They packed the auditorium and its balcony and cheered him to the echo for two full minutes. Three to four hundred Eurocrats - officials in DG5, the directorate for Social Affairs - turned out yesterday, of their own volition, to say goodbye to their boss, Padraig Flynn.
He told them he was a conviction politician through and through and that Europe needed more of them. He spoke warmly of the former Commission president, Jacques Delors, as a conviction politician, and how he, Padraig Flynn, had introduced himself apprehensively to him as a right-wing Catholic politician. "That's why I want you," he claimed Delors had said. And they had gone on to carry out a revolution in the way employment was treated in the Union.
He praised his staff and cabinet and said he had no regrets. That was no way to live. Later, in his office in the Breydel, the Commission headquarters, he spoke of his feelings. It has been stripped now of all the pictures and personal touches, the bookshelves are empty, the vast expanse of the red-leather desktop is almost bare.
The new Commission takes over on Thursday. Today Padraig Flynn travels down one last time to Strasbourg to the European Parliament to watch his successor being installed. Then it's home to Dublin and Castlebar.
To what? Business? "I want to stay active. I've learned a lot along the road of life. If my expertise can be of use to me and others, then it is available, and so be it. If no one wants it, so be it. I don't mind."
Elected office is out of the question. "There is a new generation coming up," he says. And he's not sure about either of the books, about his life in Ireland and in Brussels respectively, that it has been suggested he write.
But there is no doubt that his voice will still be heard in politics, and yesterday he even sent off a small rocket to his own party when he confessed he did not understand Fianna Fail's current association with a deeply Eurosceptical group in the Parliament.
"In my opinion it's coming to the time when my party has to be seriously looked at, so they can focus on support for integration. They are out of synch. And now is the time to talk about it."
He adds that the party's involvement with such a small group had been a "great disadvantage" as a commissioner. His European convictions have been strengthened, he admits, by his time out here, and he warns of the dangers to Ireland as it crosses the "great threshold" to a new role as net contributor. There would be huge challenges to his own vision of a social Europe from the pressures of enlargement and the demographic reality that meant that within 20 years there would be at least 10 per cent more dependants in the population.
Of the Gilmartin cheque, he will still say nothing. "I respect the tribunal process," he insists. That might not suit others, he says, but equality of treatment should apply.
How would he like to be remembered? "As someone who gave it everything, had reasonable success, and as Frank Sinatra said, did it my way."
