Padraig Flynn is in great form these days, a bit like the cat that got the cream. And why not? Today's Luxembourg jobs summit agenda is devoted to his agenda, its result will be to significantly enhance the powers of the Social Affairs commissioner, and Mr Flynn has shown his colleagues in the Commission that he is no mean political operator.
When the heads of government in June signed off on the Amsterdam Treaty's new employment chapter, some of them most reluctantly, they created the potential for a new approach to the jobs crisis.
Instead of simply reporting statistics and exhorting member-states to mend their ways, the Commission was given the power to report annually on their performance against yet-to-be-agreed yardsticks, effectively to crack the whip to keep the reform process on the move.
A special summit was to be called to allow heads of government to take the process forward and put flesh on the new provisions. A declaration would set the limits of Mr Flynn's annual investigation. Or so they thought.
Mr Flynn moved to seize the initiative by persuading the President of the Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, that instead of waiting for the summit to set their mandate, they should present the summit with detailed guidelines for reform and defy the Council to rein them back. Once in the public domain, governments could in practice do little about the broad approach except snipe at some of the specifics.
"The treaty changed everything," Mr Flynn boasts, insisting that the row about over-ambitious specific guidelines, which has preoccupied the press, misses the main point. The Commission now has a procedure to work with. "The guidelines are not set in stone," he says.
"The procedure is hugely important," he adds. "Without it the guidelines cannot operate. Otherwise we were back into a litany of pious hopes and declarations. There was no need to call a summit to achieve that. It could have been done by fax."
Now member-states will have to come up with action plans by the time of the Cardiff summit next summer and the Commission can begin its review process immediately.
The Commission argues that it will have the same success for employment as the similar Maastricht review process had in bringing down deficits. But the Maastricht criteria were backed by the sanction of exclusion from monetary union. Surely without sanctions the guidelines will mean little?
Not so, he says. Unlike the deeply unpopular deficit targets, these guidelines are likely to be politically self-sustaining.
"When you make recommendations to member-states every year they have to respond in their national territory and before their national electorate as to why they did or did not do something. I see that as the driving force for action. And then you have to go to a summit every year and each prime minister has to sit at the table and say they have achieved or have not achieved and why they haven't. That's a big sanction."
He accepts that the guidelines must be a real challenge to member-states. Even Ireland's recent success will not allow it to escape scrutiny and criticism from the Commission review.
"Ireland has done very well on growth and job creation. Youth unemployment has very much been tackled." But Ireland's employment rate is still 10 per cent behind the Commission guideline target, he points out. And too many young people are leaving school unqualified.
"And insofar as long-term unemployment is concerned there's something extra to be done," he says. With 59 per cent of the unemployed in Ireland out of work for over a year, a full 10 per cent more than the EU average, only Italy is performing worse.
The Government will also have to work hard to extend child-care provisions: "There's a lot to be done to provide the services and to bring them up to a standard so that equality of opportunity can apply right across the board.
"I'm just saying there's a lot to be done."
At the core of his document for the summit is the need for member-states to move welfare recipients from passive welfare support schemes into active schemes which make them more employable. Is this possible without the threat to withdraw dole from those who don't comply?
"I have never subscribed to the view that this would be done by diktat. People want to work," he says. But Mr Flynn admits that if such an approach is to work, schemes must be tailored to identify individual requirements. "If people need specialised training then things are going to have to be arranged to make that possible."
It will also only be possible through a much closer link between industry and the training authorities, he says, emphasising the need for the social partners to be seen as key contributors to reform.
