Born: 07 January 1940, Ballybofey, County Donegal Donegal
Entered: 07 September 1957, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 17 April 2020, Cherryfield Lodge, Milltown Park, Dublin City

Left Society of Jesus: 21 June 1966 (from Heythrop College, Oxfordshire, England)

Born in Dublin while parents were living at Ballybofey, County Donegal Donegal. Then family moved to North Parade, Gorey County Wexford, and in 1951 to St Anthony’s, Yellow Walls Road, Malahide, County Dublin

Father, Robert Anthony, was a civil servant in the Social Welfare Office, Dublin. Mother was Mary (Quinn).

Eldest and an only boy with two sisters.

Educated for two years at a Convent school in Gorey, County Wexford and then for four years at the Christian Brothers school in Gorey and one year at Malahide NS. He then went to Clongowes Wood College SJ for five years.

Baptised at St Andrew’s, Westland Row, 22/02/1940
Confirmed at St Michael’s, Gorey by Dr Stanton of Ferns, 28/05/1950

1957-1959: St Mary's, Emo, Novitiate
1959-1962: Rathfarnham Castle, Juniorate, UCD
1962-1963: Gonzaga College SJ, Regency
1963-1964: Berchmanskolleg, Pullach, Germany (GER S) studying philosophy
1964-1966: Heythrop Oxford (ANG) studying Philosophy

After leaving he went into the diplomatic service. He was private secretary to Paddy Hillery, and then went to the EEC. Married with children.

Address 2000: Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin City & Department of Foreign Affairs, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin City

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-mccolgan-obituary-diplomat-played-key-role-in-north-south-relations-in-1970s-1.4299290

John McColgan obituary: Diplomat played key role in North-South relations in 1970s
Good listener was renowned for his wise counsel, keen intellect and affable manner

Born: January 7th, 1940

Died: April 17th, 2020

The Irish diplomat and European Commission official, John McColgan, who died recently was born in Dublin, with strong familial links to Donegal. He played a significant role in developing communications with the unionist community in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.

His first diplomatic role was as press officer at the Irish embassy in London in the early 1970s. Back in Dublin in 1974, he became the first Irish government official appointed as a covert contact with the unionist political, religious and paramilitary leaders in Northern Ireland

At that time there was no official home for Irish diplomats in Northern Ireland so McColgan travelled almost daily to the North accompanied by Sean Donlon, then assistant secretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs, who was meeting leaders in the nationalist and republican community. Over a period of 18 months, McColgan formed firm friendships with key political figures including Rev Ian Paisley, John Taylor and Bill Craig as well as paramilitaries, Andy Tyrie, Glenn Barr and John McKeague. Donlon recalls that following the murder of the British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs in July 1976, a loyalist hit squad was planning a revenge killing and McColgan was its target. However, Tyrie intervened and stood down the attack, thus blowing McColgan's cover and ending his covert discussions. His work was however deemed to have laid foundations for future negotiations on Northern Ireland which culminated in the Anglo-Irish Agreement between then taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald and British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher in 1985.

Following that testing experience, McColgan returned to the European Commission office of Dr Paddy Hillery where he had previously worked from 1973 to 1974. In that earlier period, his fluency in French and German had greatly assisted Hillary as commissioner for social affairs in the initiation and implementation of the first Social Action Programme for Europe in 1974.

McColgan remained with the commission for the rest of his career and was head of administration at the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) in Dublin, 1976-1995. This agency was one of the first decentralised EU agencies and McColgan was influential in bringing it to Ireland. In European negotiations on workers’ rights and safe working conditions, his linguistic talents, profound interest in European history and experience of being from a small country in the burgeoning European project were assets.

Donegal
The only son and eldest of three children of Robert and Mary McColgan (nee Quinn), John McColgan grew up in Malahide, Co Dublin. Both of his parents were from Donegal: his father, an accountant in the civil service was from Culdaff on the Inishowen peninsula, and his mother a Donegal County Council official before marriage, was from Ballybofey.

At 11, John was sent as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College in Co Kildare. He excelled academically and in debating and in 1957 joined the Jesuit order as a scholastic to enter the priesthood. For the next nine years, he studied classics at University College Dublin, philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and philosophy and theology at the Jesuit-run Heythrop College in Oxfordshire. However, in 1966, he left the Jesuit order before his ordination and was hired by the ministry for external affairs (later renamed the Department of Foreign Affairs).

