An Accidental Diplomat:

My Years in the Irish Foreign Service 1987-95

Eamon Delaney

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781902602394
• eBook ISBN: 9781848403314
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'John Le Carré meets Bill Bryson with a touch of Yes Minister' - the Irish Times
Eamon Delaney's controversial Number 1 bestselling exposé of backstage life at the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.
From the lonely nights at the Soviet Desk to glamorous soirées during Ireland's presidency of the emerging European Union, Eamon Delaney kept his ear to the ground - a useful skill when wedged precariously between Iran, Iraq and Israel at the UN General Assembly. And more useful still when, at the Irish Consulate, he travelled the strange world of Irish America, doing battle with radical nationalists and having to indulge in a painful amount of céilí dancing...
And then there was Northern Ireland, and the Peace Process of 1993-1995, where no amount of dining, spying and manipulation was spared in the pursuit of the ultimate goal - the greater good of officialdom.
Hilarious and at times deadly serious, An Accidental Diplomat offers a wry and irreverant view of the backstage dealings at foreign affairs. When diplomacy turned the other cheek, Eamon Delaney kept his eyes peeled... luckily for us, he was taking notes.

Section IV

Northern Ireland

18

Bugs and Shredders

When I returned from the US I was put into Anglo-Irish, the Division dealing with Northern Ireland and relations with Britain. Along with the EU Division, it is probably the most important part of the Department. It is one thing dealing with the political situation in Sri Lanka or Poland, it is quite another when it is your own country, where a state of war has existed for the last twenty years. Everything involving the State and the Northern part of the island came through this Division, although in a curious overlap which had implications for the Peace Process later on, the Taoiseach’s Department is also involved.

The Division has grown in leaps and bounds. The largest leap was in the early Eighties in expectation of a major agreement arising out of the two Government’s Anglo-Irish Studies. But such a prospect was oversold by an excitable Brian Lenihan and CJ Haughey, and Thatcher lost her nerve. Nonetheless in 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed and the Division grew again in the expectation of new political progress. But they hadn’t reckoned with the ferocity of Unionist opposition. These sudden increases in personnel would later create awkward promotional bottlenecks in the Department, just as did the sudden increase which followed our EEC accession in 1973.

The Division structure was effectively determined by the Agreement. On one side, were Political, Economic and Social Affairs, and the US. Significantly, US-Irish relations were in the Anglo-Irish Division. On the other side were Human Rights, Cultural and East-West affairs. East-West was the euphemism given to British-Irish relations, including the Irish in Britain. It also handled the British-Irish Parliamentary Body, a non-executive ‘talking tier’ of the Agreement, which was really just a dining club but effective nonetheless. Why wouldn’t it be, given the dining prelude to the Agreement itself. Like many Tories, its long standing co-chairman, Peter Temple Morris, arrived in Ireland as a mild Unionist and apparently left seeing the wisdom of a United Ireland. He even deserted the Tories for New Labour some time later.

On the other side was Security and Legal Affairs, which worked closely with the Department of Justice. Justice also had people in Maryfield, the Government’s Secretariat in the North. Meanwhile, the International Fund for Ireland was downstairs, operating as a unit on its own, dispensing money in the Cross Border area and fighting off the demands of local politicians and ‘deserving causes’. From time to time, the Division also created new units, think-tanks and temporary research sections, set up to serve the ongoing Talks process and to dream up new schemes and models to tackle the Overall Problem, and build on the Irish State’s ‘foot in the door’.

The Division is in a modern hospital-looking block, built onto the back of Iveagh House. The two buildings are linked by a long carpeted corridor, looking out onto garden graced by a statue of Abraham Lincoln, strangely appropriate given the man’s role in another difficult North-South relationship. A coded security door leads to the upper floor but the main entrance is through a caged staircase known as the Golden Gate, accessed by a man inside a glass box pressing a buzzer, a replication of the box at the Department’s front entrance. The back entrance is via Earlsfort Terrace where, in the yard, trucks were almost permanently parked, doing on-the-spot shredding of some of the huge amount of documents the Division produced.

There is a manic, and competitive, desire to record everything on Anglo-Irish matters and such papers will be a boon to historians of the future should they ever be released. But the dangers of such inscription were revealed later with leaks in 1993 and 1997, both of which had major implications for, respectively, a British-Irish agreement on the North and the Irish Presidential election. Typically, it wasn’t Civil Servants who leaked but politicians, or more likely, their spin doctors or advisers.

