Canadian rhapsody – Frank McNally on a party to celebrate Canada Day

Exploring darkest Ranelagh on Thursday evening, Google maps in hand, I was interrupted by a smiling woman with a pet greyhound who said (the woman, that is, not the greyhound): “It looks like the Mafia are in town.”

For a moment I thought she meant me. Then I noticed the sleek, black cars parked in a row, confirming I had found what I was seeking: the Canadian ambassador’s residence.

So I told the woman there was a garden party around the corner, to celebrate Canada Day (a little early), and she went off reassured that the mob had not taken over Dublin 6.

Mind you, the first person I met there was a fellow member of what we humorously call the “Dublin-Monaghan Mafia”: a group of Oriel County emigrés determined to infiltrate the upper echelons of Irish society and bring glory, or at least notice, to our small county.

A pioneering role in Irish women’s education – Brian Maye on Agnes O’Farrelly

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Canadian rhapsody – Frank McNally on a party to celebrate Canada Day

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Making a show of us – Frank McNally on a 1927 film that outraged Irish America

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The death of poets – Tony Delaney on James Clarence Mangan, John Keegan and the cholera epidemic of 1849

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I won’t identify the man in question, because he’s one of our highest-placed operatives. Also, as an accountant, he’s already dangerously conspicuous due to his rock-star hair.

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I was supposed to meet two friends beforehand in Ranelagh village. We’ll call them “Sarah” and “Paolo” because they’re both heavily involved in public transport design and I don’t want to embarrass them.

Anyway, they ended up taking a different route to the party and were clearly ahead of me, so I said I’d meet them there.

“Paolo” – an engineer largely responsible for designing a well-known Dublin light rail system that I also won’t identify - was in charge of directions, apparently. So imagine my surprise when I got to the party and couldn’t find them. Concerned, I rang “Sarah”, who – audibly blushing – admitted: “We’re a little lost.”

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Happily, they arrived in time for what some of us considered the highlight of the evening. This was when outgoing ambassador, Nancy Smyth, quoted something “Frank McNally wrote in his Irishman’s Diary recently”.

It was about “making connections”, which as I’d noted, was a sub-theme of this year’s Leaving Cert English exam. It’s also a thing columnists do a lot of in print, while diplomats do it in person. Ambassador Smyth did more than most during a strange and eventful stay in Ireland that began in the year 1BC (Before Covid), or 2019, and ends in August.

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The party was unusual for, among other things, hosting an exhibition in a greenhouse. A magnificent Victorian structure, the latter contained both a fine collection of plants and a series of exhibits marking 85 years of Canadian-Irish relations, via the lives of five heads of mission here.

These included John Doherty Kearney, who as a young man won a Military Cross for bravery in the first World War and went on, by complete contrast, to become Canada’s representative in neutral Ireland in 1941.

Kearney won his medal for a gunfight at a place called Upton Wood. Not to be confused with the “Lonely Woods of Upton”, from the War of Independence ballad, that one was in France. But he did have an engagement in Cork soon afterwards, marrying a woman from that county whose name was apt given the location of the exhibition: “Winnifred E Greenish”.

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Used as an adjective, “Greenish” would understate the political history of Oakley Road, where Canadian ambassadors now reside. First there was Cullenswood House, next door, location of Patrick Pearse’s original St Enda’s school. Then there was Thomas MacDonagh, who lived at No 29, while Éamonn Ceannt was a little farther up.

Thus, no fewer than four of the men executed for Easter 1916 (including Pearse’s brother Willie) – three of them signatories – left for the Rising from this road. No wonder people called it “Rebel Ranelagh”.

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But speaking of Canadian-Irish diplomacy, as I was also reminded Thursday, it was a temporary shortage of same that – some believe – caused Ireland to quit the Commonwealth in 1949.

Taoiseach John A Costello was always going to repeal the External Relations Act, de Valera’s creative fudge that allowed us to both recognise and not recognise the British monarch.

But at a state dinner in Canada in 1948, it is said, he took offence at insults including the placement on the table of a replica of “Roaring Meg” – the cannon used by loyalists in the Siege of Derry. Personal annoyance then persuaded him to go further than originally intended in a press conference.

He had hoped to take the gun out of Irish politics. But as Costello biographer David McCullagh wrote, his words and the British response “arguably laid the ground for the IRA’s Border Campaign a decade later.” McCullough added: “What began with a replica of a cannon would end up with real guns.”

The first word of the Canadian anthem is “O” (“O Canada”), however. And happily, there was to be a moment of complete historic circularity several decades later. Step forward Canadian general John de Chastelain, also mentioned in Ambassador Smyth’s speech, under whose witness (and that of the famous two clergymen), most of the guns that had long bedevilled Irish politics were indeed finally removed.