When I read Diggy on Harry, I must confess, I winced. The possibility that the accident-prone Harry Whelehan would be appointed president of the High Court made Dick Spring's adviser, John Foley, see red. Sean Duignan recorded in his book: "John F says the deal is not on. Harry is not OK. Harry shouldn't be appointed dog-catcher, should be sent to . . . Europe, anywhere . . ."
I know exactly what he meant. Not about Harry but about Europe and the way it is seen by all too many. Exile. But Europe as a story, though rarely sexy, keeps surprising us and, for me, was always interesting.
My predecessor left Brussels in 1994 and the paper, as is its wont, asked him to reflect on his time there and on the state of the Union.
After the exertions of the Maastricht Treaty, he told readers, the European Union could look forward to a period of deafening quiet. Nothing much was likely to happen in Brussels for a long time, he suggested, to the distress of the fellow hacks he left behind.
A small blot on an otherwise distinguished career.
As I leave the European Union/dogcatcher beat for pastures new, 25 summits and 200-plus European Diaries later, the Union has its own currency, three new member-states and, after two wars on its doorstep, an army (that isn't really an army). We've negotiated two new treaties, had one new Commission after a traumatic internal crisis, another CAP reform and two BSE crises. We now have an Irish secretary-general in the Commission, David O'Sullivan, and soon, probably, an Irish president-to-be of the Parliament in Pat Cox. Not to mention a new seven-year budget and the prospect of a dozen new members.
Ireland, the poor relation with the hand permanently outstretched, has moved into the ranks of star pupil, galloping up the prosperity league. We have even signed up to the NATO offshoot, the Partnership for Peace.
Yet, though privileged to sit in the front row of history, rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, I have a sense that what I will remember most vividly from these years will not be the history-making summits and their vast, indistinguishable press rooms and forest-destroying swathes of paper. Instead, it will be strange, disconnected moments, often absurd.
Like that first trip to Norway in the autumn of 1994 to report on its lively accession referendum campaign featuring Blondes Against the EU and their unforgettable slogan "For once blondes say No".
And one balmy night at one end of Oslo's main square, as children and parents skated on an open-air rink to the sound of the Beatles. On a bandstand, Artists Against the EU railed against Brussels. A distinguished actor read 19th century poems that spoke of blood and honour, a writer warned of the threat to Norway's unique beer and cheese, and, to cap it all, a Norwegian singer sang The Rising of the Moon. The country voted no.
On a later visit, on a crisp spring day, I was transfixed by the sight of squads of civic-minded volunteers cleaning the bird droppings off the statues in the Vigeland park, particularly the little old lady up on a plinth, firmly rubbing a statue's private parts. No bother on her!
And then there was Flynn. Towering Pee, of course. Flynn, enjoying himself hugely, berating the British for their refusal to sign up to social policy. More in sorrow than in anger, you understand . . .
I travelled round the Middle East with Dick Spring later in 1995, homework for the Irish presidency the following year. We visited Cairo on a day so hot that the tourists had abandoned the pyramids. The country's foreign minister, Amr Moussa, looking anxiously at an Irish Times correspondent who appeared to be melting like an ice cream in the sun, apologised that it was so bad most of his staff had not turned in for work.
Then to Syria, Lebanon and Israel, where Spring split the cabinet by visiting the Palestinian headquarters in East Jerusalem and Shimon Peres, going out on a limb, described him as "my friend and a friend of Israel".
To Gaza for a midnight meeting with Yasser Arafat (and that very special Arafat welcoming wet kiss) and, dropping with exhaustion, a 2 a.m. dinner with Charlie Bird in The Love Boat restaurant on the beach. "Would sirs like some candles to make it more romantic?" asked our solicitous waiter. Charlie nearly choked.
As we were whisked from country to country, I have a recollection of an energetic Spring, discovering a vocation for diplomacy that I suspect he thought he would never have. He surprised even his own staff in Damascus, genuinely engaging with the notoriously difficult Hafez al-Assad. Even Brussels's exhausting meetings began to interest him. Pity, though, I never got him up on that camel.