Civil Servants were too conditioned by the culture of security, with shredders in every room. As well as the commercial shredders in the yard, some officers had mini-shredders attached to their desks, so they could shred as they went. Faxes to Maryfield were sent by secure fax, or sealed diplomatic bag, and phone calls were by secure phone where you pressed a button to scramble the line. Despite this it was always assumed that the British were listening in; the main target of such security measures was thus to prevent penetration by the Provos or Unionists.

The British would bug anything they could get their hands on. In the 1980s our Embassy in London was so badly penetrated they couldn’t even use electric typewriters because the British could decipher the noise patterns of the golfballs. So letters were typed manually, driven to the airport and given to the pilot to take to Dublin. In the 1990s it was still assumed that GCHQ were listening and Seán Ó’hUiginn, the head of Anglo-Irish, would talk to the Ambassador in Washington in Irish and recite, sotto voce, the children’s poem, ‘M’Asal Beag Dubh’, just to have a bit of fun with the moles.

The Maryfield staff rotated every week and each Friday, you’d see the black cars in the yard filling up with paper. Escorted to the Border by the Gardaí, they went the rest of the way with the RUC. Maryfield was just outside Belfast, surrounded by large fields. Sometimes they went by helicopter. Cars and routes were often changed. By now, the threat had reduced from the dark days of the late Eighties when a loyalist mob was almost permanently encamped outside the gates, along with George Seawright, the Scottish loyalist, who sat in a caravan and ominously took notes of the car regs going in and out. Seawright was later shot dead by the INLA.

The staff lived permanently in the school-type building and didn’t leave the compound. But they compensated with a lifestyle of wining and dining which became almost legendary. Thus, Gerry Collins’ jibe to Napoleon at the UN, ‘is the drink not as good as it was in Maryfield?’ The parties became famous and were soon an attraction for the softer elements of Unionism, which was half their purpose. Typical Free State diplomacy; win them over with hospitality. For the staff, the giddy partying was understandably escapist, given the mob at the gate. It was a classic neo-colonial outpost, a besieged foothold for the Free State in Northern Ireland, except now the roles were reversed.

The social offensive was particularly active under Declan O’Donovan, a tireless ‘North’ expert, bon viveur and more recently Ambassador to Japan. The epic dinners he held each evening after the 1992 Talks — Maryfield was the Irish team’s base — became the stuff of folklore, mainly because the in-fighting, story-telling and intellectual bullying therein were far more daunting than anything seen earlier in the day with the Unionists and British. O’Donovan was a democrat and made sure that all of the staff could sit down and watch these brandy-fuelled combats between combative mandarins. Such jibing, of course, was only a relief from the frustration elsewhere; the bruising 1992 Talks.

The Loyalist threat, meanwhile, never went away. In fact, it got more specific. In 1994, the UVF named Departmental officers as legitimate targets and, in 1997, even in the middle of an IRA ceasefire, the Loyalist Volunteer Force gave the Maryfield staff forty-eight hours to leave Northern Ireland ‘or face the consequences’. The threat, naturally, was ignored. But everyone was encouraged to join the Life Insurance plan. This was mainly aimed at the ‘Travellers’, officers who went to the North undercover meeting people who were best met incognito (see below). In the event of a tragedy, the compensation wasn’t very much and black jokes abounded about its only merit being that it might free up a few promotions.

It was only in 1998, with the Good Friday Agreement, that Maryfield was finally wound down, although I am quite sure that its mechanics, and paperwork, is still clunking away somewhere in Dublin. (How ambitious the Government had once been about the Agreement was revealed to me later when a colleague showed me a secret file, concerning buildings in central Belfast, which the Government had purchased under an assumed name. For reasons of security and practicality, they were later sold on, and the paperwork conveniently disguised among more innocuous accounts.)

Maryfield was the physical manifestation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. But in other respects the Agreement was busy ‘below the water’. The full institutional impact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement has never been highlighted or documented. With good reason. Seeing how mad the Unionists were at its symbolism, they would go crazy altogether if they knew its full practical detail.

In one sense, however, this is a pity for it would give the lie to those who said that the Agreement was ineffective. On the contrary, the Union could never be the same again. How could it be? The Agreement gave the Irish Government a consultative role in all aspects of Northern Irish life, economic, social, administrative and cultural and paved the way for the later Good Friday settlement, including Sinn Féin. No need to include the Political aspect here; in the absence of a settlement or assembly, the Agreement was the political system, assisted by a raft of quangos. There was not a hospital closure, fisheries initiative or cultural programme that the Irish Government didn’t have a ‘view’ on.

