Eamon Delaney offers a diplomat's-eye view of other Irish Embassies
One of the pleasures of being a diplomat is getting to work in a nice and interesting Embassy overseas. The variations are many: from a 1950s apartment block in the Balkans to the salubrious pleasures of a period house in Paris or Rome. Or the more exotic locations, such as those used by our Honorary Consuls, including a former yacht club in India, and the back-streets office I saw in Central America, with its overhead fan and dusty typewriters, as if from a Graham Greene novel.
My own diplomatic experience involved stints on the high floors of skyscrapers in New York, with the Consulate and UN Mission, and Washington DC, where I got to inhabit part of a proper Embassy building in a proper Embassy capital. Indeed, one of the delights of going along "Embassy Row", in the leafy northwest of that beautiful city, was to see the various embassies constructed in the architectural styles of their countries: a white-walled hacienda for Mexico, a pagoda for Thailand and a minimalist cube of black glass for Sweden.
The Irish Embassy was an old building, apparently owned by the Kellogg family, with large balcony windows and a sweeping interior staircase. It was adorned with paintings and sculptures on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland and the Office of Public Works. Such artworks were in circulation throughout all Embassies and residencies. The Irish Embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, was right between the Romanian and Egyptian embassies, where they seemed to be continuously washing their cars. Or standing around outside, having a cigarette. As someone said, much of diplomatic life was about watching and waiting. So you might as well have a pleasant place to do it in.
Right across the road, on Sheridan Circle, was a statue of the rebel Robert Emmet, a replica of the one on St Stephen's Green, in Dublin. Further up Massachusetts Avenue was the huge British embassy, which could house up to 700 people. Outside it was a statue of the indomitable Winston Churchill. During anti-British protests, which were popular with Irish-Americans, Churchill's head was often painted green.
In general, however, there is heavy security around embassies everywhere. Not that it could always stop violent or mysterious events. Infamously, on Sheridan Circle, almost outside the Irish Embassy, a former Chilean foreign minister was assassinated in a car bombing in 1976, presumably by agents of General Pinochet.
The Irish Ambassador's residence, also in the northwest of the city, was possibly an even finer building than the Embassy, with gravelled paths, lush gardens and a cut-stone outdoor swimming pool. Hanging in the livingroom, when I was there, was a large portrait of the dramatists Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. In this room, in front of a roaring fire, many deals were sealed and much wooing done.
At one garden party I had the honour of pushing the wheelchair of Jim Brady, the man who "took the bullet" for President Reagan during the assassination attempt in 1981, and in whose name a congressional bill on gun control was later introduced. It was also in this room that energetic attempts were made to engage with visiting Ulster Unionists. Such attempts seemed in vain at the time, but, with hindsight, they were all part of a necessary learning curve, given the later American involvement in our peace process. Such is the value of an Embassy abroad.
Former diplomat Eamon Delaney is author of An Accidental Diplomat and editor of Magill magazine