In 1966, John met Jane Hyland, who also grew up in Malahide and played hockey with his sister, Annie. The couple married in 1969, the same year that McColgan was appointed as a private secretary to the new minister for foreign affairs, Dr Paddy Hillery.

In their early married life, the McColgan family moved between London, Brussels and Dublin but then settled in Donnybrook where their children grew up and attended school. When the children were young, they returned to Donegal for family holidays and then as they became older, the family spent long summer holidays in France.

Outside of work, he enjoyed golf, played poker and bridge, and hosted and attended dinner parties with his wife, Jane. His keen intellect was shaped by an affable manner and strong interest in cultural and political affairs. A good listener, he was renowned for his wise counsel. His friendships spanned the worlds of politics, media and the arts and he was a good source of information for many political journalists.

Following his retirement in 1996, John and Jane continued to travel throughout Europe and spend time with their adult children and grandchildren. McColgan’s health declined in latter years and he spent his last 11 months in the Jesuit run Cherryfield Lodge nursing home in Milltown where he died.

John McColgan is survived by his wife, Jane, his children, Mark, Garth, Kate, James and Robert, his sisters, Mary and Annie and nine grandchildren.

Born: 21 November 1923, Kevit Castle, Crossdoney, County Cavan
Entered: 07 September 1942, St Mary's, Emo, County Laois
Died: 25 November 2012. Bloomfield Care Centre, Rathfarnham, Dublin City, County Dublin

Left Society of Jesus: 28 August 1944

Father was a doctor.

Youngest of four boys with four sisters.

Early education at a Convent school in Kildare he then went to Clongowes Wood College SJ for seven years.

https://www.dib.ie/biography/smith-louis-patrick-frederick-a10051#:~:text=Smith%2C%20Louis%20Patrick%20Frederick%20(1923,wife%20Isabella%20(n%C3%A9e%20Smith).

Smith, Louis Patrick Frederick
Contributed by
Clavin, Terry
Smith, Louis Patrick Frederick (1923–2012), agricultural economist and academic, was born on 21 December 1923 in Kevit Castle in Crossdoney, Co. Cavan, the youngest of eight children of Dr Frederick Paul Smith, a farmer and ophthalmologist of Kevit Castle, and his wife Isabella (née Smith). He was born into a thriving branch of an ancient Cavan family, known originally as O'Gowan. His grandfather Philip Smith bought the Kevit Castle estate in the 1850s and later became Cavan's first catholic JP. Of his uncles, Philip H. Law Smith was county court judge for Limerick; Louis Smith, the crown solicitor for Cavan; and Alfred J. Smith an internationally respected UCD professor of midwifery and gynaecology. As well as having a successful ophthalmological practice, his father was elected to the first Cavan County Council and helped establish the local cooperative movement.

Louis was educated in Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, before studying economics and history in UCD, graduating with a first class honours BA (1947). Continuing in UCD, he won the Coyne Memorial Scholarship while receiving a first class honours MA in economics (1948), writing a thesis comparing agriculture in Northern Ireland and the Republic. He also studied law at King's Inns, passing his bar exam finals, but preferred a career in economics and spent a year at Manchester University researching British agriculture and getting lecturing experience.

In January 1949 he sat the civil service examination for the position of third secretary of the Department of External Affairs. Despite otherwise coming first by a distance, he failed the oral Irish test, which he retook unsuccessfully in August and then September. The examiners were unmoved by his protests that the test was unfair so on 28 November the cabinet intervened by temporarily appointing him economic assistant in the trade section of the Department of External Affairs. This was at the behest of the external affairs minister, Seán MacBride (qv), who wanted Smith to explore the potential for trade liberalisation.

In 1951 he joined the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) for which he organised agricultural cooperatives in the northern parts of the state. Farmers were initially suspicious of the 'man from Dublin', but were won over by his lucidity and soft-spoken decency. That year he married Sheila Brady of Herbert Park, Dublin. They lived in Dartry, Dublin, later settling in Donnybrook, Dublin, and had three sons and three daughters. Tall and with refined features rendered distinguished by his prematurely grey hair (a family trait), Smith relaxed by playing tennis at the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club. He also enjoyed cycling, boating, rambling and do-it-yourself work, including furniture making, and was fluent in French.

