Paddy Teahon, until this spring the secretary general at the Department of the Taoiseach, comes in for mention in the revised edition of Donald Macintyre's biography, Mandelson and the Making of New Labour, which is just out. Last February, as Dublin made frantic efforts to persuade Peter Mandelson not to suspend the new Northern Ireland executive in the face of David Trimble's threat to resign over the lack of progress on IRA decommissioning, relations between Dublin and Tony Blair were the worst ever. British officials were trying to dissuade their counterparts in Dublin and Washington from suggesting that the institutions could be miraculously revived on the basis of de Chastelain's second report and Bertie Ahern was trying to persuade Blair to state he now intended to go back to Parliament to rescind suspension. It would have been a "hopelessly over-positive" statement and Blair stood firm.
As the biography notes: "Ahern now took the unusual step of putting an incandescent Paddy Teahon - the key official on Northern Ireland in Ahern's office - on the line. According to British sources, Teahon went to the outer limits of normal protocol for an official speaking to another country's prime minister in urging the joint statement. He also roundly condemned Mandelson for acting in a `precipitate and disgraceful' way, unaware that - as during all the calls between Dublin and London that day - Mandelson had been plugged into the conversation by the Downing Street switchboard. In the end, however, Teahon recognised a joint statement was not going to happen and dropped the matter."