On Public Appointments, the Division would nominate the names of local worthies, good constitutional nationalists, usually close to the SDLP. But not always. One of the more interesting aspects of the Agreement was the State’s almost subliminal desire to create its own ‘allies’ up North, separate from the SDLP or the dreaded Sinn Féin. Even when Dublin had no names to offer, existing appointments were often sent to Dublin for perusal. An arch Unionist I knew was disgusted to discover that the latest senior promotions at the Public Record Office in Belfast had to await clearance from Dublin.

Of course, Dublin was not always heeded and many parts of the Agreement went unimplemented. But the very fact that the facility existed was almost as important as its effectiveness. Also, in cynical diplo-think, the lack of implementation, and foot-dragging, provided more sticks with which to beat the British and keep the momentum of discontent going. The good old British. They never let you down by not letting you down. Everything they gave was done so begrudgingly and slowly that by the time it trickled down it was accepted in the same spirit, and replaced by some new demand.

So recalcitrant were the British that they would not yield on even the most innocuous issues. For example, RTÉ reception in the North. For years, we had been trying to get more coverage for Irish television in the six counties, only to be continually thwarted by the British excuses about transmitter problems, frequencies already filled and general buck-passing. The files make extraordinary reading. Who could it possibly hurt to allow RTÉ to be received in Belfast? But their attitude was that nothing is given away without a fight and anyone who worked on this issue came away boiling at such stubbornness. I remember one female DFA colleague, a hitherto benign sort not given to atavistic nationalism, returning furious from meetings over broadcasting with the British. Almost more so than after a UDR harassment case, or a shoot-to-kill.

The security area was the major aspect of the Agreement where there was a lack of progress and where harassment of nationalists still continued. The issue of police accompaniment for patrols by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the ill-disciplined and mostly sectarian back-up force, was hotly pursued by the Irish Government and then lost. Even where agreement had apparently been pinned down with the British on foot patrols and army behaviour, such guarantees would be made meaningless within days by some macho stand-off in a small garrison town.

But at least the facility to raise such matters existed mainly through the ‘log system’ in the Agreement Secretariat. Northern politicians, or community workers, would contact Dublin, or directly contact Maryfield, who would then raise such cases with ‘The Other Side’ (the actual nomenclature on our notepaper). The British, or Northern Irish, officials didn’t actually live in the Secretariat, but they were always in close proximity. They would contact the appropriate military people and an explanation/assurance would come back; details of an arrest, reasons given. Some areas were obviously more active than others, as were some politicians — notoriously so. Having opposed the Agreement, Sinn Féin cottoned on to its nuisance potential and soon we were receiving ready-made Harassment Forms hastily filled in with amazingly similar details.

The log system was a day-to-day affair and the banks of filing cabinets testified to the long years of such activity, just as did the files on Fair Employment and District Councils. Through these, and other material, a huge volume of information was being built up on Northern Ireland. Tacked to the walls were large laminated maps of the North’s urban districts, coloured according to religious breakdown, as well as charts of British army and police cap badges and insignia for easy recognition.

To ‘monitor progress’, our senior officials attended Liaison Group meetings with the British. These prepared for the Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs), the high profile meetings of the Tánaiste and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Dick Spring and Sir Patrick Mayhew respectively), after which a bland press release was issued, probably no different from that for the previous IGC.

If I was a journalist, I’d go crazy at these things. After each IGC, there was the same hubbub of activity, with the media scrambling into the room, cameras and microphones aloft, to hear Patrick Mayhew and Dick Spring reiterate exactly what was in the Communiqué and speak, through gritted teeth, about their ‘constructive dialogue’ and ‘determination to proceed’. ‘Now see here,’ Mayhew would tell one journalist, while Spring followed up with, ‘Quite frankly, the situation is …’ Eventually Spring had to be taken aside by Press section and told to stop saying ‘Quite frankly’.

There was nothing frank about it. But of course it suited the two Governments to say as little as possible. Mayhew could hardly say ‘We are very happy with the gradual dismemberment of decision-making in Northern Ireland and its hiving off to Free State-inspired quangos.’ The other reason was more fundamental and sinister. Even the smallest of remarks on the North can bring people onto the streets and have Paisley on his soap box. Sometimes, the less said the better, as I’d discover myself. Keep it bland. Indeed, in one way, the whole Peace Process has been about the annihilation of language and the search for a form of words which will accommodate everybody.

