THERE is great promoting of Ireland in America this month. The President, Mrs. McAleese is off to the West Coast, and Arts Minister Sile de Valera will be in the USA and Mexico. Meanwhile the Taoiseach departs for Moscow on Monday where he will be greeted by our new ambassador, David Donohue.
The President is off to Los Angeles on Wednesday, where she will address the World Affairs Council. She will be conferred with an honorary degree at the Loyola Law School, address a lunch of the Irish-American Bar Association and meet the Irish community. The second half of her one-week visit will be spent in San Francisco and Sacramento, where she will address the graduate school of Stanford University and the Institute for International Studies. She will be accompanied by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews.
Sile de Valera goes to Toronto next week with a group of TV and film producers and directors to attend the film festival and advance the co-production agreement between the two countries. Then it's on to Chicago for a Celtic festival and to address a number of Irish groups, including the largest chapter of the Irish Georgian Society outside Ireland. Later she launches the New York chapter of the Irish-American Cultural Institute and in Washington she will attend the launch of the Millennium Irish Arts Festival, towards which the government has given $800,000.
During two days in Mexico, where we are shortly to open an embassy under Art Agnew, the Minister will be interviewed on television in connection with a documentary on Seamus Heaney, who has visited Mexico. She will also receive a gift for the state from the Mexican government of 200 etchings and other prints, which were the property of a company taken over by Smurfits and which will go to the Museum of Modern Art at Kilmainham.