Tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs Dick Spring warned the then president, Mary Robinson, that taking up a UN position would “fly in the face” of what the public understood her role to be.
In 1993 Mrs Robinson was invited to co-chair a high-level international group set to report on the role of the United Nations to mark its 50th anniversary in 1995 and to recommend a way forward for the organisation.
The invitation had come from Yale University and the Ford Foundation, which had been set up by the then UN secretary-general Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali to report on the organisation’s future.
Certain ‘State papers’ or official archives are declassified at the end of every year. This week, thousands of documents in archives in Dublin, Belfast and London are being made public for the first time, bringing new insights into events of times past. This year’s Dublin archives mostly date from 1994.
State Papers: Five things we learned, from details of Boris Yeltsin’s Shannon no-show to blocking Mary Robinson’s UN role
How John Bruton, the last Redmondite, got to grips with the IRA, the UK and the peace process
Irish government feared retaliation over decision not to prosecute Dessie O’Hare
Bertie Ahern overruled objections to continue weapons purchases from Israel in 1990s
Attorney-general Harry Whelehan strongly advised against the government granting Mrs Robinson her wish.
If a president were to take on an outside role like the one suggested, he said, the Government would be faced with a “recurring dilemma of having to decide when the president was acting as president and when she was acting otherwise than as president – with the added political difficulty of trying to achieve an informed public perception of the two separate existences that a president could have if such a principle was established”.
The president, through her legal advisers, pushed back on his advice and stated there was nothing in the Constitution that stopped her taking up such a role, but Mr Whelehan remained adamant, writing to the taoiseach that it could lead to a conflict of interest.
The issue was a tricky one for Mr Spring as Mrs Robinson had been the Labour Party candidate in the 1990 presidential election.
[ Bertie Ahern overruled objections to continue weapons purchases from IsraelOpens in new window ]
He wrote to the president in 1993 citing their “personal friendship” but stating that taking up such a role would “fly in the face” of the traditional understanding of what the presidency should be for.
The public had an expectation that the Irish president’s role was a “total” office and that everything he or she did was in that context.
If she took up the UN role, she would become a “functional” president making some decisions as president and others in a non-presidential role.
“Any distinction would represent a considerable culture shock to the many thousands of Irish people who are uplifted by the dedication of their ‘President with a purpose’,” he warned, citing the slogan for her election in 1990.
He acknowledged there were differences of approach between herself and the government but he hoped they would never “lead any of us into an intransigent and inflexible position”.
Mrs Robinson did eventually take up a role with the UN as high commissioner for human rights and left the office of the presidency two months early in September 1997.
State Papers articles
- Bertie Ahern overruled objections to continue weapons purchases from Israel in 1990s
- Mary Robinson was blocked by Government from taking up UN role in 1993
- Russian ambassador ‘exquisitely embarrassed’ by Yeltsin’s no-show at Shannon Airport
- Jack Lynch puzzled by request to repatriate James Joyce’s remains
- Plans to name IRA Army Council ‘daft’, agreed Irish and British officials
- Dublin blindsided on Chris Patten’s appointment as head of NI policing commission, State records show
- Loyalist paramilitaries’ increased professionalisation in early 1990s concerned Dublin, State papers reveal
- More should have been done to protect assassinated lawyer Rosemary Nelson, British officials later accepted
- Family of Irishman assassinated on Bloody Sunday by Collins ‘Squad’ compensated by British
- Irish government feared retaliation over decision not to prosecute Dessie O’Hare
- Senior British general ‘furious’ about new Bloody Sunday inquiry he saw as ‘cynical political move’
- How John Bruton, the last Redmondite, got to grips with the IRA, the UK and the peace process
- Notorious apartheid police chief ‘Prime Evil’ was refused entry to Ireland over fears he would settle
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