He’s back: after a year of relative obscurity, Charlie McCreevy, Ireland’s EU commissioner, is again centre stage. On a visit to Stockholm, the scourge of “left-wing pinkos” in Ireland has had a pop at Sweden’s government and trade unions and vowed to help a Latvian company that is suing them.

Irish people got used to McCreevy’s straight talking during his seven years as finance minister. But Europe needs more time. Within hours of the commissioner’s Swedish salvo, he was being denounced by Martin Schulz, the socialist leader in the European parliament as “a loose cannon whose arrogant opinions have provoked anti-EU feeling across Europe”.

The Swedes weren’t impressed either. “When he attacks one of the most successful labour models in Europe, that is very serious,” warned Thomas Oestros, the country’s industry minister.

Serious enough to prompt the European parliament to pass a vote summoning McCreevy and his boss, Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission president, to appear before them next week. The two will make soothing noises about Sweden’s social model in Strasbourg. But that will only briefly disguise the fact that the commission and Sweden are on a collision course, and McCreevy is fired up.

“This is all the usual politics, but there is recently a marked tendency across Europe to go back to forms of protectionism,” he said this weekend. “It is not just confined to any one member state. It was manifest during the debate on the French referendum (on the European constitution) and lots and lots of politicians and opinion-formers seem now to want to move backwards. They’re against the opening of markets and they want to retreat.”

And the Irish commissioner wants to stop them. So after a low-key first year in Brussels, is McCreevy about to fulfil the destiny that was expected of him and lead a charge against old Europe and its protective practices?

IN 2004, a Latvian construction company, Laval, was hired to build a school on Vaxholm, in the Stockholm archipelago. Laval, which paid some of its workers as little as €4 an hour, soon became a target for Swedish trade unions, which had agreed hourly rates of up to €15 for such work.

Byggnads, one Swedish union, demanded that the Latvians sign a collective agreement on wages and conditions. In essence, they wanted the Latvians to pay Swedish rates. Laval refused, saying the costs would make the contract uneconomic.

Trade unionists blockaded Laval’s site. The Swedish government supported the pickets. Laval lost its contract last February and went bankrupt in April.

Laval sued, and a Swedish labour court ruled that the blockade of the Latvians’ construction site was legitimate under national rules. But it referred the case to the European Court of Justice for a final decision.

It was into this row that McCreevy stepped during a visit to Stockholm 10 days ago. He promised to speak out against Sweden’s position on the court case. He was mis- reported as saying that he didn’t think much of Scandinavian-style collective wage agreements either.

“It is entirely a matter for member states as to whether they want social partnership or collective bargaining agreements,” McCreevy clarified this weekend. “What is at issue are the rights of workers in Latvia to freely work in another member state.”

Swedish politicians linked the Laval row to McCreevy’s pet project, the services directive. This is intended to allow free trade in services across the EU, allowing Estonian insurance companies to operate as easily in Tallaght as in Tallin. National rules still tie up foreign service providers in red tape. Eliminating them could create up to 600,000 jobs across the EU, McCreevy has said.

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