My guest is Catherine Day.

Catherine Day.

Catherine Day is a former Secretary General of the European Commission.

A post she held for 10 years from 2005 to 2015 and is the first woman to hold this post.

She chaired the governing body of University College Cork from 2015 to 2023.

She currently chairs the Board of Trustees of the Chester Beatty, Ireland's leading museum of world cultures, and is on the board of the Irish

Times and the Irish Times Trust. She chaired the Irish Citizens Assembly on Gender Equality, 2019 to 2021,

and advised the Irish government on improving the international protection system for asylum seekers.

She's on the boards of European Movement Island, the Institute of International and European Affairs,

and the Advisory Council of the Centre for European Reform.

In July this year, she was appointed by the European Commission to become chairperson of the High-level reflection group on the future of the European Commission's civil service. Welcome to the podcast,

Catherine. Thank you very much, Paul. Good to be with you. Right. Well, that's quite a long introduction,

because you've got a lot of jobs at the moment, despite in principle being retired from the European

Commission. I thought we'd kick off very, very briefly, because I like

these podcasts to be subtly pedagogic by you giving me your kind of textbook definition of what

the Secretary General of the European Commission's job is as far as the theory is concerned,

shall we say? Well, I think the job is to be sort of the conductor of the orchestra in a way.

And you are also the link between the political level of the commission,

so the president and the college of commissioners and then the civil service of the commission.

And in that fun, you also have an external role because the Secretary General of the commission

attends all of the meetings of the European Council,

but also runs the circle of Directors General inside the Commission.

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