Several Irish former politicians have developed lucrative lobbying careers in Brussels working for tech multinationals, the pharmaceutical industry and big banks, according to company accounts and financial filings.
It was the amount of time former junior minister and Fine Gael TD Dara Murphy was spending in Brussels, and not in the Dáil, that saw his political career end in controversy.
Ironically, that left him well placed to carve a path after politics as a well-paid lobbyist and political consultant, advising private clients on how to navigate European Union (EU) institutions.
Murphy resigned as a TD in late 2019 following the controversy over expenses he claimed for Dáil attendance, at a time when he was also working in Brussels as director of elections for the European People’s Party (EPP). It was a full-time, paid role with the political grouping that includes Fine Gael and other centre-right parties.
RM Block
After a brief stint in the European Commission as an adviser, Murphy took a job with Rasmussen Global, a public affairs consultancy set up by former Danish prime minister and head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
The firm isn’t typical. It advises private companies, but also countries. The governments of Japan, Taiwan and Armenia are all clients.
Murphy is now a vice-president of Rasmussen, a full-time role where he focuses on tech and energy policy, among other things.
“We’ll only work with democratic governments. Not every democracy is perfect, but it has to be a democracy,” Murphy says.
“We don’t sort of lobby as such, we more explain to governments [and companies] how the systems work, how Europe functions,” he says.
Murphy has well-established links inside the EPP, the grouping that dominates the European Parliament and counts nearly a dozen EU leaders as members, along with commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
As a former Minister of State for European affairs, Murphy has been inside the rooms where decisions were hashed out between member states.
[ Pharma lobbyists cash in on Brussels red tape rampageOpens in new window ]
A lot of the work with Rasmussen entails advising governments and companies how to work the so-called Brussels bubble. That means knowing which commission officials or MEPs they need to target to have a better chance of influencing the EU machine in their favour.
Separate to his senior role with Rasmussen, Murphy carries out some work for the US tech giant Apple. That lobbying work is conducted through a company he registered in Ireland, Epecon Ltd.
Financial accounts for the firm show Murphy took in profits of €96,000 last year and €155,000 the year before. It has assets of €360,000, records show. This revenue is on top of his Rasmussen salary, which is significant.
“It’s a comfortable living that I’m earning,” he says when the figures are put to him.
Apple is the company’s main client. This information is available through declarations that lobbyists are required to submit to a public EU transparency register. He started lobbying for Apple around the same time he joined Rasmussen in 2021.
As a former politician from Cork, where Apple has a large manufacturing base and employs 6,000 people, Murphy says he has “always had a lot to do” with the iPhone maker.
Former EU commissioner Phil Hogan has also gone on to set up a lucrative lobbying consultancy providing “strategic advice” to companies.
As a past commissioner who held the powerful trade portfolio, Hogan is still a high-profile figure around the corridors of the EU’s institutions. He splits his time between Ireland and Brussels.
Filings show his big clients include US banking giant JP Morgan, law firm DLA Piper, telecoms firm Vodafone and payments company Visa.
The former Fine Gael environment minister declared significant work for Ardagh, the glass bottles and drink cans company built up by Irish financier Paul Coulson, though they are no longer listed as a client.
Hogan’s work for those top clients brings in revenues of between €100,000 and €300,000 a year, per company, according to transparency filings.
He is providing consultancy advice to Irish firms, such as Co Kildare veterinary diagnostics lab Enfer. Irish-headquartered aviation firm AerCap, which buys and leases aircraft to airlines, was recently declared as a new client.
Retaining Hogan or other senior former politicians gave businesses a valuable “insider perspective”, one source in the corporate lobbying industry said.
“They know the unwritten rules of how policy is made and how governments operate,” the source said.
His firm, Triton, trades under the name Hogan Strategic Advisory Services. It was incorporated in Ireland as an unlimited company, meaning it is not required to file annual accounts detailing its profits or other financial information.
However, declarations made to the EU’s transparency register state it has taken in €1 million or more in annual revenue from Brussels-related work in the last number of years.
Separately, records show Hogan lobbied Bernard Gloster, the chief executive of the Health Service Executive (HSE), making representations on behalf of several clients.
He sat down with Gloster this July in the HSE’s Dr Steevens’ Hospital head offices. They discussed cancer screenings, waiting lists for obesity patients and “innovative” new fertility treatments, notes of the meeting show.
In paperwork disclosing the meeting under Irish lobbying regulations, Hogan’s firm said he was acting for three companies: Certior, an Irish company that produces blood tests to help detect cancers; Auralia, an Irish plastic surgery business set up by an Iraqi surgeon, and Hertility, a UK start-up that sells home fertility tests to women.
