TWO MONTHS AGO, perhaps only a handful of people in the country had even heard of Olli Rehn.
But almost overnight, the EU’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner appears to have become the most powerful man in Ireland; a mandarin with such sway he can keep the Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, late for the most important Cabinet meeting in the country’s history.
Today’s Irish Daily Mail reports that, at their meeting on Monday, Rehn set out a strict budgetary plan which he expects Lenihan to follow over the next four years.
Entitled the National Reform Programme, Rehn’s document is reportedly adamant that the government must keep a regular line of communication open to Brussels at all times.
So before he arrives in the country on Monday week, where he will brief the leaders of Fine Gael, Sinn Fein and Labour, here’s your chance to beef up on our new, unelected overlord.
1. First off, we should probably get his name right. It’s Rehn, Olli Ilmari Rehn. That’s Olli, without an ‘e’, and Rehn, pronounced like ‘wren’.
2. Here’s the biographical stuff: He’s the son of an orphan, who became a successful car salesman, and an intellectual – his mother was the first person in her family to go to college and became an English teacher. At 48, he’s one of the youngest of Manuel Barroso’s team. He’s Finnish, married to a woman called Merja and the father of a daughter, Silva.
3. He’s a keen soccer player. He started playing football at 6, and – at 17 – made it into the first team of FC Mikkelin Palloilijat. A knee injury ended his career at 20. (Maybe we could get Roy Keane to give him a talking to?) But he wasn’t a total jock: he has also said he used to read the Economist and Newsweek for pleasure when he was at school.
4. He’s no slouch intellectually either. He studied journalism, along with economics and international relations for one year at McAllister college in St Paul, Minnesota, and did his masters in the University of Helsinki, plus a PhD in Oxford. He later became a columnist for several Finnish newspapers. Oh, and he speaks Finnish, English, French, Swedish and German.
5. He doesn’t hang around. He got his first political appointment in 1988, when he was made deputy leader of his party. But don’t get too excited – 4,000 other people are members of the congress of the Center Party of Finland. It has the biggest congress in the world, after parties in China and the USA. Its meetings are held in an ice-hockey rink.
He became an MP for the first time in 1991, and by the following year had been appointed special adviser to the prime minister. He stood in the European elections in 2005, and became economic policy adviser to the Finnish government in 2003-2004, at a time (pay attention down the back) when it was grappling with a serious depression. Now he’s the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner.
6. He’s trained to fire machine guns, thanks to his stint in military service in Finland, and is a keen hard rock fan. But he must have a softer side too – he’s said to like jazz.
7. All that, and modest too. “One of the greatest moments in my historical memory has been the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa. I can’t claim credit for that, of course,” he has conceded.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say