Formatively impressed by what he saw on a research trip to Scandinavia, he lauded the progressive cooperative farming that prevailed there as a model for an Irish agricultural sector resistant to modern scientific and business methods. He concluded that Ireland's weak social structures had bred a suffocating state paternalism towards agriculture and that strong vocational institutions were needed to counteract this. Drawing upon his training as an economist and personal experience of cooperatives, he later wrote The evolution of agricultural co-operation (1961), which examined the application of the cooperative principle in various countries with a characteristic emphasis on the practical over the theoretical.

In 1954 he left the IAOS to join Macra na Feirme, a vocational association that trained young farmers. He directed its activities in economics and marketing, and became involved in efforts underway towards creating a farmers union spanning all commodity interests. Appointed economics adviser to the National Farmers Association (NFA) formed in January 1955, he helped establish the system of commodity committees that served as the basis of the NFA's organisation. (His brother Alfred Myles Smith served as the NFA's legal adviser and later as president of its Cavan executive and vice president of its Ulster executive.) At this time Louis worked a ninety-hour week making the case for the NFA to farmers.

His main function was to conduct research, an important role given that agricultural policy had previously been developed on a non-factual basis in response to short-term political exigencies. Part of a vanguard of experts who placed the Irish economic debate on a firm statistical footing, he established the NFA's credibility by churning out facts and informed arguments, clashing regularly with politicians and civil servants discomfited by the advent of a well-organised farmers lobby. Through his public lectures and newspaper pieces, he exerted an important influence over young farmers, most notably by persuading them of the advantages of cooperative livestock marts over unsanitary and inefficient cattle fairs.

From 1954 he combined his work in farm organisations with lecturing in agricultural economics and international trade in the UCD economics department. He also introduced courses on European institutions and was awarded a Ph.D. by UCD in 1955. His dual roles complemented each other, bringing home to him the importance of linking agricultural education with research. He criticised the government for failing to do so and also for starving agricultural education and research of resources and for maintaining political control over the farming advisory services. He identified a lack of training and basic schooling as the besetting weakness of Irish farming.

His research for the NFA revealed that Irish agriculture was unproductive and undercapitalised, but that much of this was attributable to government policies which lumbered farmers with high input and transport costs, arbitrary rates, mistaken breeding programs, volatile prices, weak cooperative marketing and export restrictions. Above all he showed how the strategy of seeking trade preferences for Irish farm produce in Britain had run aground once Britain began protecting its farmers through subsidies rather than tariffs. With their traditional British outlet emerging as the industrial world's most open food market, Irish farmers received the lowest prices in western Europe and became increasingly reliant on exporting unfinished cattle, a form of production that provided the least employment.

Pointing to the European common market as a secure, well-paying alternative, he highlighted the untenable nature of Ireland's position as a small, politically isolated food-exporting country, particularly as generously protected continental farmers produced ever-larger surpluses, which were then dumped on the British market. His arguments convinced previously sceptical farmers that there was a political solution to their economic difficulties, though his assertion that Ireland could join the EEC even if the UK did not was unrealistic. He was a founding member of the Irish Council of the European Movement, established in 1954, serving as its chairman (1962–5).

Having become a full-time UCD lecturer, he resigned his position in the NFA in January 1963, continuing for a time on the NFA's National Council. He received a doctorate in economic science from UCD in 1963 for his published work and became an associate professor of political economy (international trade) in 1969. Enthusiastic and engaging as a teacher, if at times impenetrable and absent-minded, he co-wrote an economics textbook, Elements of economics (1969), and expressed public sympathy for the late 1960s student protests against the UCD administration. A long-serving president of the Irish Council for Overseas Students, he was a council member of the Irish Federation of University Teachers and active in the Academic Staff Association as a committee member and secretary.

Continuing to comment regularly in the print media on farming, the EEC and economics, he had a well-regarded weekly farming column in the Irish Independent (1965–69) under the penname 'Agricola'. In 1971 he contributed to a booklet outlining the farming benefits to be derived from Ireland's membership of the EEC and later disputed claims made by anti-EEC campaigners concerning high food prices within EEC member states. After Ireland joined the EEC in 1973, he opposed efforts to subject the newly enriched farming sector to meaningful taxation. He also argued influentially that Ireland's currency link with a depreciating sterling reduced the benefits of EEC membership by causing high inflation.

