Growing up as the son of a truck driver in Cabra in north Dublin, Tony Murphy did not expect to one day find himself heading up one of the seven institutions of the European Union.
As president of the European Court of Auditors, the union’s spending watchdog, Murphy is among the most senior Irish officials working in the EU.
After finishing school in 1979, he secured a spot to study Irish and French in Trinity College Dublin, to the delight of his family. The week before he was due to start university, Murphy got a letter from the Civil Service, offering him a job in the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), the State agency responsible for auditing public spending.
“They said they would pay for me to do the accountancy exam, so I said, ‘Okay that sounds like a reasonable deal.’ Things in life just happen for a reason; there’s a lot of luck involved. I said, ‘I think I’ll go down that road,’” he says.
After about 20 years working for C&AG, a chance came up to change tack and move to Brussels to work for the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU that proposes laws. “I loved what I was doing in Ireland, there was nothing wrong with that. I was auditing the health boards and auditing universities,” he says. “It was time for a change.”
Murphy has an interest in languages and had learned French, which helped him when moving, he says, and this was put to the test pretty quickly, with everyone in his office working through French when he arrived.
After about a decade in the commission’s internal audit unit, Murphy moved to the Luxembourg-based European Court of Auditors, working his way up through the institution to become president in late 2022.
The decision to stick with a career in the EU was driven by a mixture of the professional and the personal.
“The kids were after settling a bit but, I think, also it was a complete change from what I was doing in Ireland,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed it very much, I’ve had a very good career, I can’t complain. Who knows what might have been at home. I don’t know, you never know.”
There was a time when Ireland had a sizeable spread of officials throughout the commission, where policies that are later converted into EU laws are first drafted. However, a once-steady flow of people making the move from Ireland to Brussels to pursue careers in the EU institutions has slowed significantly.
Now, with a generation of long-serving Irish officials retiring, there is concern that Ireland could lose influence due to few Irish citizens holding mid-ranking positions and potentially advancing into senior commission roles in the coming years.
About one-third of Irish officials working in EU institutions are due to retire by 2026. Old hands inside the commission have for years been privately sounding the alarm about this looming demographic cliff edge.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Government have more recently become alert to the problem, putting in place plans to encourage Irish civil servants and others to consider careers in the EU. The department says it hopes to have an extra 50 Irish staff hired into EU institutions by 2030.
The competition can be intense for well-paid jobs in the commission, with applicants needing to be fluent in two, if not three, languages. The 2004 enlargement towards central Europe, which brought 10 extra states into the union, also meant for many years afterwards recruitment into the commission focused on hiring officials from those new member states, to ensure they were represented in the executive.
“There is definitely a deficit at entry level. The conveyor belt is slowing down,” says David O’Sullivan, who served as secretary general of the commission from 2000 to 2005.
That is partly because there are now plenty of attractive employment opportunities in Ireland, which would have been scarce in the years after the State joined the EU in the early 1970s.
O’Sullivan started his career in the Department of Agriculture in the mid-1970s, before moving to the Department of Foreign Affairs. He was successful in applying for a commission post and moved to Brussels in 1979 after getting a leave of absence from the department.
“I think I’m still on leave of absence,” he adds. “In those days there was a great interest in jobs in Brussels among young Irish people, not least because the options at home were very limited,” he says.
“When I left university in 1975 it was either the public service or if you wanted to go into industry you went to the UK. There were no jobs at home.”
Several years on, O’Sullivan considered moving home to Dublin after finishing a stint as a member of Ireland’s then-EU commissioner Peter Sutherland’s team.
“I actually rang the department and said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of coming back.’ I didn’t get a very encouraging response. This was in 1989 and the country was in dire straits,” he recalls.
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Speaking privately, other officials say that attitude would be unheard of today. Where departments do agree to let a civil servant work in the commission for a period on a secondment, often as a policy expert, they are keen to pull them back as soon as possible.
O’Sullivan, who went on to become one of Ireland’s most senior officials in the commission, says the Government needs to make it easier for civil servants to rotate to work in the EU.
“I do think it’s an issue for the country, not because having Irish people will somehow mean the commission does everything Ireland wants, but it’s a question of being represented, [having] the Irish view of the world being heard throughout the institutions.”
A common complaint among some Irish people in Brussels is that Irish diplomats posted to the EU are less proactive about trying to help place their nationals into roles in the commission or other bodies than their counterparts from other EU member states.
The idea is that officials operating in the mid to upper echelons of the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters would subtly shape policy in line with their own national perspectives at an early stage. Diplomats from their member state might then not have to lobby to have the proposal changed later during negotiations between governments, before policies become EU laws.
Another complaint is that diplomats from other member states, like France, are better at fostering a professional network of officials inside the institutions.
“I was in the commission for over 10 years and there was never any contact with anybody ... I think that has gotten better,” Murphy says.
Departments need a push to be more willing to let go of civil servants, who could then go on and have successful EU careers, which would benefit Ireland in the long run, he adds.
“You have to change the mindset and look on it not as a short-term loss but as an investment in the future, but they are trying I think ... It’s good that they are paying attention to it now,” he says.
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