Hogan’s company was established in early 2021, several months after he was forced to resign as EU trade commissioner for attending a dinner organised by the Oireachtas golf society, at a time when Covid-19 restrictions on large gatherings were in place.
The commission has rules to stamp out perceptions of a revolving door between the top of the EU’s executive arm and private industry. During a two-year “cooling-off” period, Hogan had to refrain from any lobbying or consultancy work that overlapped with his old portfolios of trade and agriculture in the commission.
The Irish Times previously reported that he had to temporarily drop international law firm DLA Piper as a client, after the commission’s ethics board felt he could be breaching those rules. The restrictions on his consultancy work came to an end in September, 2022.
It is understood Hogan Strategic Advisory Services is largely the former Fine Gael politician acting solo, with at least one other employee working as an assistant. It has an office on Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, with Hogan frequently travelling to Brussels for meetings.
Internal documents show Hogan’s firm lobbied commission officials earlier this year on behalf of a US-based client, OathLife, which makes products to “replenish” the health of soil.
In a January 28th email to John Bell, then a high-ranking Irish official in the commission, Hogan’s firm touted a “new soil technology that may be interesting for farmers, climate emissions, carbon measurement”. A follow-up meeting the following week between Bell and Hogan discussed what the company was working on, minutes show.
At a separate meeting in February with an official in the commission’s agriculture department, there was a discussion around how OathLife was applying for product approval in several EU states, having already secured authorisation in the US.
Minutes of the meetings and the internal correspondence were released to The Irish Times on the back of EU access-to-information requests.
Hogan did not respond to queries from The Irish Times about his consultancy work.
Similar to Murphy, former Fine Gael TD Lucinda Creighton grew to know how the EU really worked during her stint as junior minister for European affairs. Creighton was in that job the last time Ireland took over the rotating EU presidency in 2013, which put Enda Kenny’s coalition government at the heart of the Brussels deal-making process.
Creighton, who broke with Fine Gael when it moved to ease restrictions on abortion access, formed a new centre-right party, Renua, before leaving politics in 2016 and moving into the world of public affairs.
Creighton’s firm, Vulcan Consulting, employs about 20 staff between its main offices in Dublin and Brussels, plus some more casual advisers.
It has steadily built up a roster of clients. There are recognisable names from the pharma and tech industry, but some unexpected ones such as an organisation that represents US cranberry growers.
The firm is owned and run by Creighton. Her husband, former Fine Gael TD Paul Bradford, is a director and chairman. Financial accounts show it reported profits of €220,000 last year and €120,000 in 2023.
Creighton opened the firm’s Brussels office a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world, which was not ideal. Declarations filed to the EU transparency register state the firm has revenues of at least €1 million a year.
Chipmaker Intel, Apple, online giant Amazon, Enterprise Ireland, pharma firm Johnson & Johnson and the industry umbrella body the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association are among those who retain Vulcan’s services.
Some of this work involves keeping tabs on how various pieces of legislation are winding their way through the EU system.
Sometimes it involves more direct lobbying, where Vulcan will contact members of the Government, TDs and MEPs, seeking to influence their thinking, or set up face-to-face meetings with their clients.
Logs of its lobbying in Ireland show Vulcan was very active in helping the pharmaceutical industry convince the Government to oppose proposed reforms of the sector being debated at EU-level this year.
[ Government U-turns on EU pharma reforms after lobbyingOpens in new window ]
The company reported receiving between €200,000 and €300,000 last year for its work with Teksend Photomask, a Japanese company involved in semiconductor production. Massachusetts-based Analog Devices, another player in the semiconductor sector, paid Vulcan a figure in the same range last year, according to transparency register filings.
Vulcan won a valuable public contract to advise the Hungarian Integrity Authority, a newly established independent body intended to be a check on efforts by prime minister Viktor Orban’s government to further erode the rule of law in Hungary.
Creighton says the political system needs input from business to work well.
“You can’t have one without the other,” she says.
Politicians could only be expected to master a “superficial” understanding of any given policy or topic, having to be across so much.
“Even as a minister you’re being pulled in so many different directions; you have your constituency as well,” she says.
“I am enjoying getting to really delve into policy in a way that wasn’t possible as a politician, which is ironic. I love it.”
“Ultimately the responsibility lies with the politician and their judgment,” Murphy says of corporate attempts to sway the political system.
He says rules the EU set to regulate the practice were strict, as were the limits capping political donations in Ireland.
“At the end of the day, we have to trust the people we elect to ultimately judge what is in the best interest for the people,” Murphy says.