He was a director in a firm of management consultants and of the South Dublin Provident Society, and was retained as an economics consultant by various semi-state agencies, the European Commission and AIB. His 1971 AIB appointment reflected his successful efforts to encourage the banks to lend more to farmers. During the 1960s and 1970s, he published a labour survey of the Cooley peninsula as well as studies of the Irish food processing and retailing sectors, the finance costs associated with Irish farming and the compliance costs associated with the Irish tax system. He condemned the high tax policies of the 1970s and 1980s for discouraging savings, employment and investment, and devised tax reform proposals on behalf of the Irish Federation for the Self-Employed. A longstanding member of the Christian Family Movement, he drew attention to the rapid 1970s increase in Irish working mothers and annoyed feminists by suggesting this would put families under strain and encourage lesbianism.

He co-wrote two histories, Milk to market (1989) and Farm organisations in Ireland: a century of progress (1996): the former capably described the role of the Leinster Milk Producers Association in supplying Dublin; the latter contains invaluable anecdotal material relating to the founding and early years of the NFA, though as a history it is workmanlike, partial and sketchy in places. After retiring from UCD in 1988, he kept active by playing tennis into his mid-eighties before switching to snooker and swimming. Following a long illness, he died in the Bloomfield Care Centre, Rathfarnham, Dublin, on 25 November 2012. He was buried in Mount Venus Cemetery, Rathfarnham, and left a will disposing of €1.26 million.

Sources
GRO, (birth, marriage cert.); Ir. Independent, passim, esp.: 2 Nov. 1943; 29 Oct. 1948; 24 May 1963 (profile); 14 Aug. 1979; NA, Dept. of the Taoiseach, S14603, 'Irish test for the post of third secretary: complaint of Louis P. F. Smith' (1949); Louis P. F. Smith, 'Agricultural education by co-operatives', The Irish Monthly, vol. 79, no. 935 (May 1951), 224–30; Nationalist and Leinster Times, 13 Dec. 1952; 15 Jan. 1965; Ir. Times, passim, esp.: 23 Oct. 1954; 3 Aug. 1955; 4 Aug. 1956 (profile); 21 Sept. 1957; 25 Aug. 1959; 28 Nov. 2012; 15 Dec. 2012 (obit.); Louis P. F. Smith, 'The role of farmers organizations', Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 44, no. 173 (spring 1955), 49–56; Kilkenny People, 6 Aug. 1955; Cork Examiner, 6 Mar. 1956; Irish Farmers' Journal, 24 Aug. (profile), 14 Dec. 1957; 4 Nov. 1961; 1 May 1971; 1 Dec. 2012; Ir. Press, passim, esp.: 29 Oct. 1957; 6 May, 11 Nov. 1969; 2 May 1972; National Observer, vol i, no. 1 (July 1958); Southern Star, 16 July 1960; Sunday Press, 27 Aug., 29 Oct. 1961; 3 Nov. 1963; 24 Apr. 1966; Kerryman, 17 Feb. 1962; Sunday Independent, 27 Oct. 1974; 19 May 2013; Hibernia, 2 May 1975; European Opinion, Dec. 1976; Report of the President; University College Dublin, 1988–1989, 185–6; Louis P. F. Smith, Farm organisations in Ireland: a century of progress (1996); Gary Murphy, In search of the promised land: the politics of post war Ireland (2009)

Forename: Louis, Patrick, Frederick
Surname: Smith
Gender: Male
Career: Agriculture, Education, Scholarship, Social Sciences
Religion: Catholic
Born 21 December 1923 in Co. Cavan
Died 25 November 2012 in Co. Dublin

Born: 02 october 1886, Killenaule, County Tipperary
Entered: 07 September 1903, St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly
Died: 06 February 1956, Anglo-American Hospital, Cairo Governorate, Cairo, Egypt

Left Society of Jesus: 26 July 1915 (for health reasons)

Father was a general merchant and died in 1900.

One of four brothers and three sisters. Eldest brother is a priest in the diocese of Dubuque, Iowa, USA, and eldest sister is in the Presentation nuns.

Educated at local NS he then went to Mungret College SJ for two years.

1903-1905: St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, , Novitiate
1905-1907: St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, , Philosophy
1907-1910 at Kasteel Gemert, Netherlands (TOLO) studying Philosophy
1910-1915: Clongowes Wood College SJ, Regency

Sought dismissal in part due to the experience of deafness.

