You’re unlikely to find anyone in Iveagh House, the Dublin headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs, who thinks Brexit is a good idea. Yet Britain’s act of national self-immolation, and the gorse fires it has set off across the region, have, in a narrow institutional sense, been good for Irish diplomacy.
As the lead department in Ireland's effort to limit its exposure to the inferno – a status it has been reclaiming from Merrion Street since it was given the Brexit brief, and the resources that go with it, earlier this year – Iveagh House suddenly has an importance in Government that it hasn't had since the Belfast Agreement was signed two decades ago.
In the past decade, the Department of Foreign Affairs has had its share of existential angst. The bedding-down of the peace process, a project that virtually defined the department for three decades, left a gaping hole in the organisation. Its other major focus was EU relations but, in 2011, in the middle of the economic crisis, it lost control of that brief when EU Division moved from Iveagh House to the Department of An Taoiseach on Merrion Street. Department of Foreign Affairs management supported – by several accounts, initiated – the move. It was acutely conscious that, in the period leading up to the bailout, it had been out of the loop; ambassadors often complained that they were making fools of themselves by spouting lines that turned out to be wrong or out of date.
Battered reputation
It was also apparent that, under changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, heads of government were more central than ever to EU decision-making. And it made sense to centralise efforts to salvage Ireland's battered reputation. The result of the move to Merrion Street – combined with the fact that its then minister, Eamon Gilmore, along with his secretary general, sat on the war cabinet-style Economic Management Council – was that the department was closer to the inner circle of government than it had ever been. But back at Iveagh House, the loss of EU Division felt like an amputation.
Around the same time, the organisation got a name-change: it was to be known as the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. But while that formalised the trade-promotion role its overseas missions already had, Iveagh House seems to have made no serious effort to wrest some of the resources that a real transfer of the meaty trade function would require. Meanwhile, a promotions freeze caused morale to dip, and the department started to lose people to other parts of the Civil Service. "Without EU Division, what is the rest of the department?" one diplomat told me last year. "We have become 'passports and protocol'. They're two things we do really well, but it's limited. And it's not what anybody signed up for the Department of Foreign Affairs for."
Internally, misgivings were being openly aired about some of the department’s traditional weaknesses: its struggle to influence other parts of government or public debate, for example. “They are really good at promoting Ireland’s message, but they are not good at promoting the department’s message – within the system, within the country, within the public imagination,” says a senior official based in Merrion Street.
Money and clout
What changed the mood was Brexit. The Department of Foreign Affairs has always been driven by big projects, from joining the United Nations or the then European Economic Community to the peace process. Brexit is as big as they come. It will require the State to marshall all its diplomatic and negotiating heft not only to minimise the damage of the UK's separation but to recast Ireland's role in the new, post-Brexit EU. Nobody questions the value of our embassies these days. And with the Department of Foreign Affairs's new relevance has come money and clout. Its budget increased this year, key embassies are being strengthened and new missions are planned. EU Division has returned to Iveagh House, and its Minister, Simon Coveney, is one of the most powerful in Cabinet.
The Department of Foreign Affairs has also been fortunate. The Government's pre-Brexit referendum contingency plans were fairly minimalist; it simply drew up a list of areas that could be affected by a British withdrawal. But since the shambolic British government hadn't done any preparation at all, the Government here won plaudits for its foresight. More recently, the Department of Foreign Affairs managed to avoid leaving its fingerprints at the scene of the car crash that was Ireland's hapless bid for the Rugby World Cup.
But its new centrality will bring more scrutiny – and difficult questions – for Iveagh House. There's no guarantee its good run will continue. The fact that Ireland is now scrambling furiously to build new alliances across the Continent is an indictment of decades of neglect of those relationships – a failure for which the Department of Foreign Affairs cannot escape criticism. And just as our diplomats will be feted if Ireland escapes Brexit's house of flames relatively unscathed, they will take a share of the blame if everything goes up in smoke.