When zoo animals got mixed up in international incident

DIPLOMATIC IMPASSE:WHATEVER ABOUT bringing the horse to France, a proposed exchange of giraffes from Dublin for an elephant from Delhi reached something of an "impasse" in 1981.

Director of Dublin zoo Dr Terence Murphy wanted the elephant from Delhi zoo for the proposed Fota Wildlife Park in Cork.

However, two problems arose: neither side was willing to send its animal first and there were no volunteers to accompany the giraffes by sea from Ireland to India.

The correspondence about the animals from both zoos which went through both the Department of Foreign Affairs and Irish Embassy in Delhi runs over two years. “Indeed looking back over the file would lead one to believe that a suitable subtitle to the whole saga might be ‘shades of Tehran’,” Timothy O’Connor at the department wrote in a letter to Dan Mulhall at the Embassy in January 1981.

The second problem was that someone needed to accompany the giraffes by sea to Bombay.

“Why not ask for volunteers in the department? Interested in a trip east yourself?” Mr Mulhall joked in a letter to Mr O’Connor.

“It will be seen that we have come to an impasse on the question of who will escort the Irish giraffes to India,” Morris Reid of the Irish Embassy wrote that May.