Spring made the high point of the presidency, not its technically brilliant finale in Dublin Castle but the extraordinary foreign ministers' meeting in September in Tralee, when the craic was mighty, music played and politicians, journalists and locals mixed freely in a way that few others have ever achieved. (There was also that Ruairi Quinn evening in Kitty O'Shea's when one Dubliner, queuing for his supper, asked his neighbour "What do you do then?" "I am ze kuvernor of ze Cherman Zentral Bank."
And Tralee also saw one of those personal moments when one wants the earth to open and swallow one up whole.
I had been listening to Spring and the amiable Jacques Santer, then president of the Commission, prattling on at a press conference about the umpteen clauses of the Amsterdam Treaty that they were negotiating. Suddenly, I remembered where I had seen this scene before - A Night at the Opera. Groucho and Chico were discussing the terms of a contract full of clauses and sub-clauses and parties of the third part. Gradually they rip up the contract until there is nothing left and one asks the other "What about the Sanity Clause?"
There on the platform at Tralee was Groucho himself, or his spitting image. My hand went up and I caught Spring's eye. "What about the Sanity Clause?" I heard myself ask. The reply should have been the classic "There ain't no Sanity Clause." Instead there was silence, a frown, and total bewilderment from all, except my colleague from Agence France Presse who alone recognised the reference and fell off his chair laughing.
"I thought," the Tanaiste said frostily, "the Irish Times was a serious paper."
I acquitted myself somewhat better, you will be relieved to hear, back in Brussels, when the unassuming Monsignor Noel Treanor cajoled me into speaking about public perceptions of the euro at "a small seminar I am organising". Mr Treanor runs an outfit called COMECE, a Church listening post in Brussels, and I gave little thought to the likely audience.
When I turned up, to my horror, I was faced with 15 bishops, and a number of archbishops and papal nuncios. The speech went down well and I answered questions manfully until our chairman, a German bishop, drew the session to a close with "Well Mr Smyth, what do YOU think the Church's position should be on the euro?"
For a moment I went totally blank and then ventured that "if the Church has an aspiration to be universal in character it must be internationalist in outlook". My monsignor friend who landed me in this mess patted me on the arm with a whispered: "That's very good." "What does it mean?" I whispered back.
And then there was Flynn. Towering Pee, of course. Flynn, enjoying himself hugely, berating the British for their refusal to sign up to social policy. More in sorrow than in anger, you understand . . .
Red Flynn, the most determined advocate of a social Europe in a Commission crammed with socialists. Flynn delightedly telling the unbelieving Germans about the Irishman who did more than anyone to create their mining industry, William Mulvany from Sandymount. Flynn, years later, being backed into a lift by a TV crew, for once with no answers. Flynn, the consummate politician, appalled at the amateurishness of the fightback by his fellow commissioners against MEPs when the latter tried to sack the Commission in January 1999. "Youse all have a death wish," he told them.
Strasbourg that week was as close as he came to reliving one of the great Fianna Fail leadership heaves and he was pumped with adrenaline, relishing describing every twist and turn, and the final partial victory. I remember thinking he was riding for a fall and later regretted that I hadn't written it. On Saturday, he did The Late Late Show.
The night the Commission resigned in March, John Downing (then here for the Irish Independent) and I, at 1 a.m., climbed the back stairs of the Commission's headquarters, bypassing security. We met Flynn striding down the eighth floor towards the lifts. Going home. "Not you two. Go away," he protested unconvincingly and then ushered us into his office to tell the story, blow by blow.
And then there were the Balkans. Standing, two years ago, on a precipitously steep mountain side in central Bosnia at the end of a 10-mile rutted track, I wondered what had brought soldiers to this point to lay waste to a village that could have no possible strategic significance. Here we celebrated, with lamb roasted on open fires, the rebirth of a village and of hope.
But later, nearby, we stood beside the mass graves at the scene of one of countless pointless massacres as war crimes investigators did their grisly work. In The Hague, I saw the trial begin of one of the generals who laid waste to Srebrenica.
Yet later, in Kosovo, a Serb farmer would tell me how his neighbours had killed his brother, only days before our visit, and how they survive now in guarded enclaves.
This is Europe too. Lest we forget, this is what gives meaning to the mind-numbingly tedious work of Brussels, of building a union of the peoples of Europe. Imperfect. Bureaucratic. Elitist. But vital.