When the Commissioner for Social Affairs, Padraig Flynn, relinquishes his post to return to Ireland this week, many at home will see him as coming back under a cloud very much of his own making. Yet the perspective in Brussels is very different. Officials, journalists, lobbyists and political foes are all prepared to pay genuine tribute to a politician who has left a profound mark on the EU's social policy, particularly its employment policy.

The view is not universal. Nel van Dijk, a former Dutch Green MEP who confronted Flynn memorably at his ratification hearing, still says his manner reeks of unreconstructed paternalism.

"Whenever he wanted to say the right things, the way he spoke was wrong". His instincts are those of a priest in the pulpit, she says, and "although he tried to learn from his officials, it was so against his nature he could not hide it."

There is no doubt that Flynn's style is extraordinary. His effusiveness and circumlocutions, the "Flynnstripe" and the towering, grinning red face made him easy to mimic and often made him easy to underestimate.

Yet it is difficult to find among those who worked under him anything but affection and admiration, and now bewilderment at the mess he has apparently got himself in back home. How was it, they ask, that the sure touch of the bureaucratic infighter and negotiator they know deserted him?

John Palmer, until recently the Guardian's European correspondent, is a surprising admirer. "Flynn was a political street fighter for social policy. He deserves remembering for having ensured the Commission maintained the impetus of a social Europe at a time when so many people conspired to weaken or undermine that goal," he said.

The British Labour MEP, Stephen Hughes, chairman for many years of the Parliament's social affairs and employment committee, insists that he "proved a very good and productive commissioner, against all expectations". And on the Union's transformed employment strategy: "I don't think it would have happened without Flynn pushing it."

Today employment generation is a treaty obligation. Today the member-states are part of a system of mutually self-reinforcing peer pressure to reform their labour markets, voluntary but under Commission supervision

TODAY, just as significantly, the evidence of what Flynn advocated from 1993 and specifically in that 1996 speech, "a paradigm shift" in thinking about how jobs are created, is commonplace in every member-state. But not then.

John Morley, one of the key strategists in Flynn's directorate, remembers him in 1993 "getting off the plane with the word `employment' on his lips". Not surprisingly. Ireland's jobs situation was disastrous and no Irish politician could have done otherwise.

But the rest of the EC was at that time insisting that job creation was a matter for business. The EC should simply get off their backs. Within the Commission a few were beginning to articulate a new view, breaking from the "can't do anything" mentality by arguing that governments could indeed bring added value to growth. They could promote flexibility, training and structural reform to tackle the bottlenecks which made European growth so much worse at generating jobs than the US or Japan.

The socialist Commission president, Jacques Delors, was more than interested, Morley remembers, but uncertain when to move.

And for Flynn, instinctively more than intellectually, this was also the direction in which to move. Fianna Fail, pragmatic and centre-right, but with a working class and poor rural base, had never shared the Thatcher dream to let market forces simply rip. An approach which rejected Thatcherism's excesses but built on the new mood of financial discipline and growing socialist opposition to the excesses of state control could unite Delors from the left and Flynn from the right, and reconcile member-states to a new EU jobs role. Flynn's support for the work in his directorate on the new approach was unstinting, according to David O'Sullivan, then in Flynn's cabinet, but now Romano Prodi's right-hand man. "I think Flynn's contribution to social policy over seven years is actually staggering," he says. "And probably the most lasting legacy of the initiative was in fact to define the Third Way," he argues.

"Flynn said it's not about Europe becoming America. And it's not about Europe trying to stay stagnant with the model we have. There is a middle way between these two things where you have more of the flexibility of the US model, and the entrepreneurship, with some of the guarantees, and Flynn actually called it the Third Way. That was then picked up by Chirac in the Lille jobs summit in 1994 . . ."

Then Tony Blair, and the rest is history. For the first time Flynn opened up the debate in Europe about changing the way we looked at employment - that it was not simply the default outcome of macroeconomic policy, but that there was such a thing as employment policy, and you could choose to have forms of policy which were more or less employment friendly, says David O'Sullivan. And O'Sullivan credits Flynn with the key role in getting the employment chapter into the Amsterdam Treaty and putting into place the new system of multilateral monitoring of member-states' jobs policies. Only last week, to Flynn's evident delight, the first set of annual Commission recommendations to individual states was issued.

Then there was the legislation that few believed in 1993 would ever reach the statute books - on works councils, part-time workers, working time, parental leave, the rights of posted workers, consultation of workers, and the eventual agreement on a ban on cigarette advertising, to the fury of the tobacco lobby.

And the radical reform of the management of his directorate ensured that it was one spending directorate which was untouched by the recent Commission scandals.

Peter Brennan, IBEC's man in Brussels, who fought with Flynn repeatedly over his labour legislation, also praises his contribution to the transformation of employment policy.

"And he did incredible work for Ireland behind the scenes," Brennan insists, "particularly on the 12.5 per cent corporation tax decision, an issue that was more important to Ireland in that time than any other, bar none. Both his work in the structural fund negotiations and advice to ministers have yet to be properly acknowledged."