CSWE's John O'Brennan defends Ireland's diplomatic representation in the Sunday Times, 14 March 2010
Published: Tue 16th March
Link to article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7061028.ece
In January, Sweden dropped a diplomatic bombshell. It announced the closure of six embassies, including Dublin, Sofia and Luxembourg. Our loss is Ouagadougou’s gain, and Pristina’s and Chisinau’s — because Sweden simultaneously announced that it was strengthening its presence in 10 countries, including Burkina Faso, Kosovo and Moldova.
Carl Bildt, the Swedish minister for foreign affairs, explained that in the context of closer co-operation within the European Union, there was no need for his country to have an ambassador in every member state. Certainly not the smaller ones. So from August 31, the Swedish ambassador to Ireland will be based in Stockholm, not Harcourt Road.
“Of course it is a different way of handling issues but it is more economical and the ambassadors are closer to the decision-making process,” the current Swedish envoy to Dublin explained. More implausibly, he suggested that the embassy closure could be interpreted as a sign of the “very good” relations between the two countries.
“I was shocked by Sweden’s decision,” said Dr John O’Brennan, lecturer in European politics at National University of Ireland Maynooth. “They said it’s a signal of our good relations. I wasn’t really buying that. I don’t think anyone was. There is genuine shock about it, and it’s forced a rethink in government circles about the potential short-sightedness.”
Someone who might approve is Colm McCarthy. Last year the economist’s An Bord Snip report recommended Ireland’s embassy network be “rationalised” from 75 missions to 55, shedding 65 staff and saving €14m a year. Pointing out that the EU is about to launch its own diplomatic service, the report suggested that the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) “embrace the opportunity that this supranational service will present to further rationalise Ireland’s network of overseas missions”.
This is what Sweden regularly does; since 1990 it has closed 54 foreign missions and opened 40. But the DFA wasn’t long about giving An Bord Snip short shrift. David Cooney, the secretary general, told the Committee of Public Accounts in January that the department had already carried out a review of overseas missions in response to the McCarthy report. The conclusion? All 26 embassies in EU capitals will remain open.
In fact, Ireland is going to enlarge its international footprint. A consulate is to open in Atlanta, because the southern states of America are seen as a “growth area”, and mandarins are making eyes at Indonesia, where there is no embassy, and plotting more consulates in China.
Last year a new mission opened in Abu Dhabi. Last week the cabinet approved 30 new ambassadorial nominations.
“This is not the time to be cutting back on our level of external representation,” Cooney has said. Not even during a recession, and with the EU about to disperse 7,000 diplomats to 136 embassies, a network almost the size of America’s?
Ireland’s embassy in the Holy See may not be typical, but it is an example of the fat critics say could be trimmed from our diplomatic belly. Based in a 1630s-built villa worth €25m, the embassy was recently refurbished at a cost of €1.4m. The Holy See will not accredit a diplomat who is also the ambassador to Italy. Nor will it allow a mission to operate from the same address as an Italian embassy.
There have been growing demands to shut down the Holy See operation, especially given that it has neither trade nor consular functions. “It would not be one of our busier missions,” Cooney admitted, displaying the understatement that is his profession’s stock in trade. Nevertheless, the DFA spends €763,000 a year employing three locals and two Irish diplomatic staff there.
Money was never an obstacle to diplomacy during the Celtic tiger years, when the DFA splashed out millions revamping embassy buildings and ambassadors’ residences all over the world. There was a €4.4m bill in Ottawa, and €7m was spent in the Hague. In Pretoria, a Celtic tiger-type property price of €1.3m was spent on a residence for the ambassador, just topping the €1.2m spent in Mexico the previous year.
The total cost of our diplomatic service is now almost €100m a year, with 340 officials serving abroad and a further 300 staff recruited locally to work as drivers, porters and cleaners. What caught An Bord Snip’s beady eye was the seniority of staff being sent abroad, including no less than 32 assistant secretaries.
The DFA points out that Ireland’s network (75 overseas offices) is much smaller than the likes of Denmark (121) and the Netherlands (158), and more lightly staffed — Finland has 800 diplomats and the Netherlands 1,500.
“Most of our representations are small-scale operations,” said O’Brennan. “I have been to lots of them, and they really are shoestring. Ambassadors certainly aren’t living high on the hog, or anything like it.”
Brigid Laffan, principal of University College Dublin’s college of human sciences, said: “In relative terms, we have half the Finns’ diplomatic services, and they have one of the smallest in the EU. I never bought the McCarthy argument that Ireland is coming down with diplomats. Per capita, we are one of the lowest in Europe.”
However, the necklace of embassies around the EU is in addition to an expensive diplomatic effort in Brussels itself, where there is a “permanent representation” of 206 staff at a cost of €35.2m a year. It is difficult to foresee that, with public finances remaining in crisis, the DFA will be able to ignore the duplication involved in the External Action Service, set up under the terms of the Lisbon treaty and now taking shape under the direction of Catherine Ashton, the EU’s new foreign minister.
“I wouldn’t expect it to have a huge impact on our operations,” Cooney told an Oireachtas committee last December. But the following month he indicated a “lighter model” of embassy will be introduced in some EU states, reducing the size and cost.