Address after leaving, 32, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin Was supported financially by the Provincial until he finished his studies.

https://www.dib.ie/biography/walshe-joseph-patrick-a8908

DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY

Walshe, Joseph Patrick

Forename: Joseph, Patrick
Surname: Walshe
Gender: Male
Career: Administration and Diplomacy
Religion: Catholic
Born 2 October 1886 in Co. Tipperary
Died 6 February 1956 in Egypt

Walshe, Joseph Patrick (1886–1956), diplomat, was born 2 October 1886 in Killenaule, Co. Tipperary, fifth among six children of James Walshe (1835–1900), hotelier, retailer, farmer, and nationalist county councillor for Tipperary South Riding (1899–1900), and Frances Ellen (‘Fannie’) Walshe (neé Heenan; 1858–1931). Educated at the Jesuit apostolic school, Mungret College, outside Limerick city, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1903, studying for two years at the Jesuit noviciate at Tullybeg, King's Co. (Offaly). He continued his education at Gemert in the Netherlands, where he remained to 1910, studying with priests from the Jesuit province of Toulouse forced to take refuge in the Netherlands because of the anti-clerical laws then in force in France. During these years he became fluent in French and acquired the rudiments of German and Dutch.

On returning to Ireland in 1910 Walshe taught French, Latin, Greek, English, mathematics, and Irish (of which he was a fluent speaker) at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare. His students included the future archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (qv). In 1913 Walshe entered UCD and was awarded a BA (1916). He left the Jesuits in 1916 without completing his training, possibly suffering from ill health, but remained a devout catholic through his diplomatic career, seeking to place Irish foreign policy on a strongly catholic footing. He eschewed the catholicism of Maynooth and looked to Rome, the Holy See, and European catholicism for inspiration. In December 1933 he wrote that ‘the church in Ireland . . . has failed because it has departed from the ideals of the universal Church and concentrated the minds of the people on one or two negative commandments to the exclusion of the general teaching of Christ’ (Documents on Irish foreign policy, iv, 275).

Returning to UCD on leaving the Jesuits, Walshe studied for an MA in French, which he was awarded in 1917. During this period he also studied law and became politically active in the Irish independence movement. He held a number of short-term jobs in Dublin in these years, including waiting in Jammet's, the famous French restaurant (he was, after all, a hotel owner's son) and working in a French-language bookshop in the city. France and Italy, in particular the Vatican, in addition to the Holy Land, were to exert an enduring cultural and intellectual influence on Walshe through his life.

Though he was a qualified solicitor, diplomacy interested Walshe more than a legal career. In November 1920 he joined the Dáil Éireann mission to the Paris peace conference, led by Seán T. O'Kelly (qv), as part of the clandestine pre-independence Irish foreign service. This period in Paris, as well as his earlier years in Gemert, had a strong influence on Walshe and his later style showed influences from French diplomacy. Returning to Dublin in early 1922, he became secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs at the suggestion of the outgoing secretary, Robert Brennan (qv), who had resigned, being unable to accept the 1921 Anglo–Irish treaty. Holding the pro-treaty core of the department (renamed External Affairs in December 1922) together through the civil war (1922–3), Walshe was initially designated ‘acting secretary’, a term he disliked.

In the 1920s Walshe protected his small department from the predatory Department of the President of the Executive Council, which sought to incorporate External Affairs into its own structure, and from the Department of Finance, which sought to close External Affairs down. In August 1927 he was officially appointed secretary, his position now being equal to the heads of other government departments. Walshe used the period following the assassination of his minister, Kevin O'Higgins (qv), to effect this change when the president of the executive council, William T. Cosgrave (qv), was acting minister for external affairs. With Cosgrave on his side, Walshe could overcome any opposition from Finance. A small expansion of the department's overseas missions followed in 1929, when Ireland opened legations in Paris, Rome, and the Holy See. By the end of the 1920s Walshe had built a professional, apolitical, and impartial diplomatic service out of the ruins of the Dáil Éireann diplomatic service which split over the 1921 treaty. He undertook important overseas work, attending the assemblies of the League of Nations and the imperial conferences of 1923, 1926, and 1930. Travelling to Rome in 1929, he undertook the groundwork for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Ireland. When Ireland hosted the 1932 eucharistic congress, he organised the official welcome for distinguished visitors.

