As a member of a small political group in the parliament and a citizen of one of the EU's smallest states, Cox had few natural advantages.
What makes his feat more impressive is that he will have won office without the backing of a political party in his own country. What makes it unusual is that Cox is an unashamedly intellectual politician with a complex and somewhat inaccessible personality.
Although few European citizens could name the present president of the European Parliament, Ms Nicole Fontaine, the position is an increasingly important one. And many parliamentarians believe that Cox is the man who can help Europeans finally to feel a sense of ownership of their own parliament.
"We need to make the place what it is, more political, and we need to engage as a parliament in a very basic explanation of who are we and what do we do and how do we make a difference," he says.
The European Parliament's powers have grown substantially over the past decade and, although it cannot initiate legislation, its approval is required for measures in most policy areas. Yet the parliament remains a Cinderella among EU institutions, derided as a tiresome inconvenience by many Commission officials and representatives of national governments.
The parliament's president meets EU leaders for half an hour at the start of each summit and is included in the "family photograph" when the summit ends. But Cox acknowledges that the leaders simply tolerate the president's presence, adding that the ritual reminds him of an old television advertisement for Guinness
"This 30 minutes of darkness was brought to you by the European Parliament," he says.
At a time when the EU's public face is the bumbling figure of the Commission President, Romano Prodi, Cox will represent a fresh, articulate voice at the centre of European politics. His ruthless dynamism will also stand in sharp contrast to the stately manner of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the ancient French politician chosen to chair the Convention on Europe's Future, which will start work in March.
Nobody questions Cox's political gifts or his intellectual grasp of policy. But he enjoys more respect than affection in the European Parliament and those close to him admit that that he can be cold and insensitive to others.
In private, Cox can be witty and irreverent, a relaxed and engaging conversationalist with an endless fund of political anecdotes. In public, his eloquence can be impressive, but he is often long-winded, speaking in compound sentences which are riddled with sub-clauses and qualifications.
Pat Cox was born in Dublin in 1952 and moved to Limerick at the age of eight. His father, a watchmaker, worked at Shannon Airport after losing his job in West's jewellers on Grafton Street. Cox, who attended Christian Brothers schools in Limerick, describes his home as "a happy if frugal household" with no strong political affiliations.
He was still at school when his father died and his mother went to work at Shannon Airport. He studied economics at Trinity College, Dublin, working during the holidays in the Shannon duty-free shop.
After graduation, Cox became an economist at the Institute for Public Administration and made his first trip to continental Europe. It was a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. "No member of my family had ever been to university and none, as far as I know, ever owned a passport. This was not unusual in Ireland at that time," he said.
He returned to Limerick in the late 1970s to lecture in economics at NIHE, now the University of Limerick. In 1979, he unsuccessfully contested a local election on behalf of Fianna Fáil, a party which was dominated in Limerick by Desmond O'Malley, with whom Cox was later to have an irreparable breach.
Cox remained a member of Fianna Fáil for four years, but when he saw an RTÉ advertisement looking for current affairs presenters, he applied and was appointed.
Between 1982 and 1986, Cox became one of Ireland's best-known journalists, presenting the current affairs programme Today Tonight. He is remembered by former colleagues as a bright, courageous reporter who was equally comfortable investigating paramilitary links to crime in Northern Ireland or covering a US presidential election.
Following the formation of the Progressive Democrats in 1985, Mary Harney asked Cox to join, and he became the party's first general secretary. An energetic organiser, he was a welcome presence at branch meetings, not least on account of his high public profile as a television presenter.
He became an MEP for Munster in 1989 and played a key role in negotiating the party's programme for government with Fianna Fáil in the same year. He won a Dáil seat in Cork South-Central in 1992. Then, when O'Malley resigned the leadership the following year, Cox sought to succeed him.
AFTER his defeat in the leadership contest, Cox increasingly believed that his future lay in Europe, and he wanted to defend his European seat, promising that he would give up his Dáil seat if elected. He left the PDs, fought the European election and defeated O'Malley by 3,000 votes. Although Cox has mended fences with most leading PDs since then, he and O'Malley remain on poor terms. When Cox resigned his seat in Cork South-Central, it was taken in a by-election by the late Hugh Coveney.
Back in Strasbourg, Cox was elected deputy leader of the Liberal group in the parliament and devoted himself wholeheartedly to European politics. He gained a reputation as a formidable speaker and an able deal-maker, encouraging the Liberals, who have only 52 seats, to form flexible alliances with other groups.
In 1998, he was the unanimous choice as leader of the group, becoming an important figure in the debate which led to the sacking of the European Commission the following year. Cox's speech on January 11th, 1999, was a turning point in the debate over alleged corruption and croneyism by some Commissioners.
Although Commission officials maintain to this day that the accusations were overblown and that the Commission was treated unfairly, Cox captured the public mood by declaring: "We have crossed the line from the politics of accounting to the wider politics of accountability."
After the 1999 European elections, Cox made a deal with the conservative European People's Party (EPP) to support Nicole Fontaine for the post of president. In return, the EPP promised to back Cox next Tuesday.
Cox promises to lift the parliament's profile by forging links with the US Congress and the Duma in Moscow and introducing more political cut and thrust to the often sterile parliamentary debates. His most difficult task may be to negotiate a members' statute aimed at regularising MEPs' relationships with the thousands of lobbyists who surround the parliament and ending a stream of mini-scandals about expenses and petty corruption.
If Cox succeeds in raising the parliament's profile, he will leave office in 2004 as Ireland's most formidable politician on the European stage. Many former colleagues, including some who dislike him personally, hope that Cox will then return to domestic political life.
He will not rule out such a move. But, looking back on the meandering progress of his career so far, he says it is impossible to predict what will happen next.
"Who can ever say where all of those avenues go? I certainly wouldn't have thought when Ivoted in St Vincent's Primary School in Blarney Street in Cork in the 1999 European election that next Tuesday I'd find myself a credible possibility for the presidency of the House," he says.