Charles Whelan, who has died aged 93, was a distinguished Irish diplomat, serving successively as ambassador to Spain, Japan, Greece and Israel, and finally, from 1987-1990 to the USSR, as Russia was then called, as it began the painful transition from communist dictatorship to parliamentary democracy.
Earlier, in Spain (1974-1978), he had been one of the few European ambassadors present at the funeral in 1975 of the dictator Francisco Franco, whose obsequies were boycotted by many democratic states because of the execution of two Basque Eta members and three anti-fascist protesters shortly before, the last official capital punishments to be carried out in Spain.
While in Athens, also accredited to Israel (1984-1987), he had a nervous time, given that Irish troops were serving with the UN Peacekeeping Force Unifil in Lebanon at that time. Nonetheless, he successfully organised the state visit to Ireland of the then-president of Israel, Chaim Hertzog, who had grown up in Dublin before his family’s move when he was a teenager to Palestine.
Between these postings he had had a particularly fruitful time as ambassador in Tokyo, replacing veteran diplomat David Neligan, who spoke at his funeral service, and says of his successor “he was very skilled, using bridge and golf – at both of which he was adept – at making friendships in his host community”. Here, also, Whelan had to organise another state visit, that of President Patrick Hillery to Japan.
Mr Neligan remarks that Whelan was “very sensible, not given to flights of fancy”.
Talent for coolness
This talent for coolness, not to say nerve, was particularly to the fore for that period of his career for which he will probably be most remembered, and which, paradoxically, predated his later, more senior, work as an ambassador.
This was the extremely troubled period after Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 when Whelan, as charge d’affairs and minister-counsellor at the Irish embassy in London, was the most senior Irish diplomat in the UK at a time of crisis for Anglo-Irish relations, when Ireland’s ambassador, Donal O’Sullivan, had been withdrawn by the Government in protest at the shooting dead of 13 unarmed civilians by the British army in Derry on January 30th, 1972.
In an unpublished interview recorded in recent years, Whelan revealed that efforts by the then taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to contact the then British prime minister, Edward Heath, were rebuffed with the remark that it was “none of his [Lynch’s] business”.
When the British embassy in Dublin was subsequently burned down following the national day of mourning declared by Lynch in an effort to defuse the highly charged atmosphere, Whelan had to deal with irate callers to the embassy in London, asking how “they [the Irish government] dare burn down our embassy”, an observation as inaccurate as it was wholly lacking in awareness of its own irony.
The UK foreign office was also complaining to him about speeches being made in the United States by the then minister for foreign affairs Dr Patrick Hillery, who was telling US media, accurately as it turned out, that the protesters in Derry were unarmed.
Bloody Sunday
The events of Bloody Sunday set in train another crucial phase of Whelan’s career. In March 1972, London, perhaps finally sensing the inevitability of change, took over the responsibility for security in the North from an increasingly discredited unionist administration, triggering events which would eventually lead to the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973, which aimed to deliver a powersharing government for Northern Ireland.
In the negotiations leading to this historic but tragically unfulfilled agreement, Whelan played what colleague, former Department of Foreign Affairs secretary-general, Sean Donlon, calls “a central role” having been recalled to Dublin to head up the Anglo-Irish section of the department in September 1972.
Charles Whelan was born in Dublin to Charles James Whelan, a civil servant, and Brigid McCann, from a fruit merchant family in Armagh, much later to become famous as the owners of Irish multinational Fyffes. Educated at Synge Street CBS and Rockwell College, he entered the Civil Service aged 17 as a clerical officer, but within three years had been promoted to executive officer, serving in three different departments before winning an open competition for appointment as a third secretary in the then department of external affairs in 1949. He thereafter served, for eight years (1953-1961) in Madrid, and then in the US in Washington DC, San Francisco (where he was first secretary at the Irish Consulate from 1962-1965), in Dublin as head of the cultural and information section (1965-1969) and New York (1969-1971), where he was consul general.
Predeceased by his wife, Monica Quinn, whom he had married in 1953, he is survived by their children Fergus, Sara, Richard and Martin, and by grandchildren.