Through the 1920s Walshe identified himself strongly with the incumbent Cumann na nGaedheal government. Following the election of Fianna Fáil in 1932, Éamon de Valera (qv) became president of the executive council (prime minister) and minister for external affairs. Walshe initially feared that he would be removed as secretary of the department, but on the contrary he made himself indispensable to de Valera in the most important areas of Irish foreign policy (in particular in Anglo–Irish relations), and he and de Valera developed a strong working relationship. Though the strategic direction of foreign policy remained with de Valera, Walshe had considerable latitude in its execution, revelled in being de Valera's éminence grise, and often appeared to model his modus operandi on those of seventeenth-century French diplomats such as Père Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu, or Cardinal Mazarin. Though he committed very little to paper of his views on the correct style and manner of diplomacy, there are striking similarities between François de Callières's On the manner of negotiating with princes, first published in 1716, and Walshe's diplomatic style.

Under de Valera, Walshe further strengthened External Affairs's position in the Irish administrative system. By the outbreak of the second world war, External Affairs, and Walshe himself, had played a central role in de Valera's redefinition of Anglo–Irish relations, culminating in the 1938 Anglo–Irish agreements on trade, finance and defence. Walshe was now identified closely with de Valera, and the later 1930s saw his greatest hold on power.

Through the war Walshe undertook high-level negotiations with British officials to ensure that Ireland, though neutral, provided Britain with intelligence reports and other assistance. Walshe knew that Ireland was under threat of invasion from Britain and from Germany. Ireland lacked a viable military capacity to repel any invader, and throughout the conflict had to rely on the soft power of its diplomatic service to protect Irish neutrality. Heading that service, Walshe made sure to keep on good terms with the British representative in Dublin, Sir John Maffey (qv), and the German minister to Ireland, Eduard Hempel (qv), but he found his relationship with the American minister, David Gray (qv), much more difficult to maintain. Photographs show that Walshe aged noticeably during the war. Coming close to complete physical and mental breakdown in 1942, he nevertheless skilfully handled the crises of wartime diplomacy, in particular the ‘American note’ incident of February 1944, and had earlier calmed growing tension between Ireland and Germany as Hempel showed his disapproval at the interning of crash-landed German airmen while allied airmen were allowed over the border into Northern Ireland. Walshe ensured that Ireland, though secretly strongly pro-Allied, appeared in public as scrupulously neutral. However, he was unable to prevent de Valera from undertaking on 2 May 1945 his visit to the residence of the German minister to give his condolences on the death of Hitler. Walshe had a strong interest in the politics of Vichy France and something of an interest in Italian corporatism; like many people of his time he was also prone to the occasional anti-Semitic remark, but he was never a supporter of the ideologies of Hitler's Germany – he was a firm supporter of democracy, and his catholicism was strongly at odds with Nazi policies.

In September 1946 Walshe presided over a four-day conference of the heads of Irish missions abroad and the heads of key senior departments of state at Iveagh House. It was to draw up the blueprint for Irish foreign policy in the post-war years, which would in particular promote national cultural propaganda and foreign trade. The conference had the feel of a religious retreat about it, and in his résumé of the conference Walshe tellingly referred to Ireland's diplomats as ‘apostles for this country’ (NAI, DFA Secretaries files, P100).

But Walshe's years running External Affairs were drawing to a close. In May 1946 he took up the post of ambassador to the Holy See, his first overseas posting since 1922. He was the first Irish diplomat to hold a posting at this diplomatic rank. In the post-war world his old-style diplomacy was overtaken by new forms of technocratic and multilateral diplomacy, and he became something of an anachronism to junior officers in External Affairs. But to Walshe, representing Ireland at the Vatican was the highest possible accolade and the crowning moment of his diplomatic career. During his eight years at the Holy See he was on the front line of the Cold War. With Italian politics bitterly divided between left and right, he – a lifelong opponent of communism – obtained financial support from Ireland for the Christian Democrats in the 1948 elections. He wished to show the Vatican that Ireland was a strong supporter of the catholic church in its anti-communist crusade, but Irish fidelity did not always rank as highly in Vatican opinions as Walshe hoped. Having moved from a post that involved running a growing department, down to running an embassy with a very small staff, he often appeared to be depressed while posted to the Holy See. He no longer held the levers of power; and while he could operate in one of his dearest environments, he was now only a minor player on a much larger and more complex stage. In 1954, in recognition of his services, the Holy See awarded Walshe the Order of the Sword and Cape, and made him a Chevalier Grand Cross of the Order of St Sylvester, with the rank of papal chamberlain.

