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AN ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: MY YEARS IN THE
IRISH FOREIGN SERVICE
by Eamon Delaney
New Island Books, Dublin, L10, pp. 400, ISBN 1902602390
Eamon Delaney's book is the current surprise best-seller in Ireland and rightly so. It is a highly entertaining and politically revealing memoir about the author's career in the Irish foreign service, written in a style that no diplomatic memoir has previously employed. This is Bill Bryson meets Mark Steyn: the cool, droll, blokey approach to life in foreign affairs, in which a high-level diplomat, when asked a difficult question about a delicate situation (Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the UN, whatever) replies, `Ah, would you ever fuck off out of it!'
Delaney, the son of a sculptor and obviously a clever young man, joined the Irish foreign service at a bad time for clever young men in Ireland: 1987 was the height of graduate unemployment and just before the Celtic Tiger lift-off which was brought about, incidentally, not just by European Union subsidies but by an unacknowledged...