Podcast: In The Room
Andrew McDowell: "We backed down and we started again"
In March 2011, a new Irish coalition between Fine Gael and Labour took office under Enda Kenny – only four months after its predecessor had lost bond-market access and had to request a bailout from the Eurozone’s agencies and the International Monetary Fund.
It was left to the Kenny government to pick up the pieces after the collapse of the debt-fuelled “Celtic Tiger” and walk the tightrope between implementing the conditions of the bailout to the letter and negotiating away its most onerous conditions. Throughout, Andrew McDowell was at Kenny’s side as his head of programme implementation and chief economic adviser – bargaining with (among others) Chancellor Angela Merkel and two successive European Central Bank presidents Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi.
"It was quite late at night like all these meetings were,” he recalls of a pivotal 2012 meeting with Draghi at his office at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels. “Enda basically started the meeting – President Draghi was sitting at the table and there was a blank wall behind him – and he said: ‘have a look now at the wall behind you’. Draghi looked over his shoulder, somewhat puzzled. And, you know, there's nothing there. Enda went: ‘Exactly, there needs to be something on this wall. There needs to be a plaque. I can see it now’. And Draghi was getting more and more confused: ‘I thought we were here to talk about the promissory notes’. And Enda says: ‘yes but there needs to be a plaque … and we'll have it constructed saying ‘it was in this office that President Draghi saved Ireland’. And as laughable as it is, you could actually see Draghi's eyes kind of light up”.
After three successive In The Rooms with officials who managed Europe's sovereign-debt crisis from the creditors' side, Andrew McDowell provides the debtor’s eye view. An economist by training - with degrees from University College Dublin and Johns Hopkins SAIS – he worked for the government and at the Economist Intelligence Unit before joining Fine Gael as head of policy in 2007. He left the government in 2016 to join the European Investment Bank as a vice president for a four-year term and is today a partner at Strategy&.
To hear his crisis reminiscences, click on your preferred podcast app link and subscribe (free) to the In The Room podcast series.
In The Room is a series of conversations with officials who played crucial (often behind the scenes) roles in the history of the EU.
Edited and produced by davidstudio.