The atmosphere of Anglo-Irish reflected this ambitious involvement in Northern Ireland. Along the floors in different rooms, people stayed late into the night dreaming up schemes for a United Ireland by stealth. There was no knocking off at five or six. You were expected to stay late, even if you had nothing to do, which many people hadn’t, thus adding to the gossipy, intrigue-laden atmosphere. The place was absurdly competitive, as Northern politicians realised when they discovered that their complaints about harassment were more effectively passed on when they went to the right ‘contacts’.

Among the rest of the Department, the Division was half-despised. And with good reason. In the early days, after the Agreement, its people would go around puffed up like roosters, saying things ‘Like, sorry can’t talk to you’ and belittling the work of other Divisions. They would arrive into Hourican’s an hour or two after everyone else. It was even claimed that they circled the Green just to burn up time. But once things settled down and it was clear that the Agreement was not going to lead to a larger, more-inclusive settlement, such self-importance declined somewhat.

At one stage, the work was considered so sensitive, that no rookie Third Sec could come into Anglo-Irish, without having been blooded elsewhere first. It was also very masculine, and referred to as ‘The Locker Room’, such was the air of frustrated testosterone around the corridors. ‘Oh, look they’re washing their jockstraps!’ said a girl, loudly, one day, when she saw a group of men, standing around the Secure fax, with their sleeves rolled up and their ties loosened. It was like something from Wall Street. But the women too got into the spirit, chewing gum and snapping their fingers for the ‘stiff list’ — the latest list of fatalities. It was whiff of sulphur stuff. You were so close to real violence and intrigue that its atmosphere rubbed off.

The atmosphere did change gradually. By the late Nineties, the Division was much more gender-balanced and new Third Secs came straight in, having just joined the Department. Northern Ireland had become mundane and workaday and, horror of horrors, the politicians were starting to try and take some of the decisions for themselves.

In 1993, my own job seemed almost comically mundane. I was given a small room on my own and put working on a quiet part of Economic Co-operation. The desk was known as ‘the Canal Job’, for much of it involved the Ballyconnell-Ballinamore Canal, an old canal which crossed the Border and had recently been restored with EU money and the support of the two Governments.

Along with Southern and Northern officials, I had to oversee the allocation of jobs and monies. With most of the physical work done, the job was now reduced to taking calls from lockmasters and discussing toilet facilities in Fermanagh campsites. But more sensitive political aspects also arose; the real motive for DFA involvement. As ever with these projects, the reluctant Northerners wanted to keep it low-key, whereas we wanted a big, flag-waving launch with an ‘independent’ body. Even the eventual expansive title, Shannon-Erne Waterway, had to be fought for.

There was other work on the desk but most of it was sucked up by First Secs and David Donoghue, a Counsellor famous for his bureaucratic energy. He used to leap the stairs, three steps at a time, and personally reedited even the most mundane of documents. In the meantime, we were supposed to come up with new schemes for North-South Co-operation. With political movement stalled, other avenues of advance were sought, like economics or even environmental projects like the Canal. ‘A Thousand Bridges Across the Border’ was how a reconciliation pamphlet put it, but from a unionist perspective, it was more like ‘A Thousand Gangplanks for the Invaders’.

‘After all, there’s more chance of progress in the economic arena right now than in the political,’ warned Seán Ó’hUiginn, when I went to see him in his office, overlooking the back garden. Ó’hUiginn was head of Anglo-Irish Division and, when you joined it, you were called down for these little encounters, where Ó’hUiginn stared at you and asked about your interests and hobbies, but also, more fundamentally, what you thought about life. Or as he asked one gobsmacked officer, ‘What moves your lights?’ It was ‘on the spot’ stuff.

Ó’hUiginn was an impressive figure. Perhaps the most impressive figure in the Department. Feared and loathed by the Unionists and British, for whom he was regarded as the tactical and intellectual rock they had to work around, he had earned the title, ‘Prince of Darkness’ in the press profiles now breaking his anonymity. (His subsequent departure to Washington as Ambassador was sarcastically welcomed by John Taylor MP at the Forum in Belfast. ‘God Speed to this enemy of Ulster’ he told the room, while Ó’hUiginn quietly smiled in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Section I: Ireland
• Section II: United Nations
• Section III: America
• Section IV: Northern Ireland
• Glossary