Diarmaid Ferriter: Feed The World Phil has his eye on a €225,000 job

Former Fine Gael minister and European commissioner for trade Phil Hogan seems to want to be the new Bob Geldof, keen, he assures us, to “help the millions of people that need help in relation to food security and nutrition”. He wants to do this by becoming the next director general of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation. He said he is ready to “serve once again” by obtaining the €225,000 per annum job.At the launch of his bid this week, where the attendance included several Fine Gael grandees, Feed-the-World Phil dismissed the idea that controversy over his actions in 2020 – when he attended a dinner during Covid-19 restrictions, leading to his resignation as a European commissioner – might impede his chances. He suggested that was only a journalistic preoccupation: “We have gone into the history lesson on that ... I was sloppy in relation to the guidelines that were there at the time. I made a fulsome apology.” Fulsome means excessive or insincere. To “serve once again”, he said he would spend a “significant six-figure sum” of his own money, but he is also to receive the assistance of two staff from the Department of Agriculture. Hogan is obviously a very wealthy man: his consultancy firm, Hogan Strategic Advisory Services, earned at least €1 million in 2024, with banking giant JP Morgan Chase and law firm DLA Piper among his larger clients. In March 2022, Hogan paused his work with DLA Piper to ensure there was “absolutely no doubt” about compliance with rules for former European commissioners requiring a “cooling off” period applying to the taking on of clients who were “major stakeholders” in areas covered by an ex-commissioner’s former portfolios. A European Commission ethics committee had contended there was a “substantial discrepancy” between the law firm’s announcement in 2021 that Hogan was advising it and information provided by Hogan, creating “a risk of reputational damage” for the commission.READ MOREIn pursuit of his current ambition, Hogan will channel his private wealth alongside State resources. He was chosen as a candidate after an interview by a panel that included a former senior civil servant, an industry expert and a human-resources adviser, with the Cabinet then backing his bid. It might be worth considering other history lessons. As a junior minister on the morning of budget day in 1995, an adviser to Hogan faxed the main points of the budget to a journalist. Taoiseach John Bruton asked him to resign, which he did: “I was the first to break John Bruton’s pane of glass,” Hogan later said, a reference to Bruton’s declaration that his government “must go about its work ... as transparently as it were working behind a pane of glass.” Hogan’s machinations within Fine Gael in relation to the leadership of the party have been well documented. In Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan’s 2020 history of the party, Saving the State, they record that when Enda Kenny’s leadership was threatened in 2010, “Hogan was in overdrive, canvassing almost every member of the parliamentary party, using inducements or threats, whichever he felt was more appropriate to the individual case.”[ Phil Hogan ready to ‘serve once again’ as he launches bid for UN food agency jobOpens in new window ]As minister for the environment in 2014, Hogan said the decision to set up Irish Water was one of the biggest since the establishment of the ESB. There was trenchant criticism that Irish Water spent €50 million on external consultants in its first year. Hogan responded by saying “€50 million is part of the money that is required to set up this company that will bring €2 billion in savings to the taxpayer over the next seven years.” Plans for domestic water charges became a political fiasco. In 2018, Irish Water spent €683 million on the Republic’s water supply system and received €1.1 billion from the government.In his 2025 memoir, Speaking My Mind, former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar wrote this of Hogan: “He’s the sort to explore all options, even dubious ones.” Regarding the 2020 controversy, Varadkar records that Hogan “ignored guidelines requiring people coming to Ireland from abroad to stay at home for 14 days. He had met me in the department during that period and been in and out of Kildare for golf trips during the local lockdown, when all non-essential journeys were to be avoided ... he returned to Brussels, leaving the rest of us to deal with the fallout”. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen sought a detailed statement and timeline of his movements. She said “As Europe fights to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and Europeans make sacrifices and accept painful restrictions”, she expected commissioners “to be particularly vigilant about compliance”. There are certainly no restrictions on his movements now: he has recently been drumming up support for his candidacy in Singapore, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and south Pacific islands.It is not enough to save the State, or Europe. It is time now for multi-options Phil to feed the world.