On retirement in October 1954 Walshe hoped to live in Rome and remain of service to the Vatican. However, the heart and respiratory problems that had dogged him during his life returned. To improve his health he moved to Kalk Bay, Cape Province, South Africa. While returning to Rome in early 1956, he was taken ill in Egypt and died of cardiac asthma at the Anglo–American Hospital, Cairo, on 6 February 1956. He was buried in the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery, Cairo. It is said that Walshe had made it clear before he died (though it is not in his will) that he wished to be buried where he died, expecting it to be Rome, rather than Cairo. Yet, as he was a frequent traveller in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine in the 1930s, this can perhaps be regarded as a second best.

Joseph Walshe remains among the most significant figures in the history of twentieth-century Irish diplomacy. He was the founder and father of the modern Irish diplomatic service. He rebuilt the Department of External Affairs from the ruins of the split over the 1921 treaty, and served the Cumann an nGaedheal, Fianna Fáil, and inter-party governments. His colleague Leo McCauley (qv) wrote to Walshe in 1934 that he knew that the Department of External Affairs was ‘the apple of your eye, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh’ (NAI, DFA S78(a)).

Walshe favoured a closed style of diplomacy and was often in conflict over matters of policy with his own colleagues and with senior officials in other government departments. He often kept his assistant secretary and best friend from UCD days, Seán Murphy (qv), in the dark about important decisions. Walshe was also mercurial and quick to take offence. Though he would say that his mood swings were merely mischievous on his part, he almost fell out with Murphy over the direction of Irish policy towards France in 1940–41, when Murphy, on the spot as minister to the Vichy government, was in a better position to comment on developments in France. Walshe had had a similar run-in with Seán Lester (qv) in 1931 over the Irish response at the League of Nations to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; and by the 1950s he had a less than civil relationship with the Irish minister to Rome, his old colleague from the Dáil Éireann foreign service, Michael MacWhite (qv). It is therefore no surprise to learn that when he was approached by Michael McDunphy (qv) to contribute a witness statement to the Bureau of Military History, he replied: ‘I am afraid that I should have to ask to be relieved of such a task . . . I cannot believe that it would be a good precedent for a civil servant to tell the story of his own period . . . that kind of story, especially in a post like mine, would have repercussions which, cumulatively, could be quite detrimental to the interests of the state’ (NAI, DFA Holy See Embassy 20/87). It is abundantly clear that Walshe saw External Affairs as his creation, and that he and it were inseparable.

Though a civil servant, Walshe was a strongly political actor, often uneasy with the constraints of public service. He was not always a cool, calm diplomat and was prone to being excitable, overzealous, and emotional. His complex personality left a strong impression on those who met him. He could appear as all things to all people, seeking out their vulnerable points and using them as a means to achieve his own ends. Contemporaries remarked on his ability to influence people and to win them over to his way of thinking. Yet in his private life Walshe was unostentatious and humble, happy to have been of service to the Irish state.

He never married and on his death left an estate to the value of £3,014 to his brother Patrick. Unsubstantiated lore in External Affairs was that he had always hoped to marry his colleague Sheila Murphy (qv), but his poor health came in the way.

Sources
NAI, Department of Foreign Affairs archives; Éamon de Valera papers, UCD Archives; NAI, 1901 and 1911 census data; GRO; NAI, Wills and administrations; Ir. Times, 4 Feb. 1946, 19 Jan. 1952, 19 Aug. 1954, 7 Feb. 1956; Ir. Independent, 20 Aug. 1954; Dermot Keogh, Ireland and Europe (1989); id., ‘Profile of Joseph Walshe, secretary of the department of external affairs 1922–1946’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, iii, no. 2 (1990); id., Ireland and the Vatican (1997); Ronan Fanning, Michael Kennedy, Dermot Keogh, and Eunan O'Halpin (ed.), Documents on Irish foreign policy, i–iv (1998–2004); Michael Kennedy, ‘“Nobody knows and ever shall know from me that I have written in”: Joseph Walshe, Éamon de Valera and the execution of Irish foreign policy, 1932–38’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, xiv (2003); private information