Séamus Boland (69) dropped out of school when he was about 13 years old to work on the family farm when his father got sick.
From “the bogs of Offaly”, a young Boland had dreams of becoming an actor. All that suddenly seemed closed off to him when he hit his teenage years.
Later this week, he will become president of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), one of the European Union’s (EU) lesser known bodies.
“This is where I look around and say how in the name of God did I get here?” Boland says.
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The EU forum was set up in 1958 to give civil society, trade unions and business some input into the European policymaking machine.
“I grew up experiencing poverty: the usual making ends meet, all of that on a small farm … I’m old enough to remember electricity coming in,” he says. “I know how grinding it is and I know how horrific it is, and I know how difficult it is.”
When Ireland joined what became the EU in the early 1970s, Boland was “at home on the farm literally eking out a living”.
“My love of Europe, and it is a love, starts from the fact that it made a massive change in Ireland,” he says. Membership of the political and economic union transformed Ireland from a ‘peasant society’ into a modern, western country," he says, adding: “It changed everything.”
There is a danger that Irish people could begin to forget the positive role the EU played in the Republic’s development or could take the European project for granted, he says.
Speaking to The Irish Times in his office in Brussels, Boland is still wondering aloud to himself how he ended up here. Tomás Roseingrave, an Irish-language enthusiast and member of Muintir na Tíre, is the only previous Irish president of the EU committee, a role he held in the early 1980s.
“Frankly when I was 13½ and left school, every statistician would have said: ‘Well, he will never move beyond that level’,” Boland says.
But Boland got involved with the rural youth organisation Macra na Feirme, which he describes as his “third-level education”.
He started writing plays. He recalls one about a young priest leaving the priesthood; another told the story of a Traveller girl becoming involved with the son of a farmer. “I haven’t written anything in recent years … I keep saying when I grow up and settle down, I’ll go back to that,” Boland says.
He attended college to study speech and drama and later worked with the Traveller community, teaching people “who couldn’t read or write,” he says.
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A career that followed in the community and voluntary sector saw him become chief executive of Irish Rural Link, an organisation that campaigns for sustainable rural development. He was chairperson of the Wheel, the national association of charities; chair of the Peatlands Council; and of Pobal, the State body that administers funding to community groups.
This work as an Irish representative of the voluntary sector saw him come into the orbit of the European Economic and Social Committee in 2011.
“In the last few years I’m sitting at meetings with the [European Commission] president Ursula von der Leyen, with [Emmanuel] Macron, with a whole range of European leaders. It’s quite amazing. This is not where I came from,” Boland says.
The consultative EU body is there to “represent society in the broader sense”, he says. During his term as president, it will produce an opinion on proposed reforms of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), which is to be published next year.
It is important that policymakers in Brussels are kept grounded. If people feel their politicians are not listening to them, they would be more vulnerable to drifting to populists on the political extremes, he says.
The EU is facing a lot of big challenges, Boland says. The transatlantic relationship has been frayed by United States president Donald Trump, and there is “the threat of war on the eastern flank”, he says. Ireland has to ask itself how it wants to fit into that changing Europe, he adds.
The paperwork burden put on farmers by the EU could be “oppressive” and the bloc must make sure its laws and rules do not “spray” small businesses out of existence, Boland says.
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That does not mean the EU should walk away from its role as a regulator. “If it stops farmers from being innovative, if it stops new ideas from getting to the light, then it is a problem. But anybody who says we can survive without regulation is living in a very dangerous place,” he says.
“Much of our social-linked legislation: equal pay and women’s rights — the whole range of rights, comes from Europe,” he says.
Boland says spending more time in Brussels has meant giving up a lot of the voluntary work he was involved with back home. Though he has held on to one job: chairperson of the Killickfeehan graveyard extension committee.
“If that isn’t future rural development, nothing is,” he says.
