From red carpets to Portaloos to ‘high-level dusting’, it’s been a hectic month for George Moir, the man behind the Queen’s and Obama’s visits and Garret FitzGerald’s State funeral
UNTIL LAST Monday evening, when the wheels went up on Air Force One, George Moir was probably the busiest man in Ireland. Crossing the upper yard of Dublin Castle to meet him I can’t help wondering what kind of state the senior civil servant is in. Given the workload he’s had over the past few weeks – co-ordinating visits by Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama and, in between, the State funeral of former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald – I won’t be surprised to find him prostrate and whimpering in a darkened room.
Despite admitting he’s a bit wall-fallen it’s business as usual for Moir, who today is preparing for a meeting with a Bollywood producer considering using the castle as a location for a film. (They loved “our little castle”, he tells me later.) Moir, general manager of Dublin Castle, and his surprisingly tiny team of seven people from the Office of Public Works (OPW) were responsible for organising everything from suitably clinky crystal wine glasses, to the widely praised Dublin Castle media centre that accommodated 1,200 international journalists, to the logistics for FitzGerald’s funeral.
We meet in the room where many of the planning meetings took place.
A notice board in one corner sets out the schedule for each day of the Queen’s and Obama’s visits and a long table is covered with a series of green paper files. Each of them contains pages of information about everything from red carpets at Baldonnell for the Queen to Portaloos on College Green for Obama. The files are stuffed with maps and checklists, schedules and protocol instructions, minute-by-minute timings and endless contact details. In the middle of these green files is a large red one the thickness of several telephone books, known simply as the bible.
The planning began in early March when Moir was given a rough outline of the Queen’s itinerary. “When you look at most of the events involving the Queen they were happening at OPW sites, several of which I manage, such as the Garden of Remembrance and the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, so we had to set them up for the visits.”
He was at home on St Patrick’s Day when he realised he might have a bit more on his plate than just QE2. “I was sitting having a cup of tea, watching the telly, when I saw the Taoiseach give a bowl of Shamrock to Obama and heard him announce the US president was coming to Ireland.”
In advance of the visits, a team member was assigned to each event on the itinerary and a recce was done of each site. The only parts he and his team weren’t involved in were the Guinness Storehouse and private visits to studs in Kildare and Tipperary.
“We did walk-throughs at all sites in advance with the protocol people, taking note of everything that was needed, from press risers to fresh pot plants.”
Given the tight security, nothing about the planning was straightforward. “We needed to do some replanting in the Garden of Remembrance, but the gardaí wanted to make sure nothing else would be planted in the pots, so it had to all be strictly supervised,” he says.
The whole of Dublin Castle got the once-over. Moir pulls out an extensive snag list, which includes “high-level dusting” of some rooms and instructions that the curtains be hoovered, brasses shined and the heraldic banners in St Patrick’s Hall taken down and cleaned. “This is all work that will stand to us in the long term, with the presidential inauguration coming up in November and the EU presidency next year,” he says.
The morning the Queen was due to arrive he got a text from his boss, one of the commissioners of the OPW. “I know and expect everything will go well,” it said.
No pressure, then.
Moir greeted David Cameron and Enda Kenny the night of the State banquet and made sure they were in the right place at the right time to greet the Queen. He oversaw all the finer details, making sure hot towels were in place in the Apollo Room, where the dignitaries adjourned before the banquet, in case the Queen felt like a wash after shaking the hands of the 172 guests. His wife saw him on TV during the banquet and sent a text to say how proud she was of him and how delighted his late father, also a civil servant named George, would have been to see him there.
The earliest he was home during the past few weeks was 1.30am, and he was up at 6am most mornings, but overtime wasn’t a motivating factor. “I’m on a non-overtime grade, so that doesn’t come into it,” he says.
The morning after the banquet the pressure stepped up another gear when he got a call to say Garret FitzGerald had died. He spent the following day in the Taoiseach’s office, meeting the protocol team and the undertaker in preparation for the following Sunday’s State funeral. At the same time he was liaising with staff at Convention Centre Dublin, where the concert for the Queen was taking place. Much of Friday was taken up with meetings at Farmleigh to work out the details of Obama’s meeting with Enda Kenny. “There were a lot of balls up in the air. I got a text that morning to say the Queen had departed: one down two to go.”
On Saturday night he was at the church in Donnybrook, getting it set up for the FitzGerald funeral. On Sunday morning, as the funeral was taking place, Moir had a phone glued to his ear outside the church, appeasing objections about Portaloos outside Bank of Ireland for Obama’s address, dealing with queries from Trinity College about insurance issues and securing an extra generator.
He explains that while his team were on hand to give assistance, the Obama address was not their responsibility. “With such a small team there is no way we could have organised the College Green event, but I was the link between Government Information Services and the event organisers, MCD, so there was still a lot to do.”
Acknowledging complaints from the public about crowd control for that event, he says he sympathises with the organisers given the security restrictions under which they were working. That night, when he knew Air Force One had taken off, he turned down an invite to a wrap party and went home.
“I slept. I just slept.”
Looking back over the past couple of weeks, he says he takes some pride in the fact that everything ran smoothly and there were no calamities. The most notable cock-up – Obama’s Beast hitting a ramp at the US embassy – happened on someone else’s watch.
That’s not to say there weren’t near misses. Getting sniffer dogs up to a disabled Portaloo that arrived too late for security clearance at the Rock of Cashel proved tricky, for example. The trumpeters who were playing a fanfare at the State banquet nearly didn’t get in to play for the Queen because of an accreditation mix-up. And one Minister’s car – “I won’t name names,” says Moir – ran over the red carpet minutes before the Queen was due to arrive for the banquet at Dublin Castle.
He knows it’s unlikely that he will ever be involved in anything as important or on that scale again. “It doesn’t get bigger than that, really. The day after Obama left was a bit of an anticlimax: it felt strange not having to be in three places at the same time.”
Asked if he got to shake the hand of Obama or the Queen at any point, or got his hands on one of the US president’s souvenir boxes of MMs, he laughs and says, “I didn’t know about the MMs and I didn’t shake any hands: that’s not part of our job.
“It’s not about personal gratification,” he says. “It’s enough of an honour that you are entrusted with such an important job; that’s my motivation and the motivation of the team. The reward is being recognised for a job well done through a phone call from the President or the Taoiseach’s office, both of which we got,” he says, pointing out that the 2011 Reeling in the Years programme is going to feature so many incredible moments.
“Our small team played a part in something historic. It’s definitely one to tell the grandchildren.”
