A 45-year-old EU Commission official, Mr David O'Sullivan, has landed the job of Ireland's most senior permanent EU official in Brussels.
The European Commission has agreed to his appointment to the £103,000-a-year job of director-general in charge of its embattled education, training and youth directorate, DGXXII under Commissioner Edith Cresson.
The management of the directorate's Leonardo vocational training programme has been the focus only this week of serious parliamentary criticism of the Commission.
Mr O'Sullivan, who succeeds Dr Tom O'Dwyer, who is retiring, is a former member of the cabinets of Mr Peter Sutherland and Mr Padraig Flynn. He is one of the youngest officials to have risen through the ranks of the Commission staff to director-general level.
The son of the former chief of staff of the Defence Forces, Lieut Gen Gerry O'Sullivan (DSM) and Mrs Phil O'Sullivan, he was educated at St Mary's College, Rathmines, and Trinity College Dublin, where he was a gold medal debater and auditor of the College Historical Society.
He then attended the College of Europe in Bruges before spending three years in the Department of Foreign Affairs and joined the Commission in 1979.
His experience since then has included periods in external relations; on the EU's delegation to Japan; in Mr Peter Sutherland's cabinet working on relations with the European Parliament; in DGXXII from 1989-'93 running programmes on university-industry co-operation and higher education co-operation with central and eastern Europe; as deputy chief of cabinet to Mr Padraig Flynn; and most recently, two years as a senior official in the employment and social affairs directorate, where he managed the European Social Fund and was in charge of budgets and management of resources.
Mr O'Sullivan said yesterday there were three key tasks in his new job: the management of the Leonardo programme and the Socrates higher education co-operation programme, which between them have a five-year budget of 1.7 billion euros; preparing the implementation of the new generation of even larger programmes which will succeed them next year; and working with his fellow directorate heads to modernise the management of the community's institutions.
Mr O'Sullivan is married to an architect, Ms Agnes O'Hare, and they have two children.
