One of the biggest reshuffles at senior level in the Department of Foreign Affairs for some time is due next year for reasons of retirement, the usual four-year rotation process and the increased workload that comes when we take our two-year place on the UN Security council on January 1st. In all, some 20 changes may be in the offing - if the Minister, Brian Cowen, feels like making them.
There are four retirements and a new embassy is being opened in Oslo, so five new ambassadors will be appointed - a prospect which puts the mandarins in Iveagh House in a state of great speculative excitement. Geraldine Skinner has already left as Ambassador to Luxembourg, and other retirements due include Eamon O'Toole from the Holy See, Eamon Ryan from Belgium and John Campbell from Lisbon. Ambassadors likely to be moved because they have served their time in their current posts include Ted Barrington in London, Patrick O'Connor in Paris, Anne Anderson, Perm Rep to the UN in Geneva, Declan O'Donovan in Tokyo, Denis O'Leary, Perm Rep to the EU in Brussels, Brendan Scannell in Tel Aviv, Dick O'Brien in Canberra, and Pat McCabe in Warsaw.
A lot of these are very senior posts, and what is called the wish list was recently circulated to our diplomats of ambassadorial level at home and abroad, requesting their preferences in the reshuffle, which will take place over the summer. Richard Ryan, our ambassador to the UN in New York, will be staying on in the post, but will be joined by a new assistant secretary who, say insiders in Iveagh House, will be David Cooney, currently a counsellor in Paris. Another counsellor, Paul Kavanagh, has already left Dublin for New York to augment the team. Interviews will be taking place at the department in Dublin over the next couple of weeks for promotions to ambassadorial level, which means the Secretary General Paddy McKernan will be missing the presidential trip which Mary McAleese is undertaking to Bosnia-Herzogovina, Kosovo, Egypt and Oman. She left Dublin yesterday and returns this day week.