A Changed Approach to Diplomacy: The Department of Foreign Affairs Then and Now

Abstract

A Changed Approach to Diplomacy: The Department of Foreign Affairs Then and Now Gearóid Ó Clérigh The Department of Foreign Affairs, headquartered in Dublin, has improved in recent decades beyond all telling, since – if not due to – my retirement on Christmas Eve, 1995.This improvement is to be seen in the treatment of its officers and not least in the freedom of expression on current policies exercised by those who are retired. A similar liberty is also evident in the case of serving officers, many of whom are of very high calibre. Traditionally things were otherwise. In my own case, I entered what was then known as the Department of External Affairs as a raw Third Secretary on the first working day after the August bank holiday in 1955, having driven overnight by way of Cork from a function in the West Kerry Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibhne. I was straight out from studying at UCD and from law school in King’s Inns. I had no experience of practical life outside such formative institutions. At the final interview for entry to the Department, I had distinguished myself by criticising its fortnightly bulletin of news and information, entitled Eire-Ireland. I informed the interview panel that as a publicity effort it could have been produced better by a shoe shop. Consequently, my first job on entry was to edit the Department’s bulletin in tandem with a senior Third Secretary. The contents of the bulletin were firstly typed by electric typewriter onto silver-grey coated plates. These were difficult to read, unless held up to the light. Once passed as fit, they were brought by messenger to the Stationery Office in Beggar’s Bush, to be printed on sheets of yellow paper, which revealed clearly every comma and other mark on them. The yellow pages were stapled and collated with addressed envelopes for various destinations, some at home, most abroad. The lot were then returned, also by State messenger, to the Department at Iveagh House on St Stephen’s Green, some Studies • volume 109 • number 434 202 for the local post, most of them for sending by diplomatic or consular bag to missions abroad for onward mailing.At the time the number of such missions of every description came to a total of twenty-four. Due to my difficulty in reading the silver-grey plates without holding them up to the window, the first issue carried clear impressions of my finger prints to the police forces of all the countries with which we enjoyed formal or informal friendly relations. In my second issue, I included the recipe for Irish Coffee but forgot to include one ingredient, namely coffee. Another issue was stopped at the mailing stage when it was realised that I did not know the difference between bloodstock and livestock. 1950s Ireland My pièce de résistance, however, was an issue commemorating Wolfe Tone. A perk of my assignment was researching away from my desk in the National Library. A downside of this was that I was forbidden, as a new entrant, from working back in the Department after office hours, even though the bulletin had to appear on schedule. This often meant my working at home late into the night. After staying up until 2.00 am, I had completed my article on Wolfe Tone. I then added brief notes on Thomas Davis’s poem on Bodenstown and on Tone’s return from France to Ireland. The first I misquoted; the second I placed at the wrong port. Nobody noticed. What hit the fan of public disquiet was a statement that Tone’s death in prison awaiting his hanging was ‘possibly by his own hand’. This phrase was inserted on the text way up the line before printing. I got the credit for it in the Department as showing an awareness of historical reality beyond common assumptions. I was too ignorant at a practical level to know how to demur. The first sign of outside interest was when a newspaper, associated with Gael Linn’s money-raising raffle on Gaelic football, took the Department to task for accusing an Irish patriot of the heinous crime of suicide...