Following this week's reshuffle of top diplomatic jobs, Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent, reports on the crucial networking by ourofficials abroad
When the first tsunami wave hit Phuket on December 27th, 2004, Ireland's ambassador to Malaysia, Dan Mulhall, was in Kuala Lumpur, having just celebrated Christmas. The following day he was in Phuket, taking in the apocalyptic sight of the world's highest profile disaster area.
Used to spending much of his time in more formal surroundings dealing with business people, government officials and others that diplomats deal with, Mulhall found himself standing in the makeshift victims' centre using a megaphone to announce his presence to Irish people.
Hundreds of Irish citizens were potentially missing. He toured five hospitals seeking Irish people, set up an office in the centre of Phuket and put up notices around the town announcing its location. "Every day we kept knocking people off the lists," he says.
Ultimately, it emerged that four Irish people had died in the disaster. He worked with families of missing people who arrived in Thailand, helping in the grim task of trying to find the bodies of the Irish dead.
"It was the most difficult and challenging part of my whole period here," he says. "It was draining and depressing. But in most of what any person does in their working day, they don't see the results for some time. In this you got to work directly with the people who are in need and you got to see the impact of what we do."
Much of a diplomat's work is seen as important but unglamorous. But diplomats get thrills too. This reporter recalls phoning the same Mulhall on the day of the signing of the Belfast Agreement. At that time, Mulhall was the press officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs and was inside Stormont Buildings watching history unfolding. His job was to inform the media of what was happening - up to a point of course, and in the interests of the Government.
In early afternoon of that day, Mulhall reported that it was looking good. Half an hour later he sounded personally devastated. "Big problems. I just can't believe it. It could be falling apart."
He and everyone else in there hadn't seen a bed for more than 30 hours. He described huddles in corridors, people moving from room to room, politicians looking crestfallen.
He didn't say what had gone wrong: with hindsight we know it was the moment the Ulster Unionists' commitment appeared to wobble when Jeffrey Donaldson said he could not accept what was being done.
Half an hour later he said it was sorted. "It's happening, it's happening." He sounded like an emotionally involved human being rather than simply a press officer.
There is of course tedium and drudge in the diplomats' life - as there is in everyone's. But every diplomat and civil servant involved in that part of the peace process recalls it as a career and personal highlight. Tim O'Connor, who is about to go to New York as consul general after five and a half years as joint secretary of the North/South ministerial council in Armagh, says being involved in the Belfast Agreement negotiations "in support of the Taoiseach and the minister for foreign affairs" was "a huge privilege".
Flexibility is at the heart of successful negotiating in Northern Ireland, and O'Connor says the Irish have it more than most. This trait - and the Taoiseach's personal possession of it in abundance - were central to Ireland's successful negotiation of the EU Constitutional Treaty during last year's EU presidency.
Anne Anderson, as one newspaper put it, "made history when she sat down" as the first female member of the Council of European Union ambassadors. She is about to head for Paris as ambassador, having just finished her term as Ireland's permanent representative to the EU.
MANY SEE EU affairs - and the constitutional negotiation process in particular - as dry and dull. But the agreement of the Constitutional Treaty during Ireland's EU presidency last June, six months after the failure to strike a deal just six months earlier under the Italian presidency, was a huge thrill for those involved.
And there were many involved.
Anderson's daily networking with representatives of other member states in Brussels was a crucial part of those talks. But the intelligence gathered in the Irish embassies in individual member states was important too.
"It is only possible to move things forward if you know the other governments' positions well," says Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh, ambassador in London. He and others throughout Europe spent considerable time last year on the EU issue.
According to Anderson, "being there" is crucial to good diplomacy and negotiation. The notion that modern communication and the proliferation of information sources makes embassy-based diplomacy unnecessary is mistaken.
"There is a very significant personal element to negotiation. You can't judge what is serious in a negotiation and what position is just tactical unless you know the people and the personalities," stresses Anderson.
Her job involves sitting in rooms for long periods with the other EU ambassadors negotiating on every issue that falls within EU competence. This week alone she sat through discussions on the future of EU cohesion funding and on the EU stance at upcoming EU/Japan and EU/Russia summits. She briefed the visiting Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív on the progress towards making Irish an official EU language, addressed Estonia's European Affairs Committee which visited Brussels ("important in terms of networking"). Every day involved a working lunch with a commissioner or some other person or group - diplomats report that good lunches, like Ferrero Rocher chocolates, become less luxurious when you have too many of them.
But the lives of ambassadors are often thought of as being full of lunches, dinners and cocktail receptions. The insistence that these events are in fact "work" can draw a laugh from the cynical. However, they almost always do indeed involve work.
Ó Ceallaigh gives a random list of recent events to make the point. During an embassy reception at which Enterprise Ireland introduced Irish building trade suppliers to major British contractors, he was told: "Deals are being done in every corner."
Last year he launched a Westlife CD and a CD of Rory Gallagher's music. He attends many book launches. Does he ever find it tedious? "You have to enjoy it personally," he says, or you couldn't do it.
He also recently had one of those unexpected events, both stimulating and harrowing, that marks the life of the diplomat as being one less ordinary. As Irish ambassador he provided support and assistance to the family of Margaret Hassan, who was abducted and later killed in Iraq, during their agonising wait through the denouement of that tragedy. He was also deeply involved in the Anglo-Irish process leading to the unsuccessful attempts to broker a deal last December.
Moving and living abroad is identified as a major positive and negative aspect of the job. "Moving gets more difficult the older you get," says Ó Ceallaigh. "It creates more difficulties where both partners are working" - a difficulty which arose less in the past.
Mulhall is looking forward to getting home to loved ones and to a challenging new post as head of the Department's EU division. His children are 22 and 20, and do not live in Malaysia.
"It leaves a gap in our lives. One has a busy and crowded life but you are cut adrift from most of your loved ones. I like this life. I enjoy representing Ireland. It gives me enormous satisfaction. The downside has to do with the separation from loved ones," he says, including parents.
IN ADDITION, SAYS O'Connor, who is about to become consul general in New York, "Dublin is a much more attractive place to live and to bring up your children in than ever before." So the advantages of living abroad may appear less clear-cut than before.
Ó Ceallaigh says the most difficult thing "is that you make friends in a place, then you have tomove on and it is as if you are leaving a bit of yourself behind you". He says he made very good friends in the US and in Finland during previous postings, but he very rarely sees them.
Mulhall agrees. "The way most people live their lives, the passing of time is less dramatic. In the case of diplomats at all levels, every three or four years you move from a country where you have made good friends. Life is packaged into three- or four-year bits."
He acknowledges that such change is necessary so people continue to feel like foreign diplomats rather than natives, but on departure "a certain melancholic feeling descends on you that I don't find attractive or enjoyable".