Politicians, judges and ambassadors gathered in the National Library of Ireland this week to applaud a new collection of poetry.
Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, launched the first collection of poems, Carraroe in Saxony, by Philip McDonagh, the Irish ambassador to India.
Among those present were Supreme Court Judge, Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman, Liz O'Donnell TD, former tánaiste John Wilson and the Dáil's current ceann comhairle, Rory O'Hanlon , and his wife Teresa O'Hanlon. Ursula Foran, theology student at the Milltown Institute, chatted to friends while her husband, John F. Deane, of Dedalus Press, publisher of the collection, was busy selling copies of the book to many of the guests.
Antóin Mac Unfraidh, Irish Ambassador to Finland, and the newly-arrived Indian Ambassador to Ireland, Saurabh Kumar and his wife, Sulekha Kumar, also attended.
Cowen listed the small number of Irish ambassadors who are celebrated poets, including Denis Devlin, Val Iremonger and Richard Ryan.
Later, other names from the Department of Foreign Affairs, such as Gearóid Ó Cléirigh and Máire Mac an tSaoi, were added to the list.
The poet's wife, Dr Ana Grenfell, their daughter Tara McDonagh (3), and his father, former UN ambassador Bob McDonagh, lended their support.
Also there were Paul O'Higgins SC, writer Ronan Sheehan and Ray Kearns, of the Institute of Education and Portobello College, who recalled teaching McDonagh and his two brothers at Gonzaga College: "They were ordained for the diplomatic corps," he said.
According to McDonagh: "A lot of the poems arise from places I visited that I found moving, such as the place where James Joyce is buried".
McDonagh worked in the Irish Embassy in London in the late 1990s at "a particularly sensitive time for the peace process", said Cowen, who welcomed Carraroe in Saxony as "a new and distinctive contribution to the literary output of the Department of Foreign Affairs".