The plan is to cut back on some of the trappings that ambassadors enjoy, such as a state car and a residence large enough to accommodate receptions and parties. More junior diplomats will be sent to the likes of Malta and the Baltic states, but they will still be called ambassadors.
“If one puts the money into having somebody on the ground, if at all possible they should carry the title ‘ambassador’,” Cooney has said. If they are merely a chargé d’affairs, for example, “they do not have the same credibility or entrée into the host country’s circles”.
Laffan believes it will take up to five years for the effect of the EU’s diplomatic service to be known. At that point, Ireland should examine its options. She supports the Ireland House model of officials from agencies such as Enterprise Ireland and Bord Bia working in a team with the DFA, which is currently being used in New York and Madrid.
O’Brennan thinks Ireland will always need a network of political spies finding out what other countries are thinking about issues important to us. “Bizarrely, one of the effects of EU enlargement is that the type of close, intensive interaction there would have been between countries has disappeared a bit,” he said.
“Meetings of the European Council have become a lot more formal, you don’t have the quality of interaction that was there previously. To me that’s another reason why we should protect the representation on the ground — people who are absorbing and learning things that might not be passed on in a formal context.”
A spokeswoman for the DFA said: “We feel it is important to have someone on the ground in each EU country as they all have a direct say in what happens in Ireland through their position on the European Council and a permanent diplomatic presence is the best means of influencing our partners’ opinions on all levels — government, parliament and public.”
The embassies also enjoy a high degree of political protection, because they are treated as a base by travelling ministers. One of the most startling aspects of the John O’Donoghue expenses scandal last year was the degree to which his costly swanning-around was facilitated, and even organised, by diplomatic staff. It emerged that the Irish embassy in London spent more than €250,000 on taxis and limousines in 2007 and 2008. This included O’Donoghue’s infamous limo trip between terminals in Heathrow.
The DFA explained that, for 30 years, it was normal for embassy officials to travel to meet and assist ministers who visited Britain. Even if they were only moving from one terminal of Heathrow to another to catch a connecting flight, a diplomat would be dispatched from central London to hold the minister’s hand.
Cooney has reassured the Committee of Public Accounts that such excesses have been scaled down. Now, when a politician is travelling overseas, the embassies send hotel and transport recommendations to his private office, and it will be up to the minister’s own staff to make the bookings.
The usefulness of embassies to travelling ministers remains and, regardless of the downturn, this government does enjoy its overseas jaunts. This week the taoiseach, 10 of his cabinet, 11 junior ministers and the attorney general are overseas for St Patrick’s Day.
Unlike Sweden, shutting embassies isn’t the Irish way. In 1987 the original An Bord Snip, also featuring McCarthy, recommended that 15 missions be closed. Only one of them was — in Nairobi. The DFA’s only contribution to the current round of swingeing cutbacks was to close its consulate in Cardiff. Neither Kenya nor Wales could be considered the locus of diplomatic dreams.
The DFA can plausibly argue that Ireland’s economic recovery must be export-led, and the way to prise open markets for companies is through state-to-state contact. Irish embassies concentrate on trade — they make almost no attempt, apart from in Britain and America, to wield political influence.
“As a country that lives by exports, we have to travel,” Cooney has said. “The days when everybody wanted to come to Ireland to take a look at the Celtic tiger and find out how we created it are long since gone. We have to go out and sell ourselves.”
The diplomatic baggage
The annual cost of renting properties overseas — both embassies and ambassadors’ residences — came to €12.5m last year. The most expensive locations were London, which cost €957,000, and Tokyo, €871,009. Rental costs in New York are especially hefty. There was a €686,141 bill last year for the Irish consulate general’s quarters there. In 2008, the rental cost for the United Nations representation in the Big Apple was just over €1m.
Ireland has had a mission to the Holy See since 1929 — it was one of the first established by the Free State. Villa Spada, a 17th-century villa, was bought by the Irish government in 1946 and costs about €750,000 a year to run.
There have been growing political demands for its closure since the publication of the Murphy report on clerical abuse last year, in which it emerged that the papal nuncio in Ireland refused to answer a letter from investigators because it was not channelled through the Irish ambassador to the Holy See.
Officials working abroad get a “foreign service allowance” which is not taxed, nor subject to pension or income levies. The total cost is about €8m a year. The idea is to compensate officials for the expense of working overseas. Diplomats have to buy nice suits — “one must tog out smarter than if one was a civil servant operating here, no disrespect to colleagues at home, but one must show a bit of form”, as David Cooney, secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs put it recently.
Diplomats are expected to maintain a home capable of being used to entertain guests. There is also a child education allowance, to enable diplomats to ensure their children can be educated to a high standard through English.
The cabinet last week approved the appointments of 30 new ambassadors, including the replacement of nine who are retiring. Only three of the 30 are women — Anne Barrington, Isolde Moylan and Philomena Murnaghan.
Following criticism in the An Bord Snip report about the high pay scale and seniority of officials sent abroad, four of the 30 appointees are first secretaries. These will be the most junior people ever sent abroad to represent Ireland. The government wouldn’t identify the four last week, “so as to avoid giving offence to the host government”, according to The Irish Times.
Ireland has almost 90 honorary consuls, who get €1,125 a year to cover office expenses. They are allowed to keep half of consular fees. The consuls have never been so busy — with Irish people travelling to more exotic locations and engaging in more adventurous activities.
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