Kara Owen may be the newly installed British ambassador to Ireland, but she is not newly arrived. Indeed, there can be few ambassadors who have ever taken up a role furnished with such connections to her posting.
First, she is married to an Irish man and a former Irish Defence Forces officer to boot, William Tierney from Ballinasloe, Co Galway, and the mother of daughters, Lila and Saoirse – the latter probably the only British diplomat’s daughter to bear that name, she jokes.
Second, she has already lived in Ireland, between 2009 and 2012, when the couple returned from an assignment she had in Vietnam, so that her husband could take up duty at Cathal Brugha barracks in Dublin.
“I wouldn’t call it Portobello. That would make me look like I’ve got notions. It’s off the South Circular,” she says, with a laugh, of her pre-ambassadorship Dublin home.
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Owen has lived in Dublin again for more than a year, ahead of taking up the ambassador’s role.
The family is now installed in the British ambassador’s residence in Glencairn on the southern edge of Dublin.
Owen and Tierney met in Aceh, Indonesia, when they both worked in 2005 on secondment for the European Union’s Monitoring Mission, which helped to supervise a peace deal that brought an end to a conflict that killed 30,000 people.
The diplomatic room to end a man-made disaster came from a natural one, the 2004 tsunami that devastated large swathes of Asia and killed 160,000 people alone on Aceh, one of the first territories to face its 100ft waves.
Tierney took leave of absence to follow her to her next posting in Vietnam. In turn, she came to Dublin when he returned to duty at Cathal Brugha Barracks, working out of the Merrion Road embassy she now leads.
Owen was in Ireland when Queen Elizabeth visited in 2011, but she remembers the emotions generated by the visit, “the nodding of her head at the Garden of Remembrance, all of it”.
Such moments in diplomacy matter in real life. Though she is less than comfortable talking about her private life, her own marriage is an example of the changes in Anglo-Irish relations that have taken place over the years.
“If we’d have got together, say, five or 10 years earlier, our path to this point might not have been as easy,” she says, “but we happened to meet each other at a time when [the two countries] were going in the same direction.”
Her next move, to Paris, lasted four years and brought an end to Tierney’s time in the military. It was followed by Foreign Office postings for Owen in London and later as British high commissioner to Singapore between 2019 and mid-2024.
The journey to Merrion Road for Owen began in her local comprehensive school in Cumbria, in the northwest of England, where she developed a love of history, leading her teacher to suggest that she should think of the diplomatic service.
The thought “worked away” at her later as she studied history at the University of Sheffield and a thesis on the Foreign Office’s files on Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and British press coverage of same.
Back then Owen, as a Cumbrian girl, was a little unusual in a Foreign Office still dominated by “Oxbridge” graduates, but the British diplomatic service has become more representative of the wider UK population in the years since.
“We’re not there yet; I don’t think any foreign service is,” she says. “There’s still tons to do. But we are a much more mixed organisation than the one that I joined. It was quite late when it stopped being the case that I was often the only woman in the room.”
Such change is not easy to bring about, says Owen, who also has a master’s degree in human resources.
“The most blindingly obvious thing at the time was the gender imbalance at the top, and amongst ambassadors,” she says.
She has long desired to be the British ambassador to Ireland. She was in Dublin during Dominick Chilcott’s ambassadorship between 2012 and 2016 to shadow him for a week.
Not everyone in the Foreign Office is interested in a Dublin posting, however.
“A lot of people join to go quite a long way from home. So there will be people for whom this wouldn’t be exotic enough,” she says.
“Some want to go further afield. That’s the brilliant thing about the Foreign Office, though: everybody has a different sort of thing that is their dream job, and this is mine.”
Owen’s Irish connections go back further, to her early life near Whitehaven, on the northwest coast, where the word “craic” is part of the vocabulary.
“You’ll find Irish words in the local dialect there,” she says. “We say ‘craic’ in the way that you mean it. There’s nowhere else that does that.”
“Hold your whisht” she recalls was another common phrase of Irish descent that was used in her childhood, usually when her aunt or grandmother was telling her off.
Some of her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Treacys from Ballymacadam, left Wicklow – and others from Co Down – for Cumbrian mining jobs in the 1850s – “there are lots of Irish names: Kinsellas and Costelloes,” she says.
Both sides of her Irish ancestry had connections with mining, the Treacys in Wicklow with silver, she thinks. Owen plans, with her mother, to learn more about their stories and the road that brought them to Cumbria, where there were tensions just like on the other side of the Irish Sea.
“There was even a bit of tension between the Catholic and Protestant communities. It was only when I went to university that I realised that that wasn’t a normal thing to know about people.”
Growing up, Owen’s Irish ancestry was not overt, but there were “certain tells”. They include her mother Glenda’s love of Irish music and literature, or the fact that no one ever left her extended family’s homes unfed, she says.
Last week she drew 250,000 viewers to an X video where she spoke in fluent Irish from the beach at Sandymount and other places in Dublin to express her joy at taking up her new role.
Modestly, she says she is not a linguist, though she already speaks Cantonese, Vietnamese and French, but the decision to learn Irish is no affectation.
“I have learned the language everywhere I’ve lived, and I find that to be utterly revealing and fascinating,” she says.
She began learning Irish online after the birth of her first child, but life intervened.
“But I found it sufficiently – what’s the word? – intriguing. I thought if I have some time, I should give this a proper lash; do it properly,” she says.
Owen has been living again in Dublin for more than a year. Before she knew she had landed the Dublin posting, she took six weeks off last autumn and went to Irish lessons every day. Since then she has been having two hours of lessons each week.
Her first public outing in the language came at Áras an Uachtaráin, when she presented her credentials to President Michael D Higgins.
“You can imagine the nerves. The first time I actually officially speak Irish, I’m doing it with a scholar,” she says.
“I’ve got an amazing múinteoir. She really cares deeply about Irish. She really cares about me doing it right. She pushes me quite hard, but I’ve really enjoyed learning,” she says.
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For now she begins her posting with diplomatic relations having recovered from the nadir of Brexit. And she knows how bad they became.
She prefers to focus on the improvement since. “The people that are really serious about our country [in the UK] know how important the relationship is,” she says. “Certainly, my prime minister does.
“It’s really, really clear to me in a way that the prime minister has a very clear view of where he wants this relationship to go and that we all need to be putting our shoulder to the wheel.”
Trade, immigration, security and defence, energy, infrastructure and the UK’s relationship with the EU: no two countries have so many common interests, she says.
“We are essential to each other, simple as that.”
