Born: July 14th, 1935
Died: August 18th, 2025
David Neligan, who has died aged 90, was one of the most consequential Irish diplomats of the past 60 years. He was ambassador to Japan, and for five years head of the Anglo-Irish section of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) during one of the most difficult stages in relations between Ireland and the UK at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
A brilliant linguist, Neligan, after school at St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, had taken a first in modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, in 1958. There, he excelled as an athlete, winning the Irish triple jump championship four years in a row from 1956 to 1959. A scholarship to the Ecole Normale Superieur (ENS) in Paris followed.
RM Block
Before joining the DFA, he taught, firstly, in St Columba’s, for three years, then in then newly independent Algeria. He therefore managed to gain experience of both France and Algeria at a time of great turbulence for each of them. Speaking French, German and Irish with elegant fluency, when appointed to Tokyo in 1976, it was in part because of what the DFA believed would be his ability to master Japanese once in that country.
He did indeed gain a functional knowledge of the language, but also charmed his hosts and fellow diplomats as a notable double-act with his wife Maura (nee O’Donoghue).
Their flair as a couple, recalled Sean Donlon, former secretary-general of the DFA, was greatly assisted by Neligan’s masterful playing of Irish ballads on the tin whistle at diplomatic parties.
[ Irish diplomat who played key role in Bloody Sunday aftermathOpens in new window ]
David and Maura Neligan met on the same day they both joined the DFA in 1963. They eventually resisted pressure from both of their respective families – his, Church of Ireland, hers, Catholic – against their marriage. The marriage actually took place in one of the few Catholic churches in Stockholm, to which Maura O’Donoghue had been posted in her first foreign posting, in 1965.
O’Donoghue was herself a strong linguist, having graduated with first-class honours from University College Galway in Spanish and French, before working at RTÉ before she was married. Her colleagues there included Gay Byrne and Terry Wogan.
Neligan was recalled to Dublin from Japan in 1978 to what would become the most stressful and difficult period of his working life – handling Irish relations with Britain during five events that were potentially very disruptive in the years following.
These were, respectively, the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in August 1979; the effective ousting of Jack Lynch by George Colley as taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil the same year, and the installation of Charles Haughey; the election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister, also that year; the crisis of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, and the great strain placed on bilateral relations by Haughey’s refusal to support the British sanctions against Argentina during the Falklands conflict of 1982.
Sean Donlon recalls that Neligan handled these challenges deftly, and with one overriding characteristic: loyalty to the Irish Civil Service tradition of implementing government policy without regard to his own views: “The Lynch-Haughey change immediately created a difference in emphasis in handling relations, especially with London… this wasn’t easy on a daily basis with people… but David managed to make sure, as a civil servant, that his [Haughey’s] new policy was implemented,” said Donlon.
This came into particularly sharp focus during the Falklands crisis in 1982, Donlon expressing the view that Neligan found his intellect at variance with what Haughey was asking him to do: “The instructions David was getting [from Haughey, in his dealings with the British] were not what he would have approved of, but as a loyal civil servant he did a great service to the country in making sure that they were carried out and that the Civil Service did not become politicised.”
It is perhaps significant that, after he eventually retired, Neligan revealed to his family that, in fact, he had been a life-long Labour voter.
Earlier in his career, his diplomatic perspicacity had been noticed in the DFA when, after four years in Bern, he was posted to Brussels in 1971, in preparation for Ireland’s entry to the EU. It was a posting tragically cut short for the Neligans by the death in 1972 of their first child, Ruth, aged four, from meningitis. It was felt a spell elsewhere would help the family, and Neligan, in 1973, was moved as counsellor in Paris for three years.
Later, Brussels came calling again in 1983, when he was approached to join the staff of the Council of Ministers as a director general for transport, energy and the environment. He was to spend the rest of his career there in, in Donlon’s words, “a quasi-independent role”, in which he frequently had to balance the demands of individual countries with those of the European Commission, trying to get its policies implemented.
He succeeded in doing so while, simultaneously, discreetly getting Irish staff promoted to senior roles there, and in the commission. Neligan retired in 2000.
He was the only son of the Church of Ireland rector of Clontarf, Canon John Burke Neligan, and his wife Phyllis, (nee Alcock), and was predeceased by his sisters Jill and Judy. He is survived by Maura and their surviving children, Myles, Kate and James.
