BOOK REVIEW:
Ireland at the United Nations: Memories of the Early Years
. By Noel Dorr, Institute of Public Administration, 242pp, €25
FOR OLDER Irish people who take an interest in the United Nations there is still a glow around the first years of Ireland's membership, as Noel Dorr observes in his memoir: "They tend to see the period from 1956 to 1960 as a kind of golden age against which everything that followed should be measured."
There was truth in this. Because of the Soviet veto, it had taken 10 years to join the UN, a decade in which the demise of the League of Nations and the departure from the Commonwealth had emphasised Ireland’s isolation. Participation in the UN General Assembly provided an unrivalled platform at the height of the Cold War at a time when the UN itself was on the cusp of change, with the arrival of newly independent states from Africa and Asia.
Dorr had the good fortune, when he joined the Department of External Affairs in 1960, to be assigned to its political-UN section. It was a momentous year: FH Boland, one of Ireland’s most distinguished diplomats, became president of the General Assembly and Irish peacekeeping forces went to the Congo. Dorr helped to decode the message from the UN asking for Irish forces. Apart from a small mission to the Lebanon in 1958, the Irish Army had never served overseas.
The Congo was a major challenge for the Army which was hampered by obsolete arms and equipment and Dorr recalls with sympathy those first “heroic” soldiers. But while the idealism of that first peacekeeping mission was tempered by the horror of Niemba, “it was not diminished”.
In retrospect, the Congo was an early example of mission creep and the first attempt to rescue a failed state. The UN learned valuable but painful lessons from it.
Dorr, long retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and now a governor of the Irish Times Trust, has vivid pen portraits of his colleagues at the UN in the 1960s. FH Boland was worldly-wise, sophisticated, replete with diplomatic gravitas and experience.
“He moved with ease through the lounges and corridors of the UN building where information is traded in quiet voices and many of the most important contacts are made.”
Boland’s career went back to the late 1920s and the League of Nations but Dorr recalls a salutary example of the transience of fame when Boland visited the UN in the late 1960s after his retirement. Although he had been one of the most distinguished presidents of the General Assembly, no one recognised him.
The man who emerges as the hero of this memoir is Frank Aiken, minister for external affairs from 1957 to 1969. Dorr describes him as “a taciturn man of great and gritty integrity, conviction and stubbornness . . . at heart an engineer with an inventive cast of mind”. Aiken liked New York and spent far more time there on UN business than any of his successors could do today. As a revolutionary turned elder statesmen he was a figure of considerable fascination to other UN delegates.
If Aiken is a hero then Conor Cruise O’Brien, if not exactly an anti-hero, is a rather brooding presence. Dorr is clearly frustrated that for many years O’Brien’s various writings dominated the history of Ireland’s membership of the UN.
He agrees with many of O'Brien's criticisms of Irish policies, praises his creativity, radicalism and literary gifts but recognises that his stiletto pen, still evident in the late Memoir(1998), carried old animosities too far, especially against Boland.
This is a thoughtful, considered book which should spur other former public servants to write their reminiscences and enhance institutional memory.
Deirdre McMahon is a lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick