For just over seven months now, the Irish Consul General in New York, Noel Kilkenny has been doing his utmost to get to know you. If you haven’t met him yet, it’s not for the want of trying on his part.
The County Clare native, and his wife Hanora, have been attending as many Irish community events in the Tri-State area as it’s physically possible to fit into their schedule - and loving every minute of it. “My priority for my first few months here was to get to know and get known by as many and as broad a spectrum of the Irish and Irish-America as possible,” he told me during an exclusive interview at his office on Park Avenue this week. “In a sense that was both difficult and easy. The difficult part is that it takes so much time – it’s literally night after night after night. But in another sense it’s easy. I went to everything humanly possible. There was no prioritization in that. It was just that if there was a gap in my diary and I got an invitation, I went to it.”
One day, Noel was talking to very important executives making very important multi-million dollar decisions about whether to invest in Ireland or not. And maybe later that same day, he’s meeting people who moved here in the 40s and 50s, who are continuing to do tremendous work in the Irish community. He loves the variety.
“Literally, in the space of a few hours, you are going to see and engage with two entirely different forms of Irish America...New York is, in a totally different way, the most exciting post I’ve ever been in.”
And that’s saying something.
Noel Kilkenny, 58, is a career civil servant, who has one of the most interesting backstories you’re likely to hear. He was posted in China during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and headed up an EU mission in Bosnia in the late 90s as the war there ended and the Dayton Peace Agreement was beginning to be implemented.
China is now a global player, but in the period from 1985 to 1989, when Noel served there, there far fewer foreigners in the country than there are today. While Ireland enjoyed good cultural relations with Beijing – the Chieftains were especially popular – only a few brave companies had been making efforts to break the market. When the protests in Tiananmen Square turned violent in June 1989, with government troops killing up to 800 of their own people, Noel was tasked with locating any Irish there and getting them to safety. “The main problem in all these situations is always information,” he recalls, “What is happening? We had about 30 Irish in and around Beijing. Some of them were students, some were teachers in the various universities. After the initial events in Tiananmen, they were cut off. There was a lot of concern. Was it going to get worse?”
He gathered all of them together in the compound where the Irish embassy is based, and flew them out to safety, including his wife and kids. He himself remained behind. “My wife and two kids were evacuated to Hong Kong. She turned on the television in Hong Kong and by then they had pictures that some of the foreign journalist had gotten out of what had been going on, not just in Tiananmen itself but in neighboring streets. She was actually more scared, in a sense, when she got there and she realized just how bad it had been in certain places. And also obviously concerned for me, because I stayed on.”
The other major professional challenge for Noel, was in 1996, when he was posted to Bosnia ahead of and during Ireland’s presidency of the European Union. One of the duties of the presidency, was to take over the running of many EU institutions, one of which at the time was the EU’s Monitoring Mission in Bosnia. “When I arrived, the war was over. The war ended with the Deyton Peace Agreement and that was around November. I arrived in in January with six months to prepare, and then six months of the Irish presidency. But even though the war was over, Sarajevo was still under siege, because under the terms of Dayton, the Serbs didn’t have to lift their siege of Sarajevo until the 19th of March that year.”
It was a massive mission, even just in terms of the numbers involved. Ireland’s biggest embassy in London has around 80 staff. The mission in Bosnia at the time counted 180 ex-patriot EU personnel and another 360 locals. For a diplomat, the logistics of managing all that was a big challenge. He also oversaw a change in the role of European forces on the ground in Bosnia, from one of a war footing reporting troop movements, to a more political level of reporting. “They were good at what they were trained to do, which was military reporting, on troop formations and atrocities and so on. But now we needed them to report on issues of interest to the international community from a political perspective. And also for the International Court of Justice in The Hague because inevitably prosecutions started to flow and our people were plugged in on the ground. So it was a challenge, I enjoyed it.”
You might think that a posting to the Big Apple would be boring in comparison to all that, but Noel says he’s enjoying the scale and breadth of Ireland’s relations with the US. “There is an energy in New York anyway, even if you are just here as a tourist. Add to that the energy we get from all the events we go to. For me it’s professionally challenging, professionally interesting. Hanora is really loving it too. The great thing about our career is that your partner is part of the job. And that’s a positive. Some people might think, oh but isn’t that a negative then, they’re unpaid servants of the State? But no, we view it as a positive.”
The couple clearly love meeting new people, and show no signs of fatigue. “People actually laugh at us. You go to events and people understand that you may need to slip away after an hour. Often we’ll say, ‘Listen, we’ll stay only for an hour’ - We’ve never achieved it. Because everything you go to, you meet someone of interest or you hear something of interest. There is something about the energy here. People positively want you to succeed and they want to work with you at succeeding. There’s a welcoming, I mean in a real sense. There is a great warmth, and not just among the Irish and Irish Americans obviously, but among Americans with no connection to Ireland, there is a positive curiosity.”
Noel and his wife Hanora regularly throw open their home to host events. The spectacular Manhattan apartment, which has amazing views of the city, has hosted events ranging from arts launches to business meetings. “It’s a State asset,” Noel says, “And it should be used to maximum degree possible. The night before last we had close on 90 lawyers there for Arbitration Ireland. In two weeks’ time the Irish Film Board are coming out here for the Tribeca Film Festival, we’ll be holding an event in the apartment for that. In May, Queens University Belfast are having an event out here, we’ll be having that in the apartment. The Ancient Order of Hibernians will be celebrating the 175th anniversary of the organization in the US and I’ll be having an event there on May 20th.
Luckily, their two dogs are also very welcoming of guests.
To get away from it all Noel enjoys a round of golf, or just watching sport in TV, especially American Football. Their two children are now grown up – their daughter works as an aid specialist for the Irish embassy in Mozambique and their son is a film editor in Dublin. Although not directly involved in the preparations for it, he says he’s hugely interested in how the Obama visit to Ireland goes next month.
As a civil servant, Noel’s positing was unaffected by the recent general election in Ireland, although the new government is keen to use its international team of diplomats to maximum affect at this difficult time. “To imply that nothing changes is to imply we run the system and we don’t,” he explains. “Two things happen after an election. One is we educate ourselves on the policies of the incoming government, and we provide briefings for them on basically how we have done things in the past and how they might want to change things in the future." The new government has summoned all the ambassadors and consuls general home at the start of June for a major briefing. “It’s not so much that we’ll get our new marching orders but we’ll certainly get what they want of us going forward. The election is almost a fresh mandate for us as well.”
Noel says his priority in the period ahead will be to maintain the contacts he has made and broaden them further. He says he’s conscious that he is not just Consul General for New York City, but for the Tri-State area plus Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia. “I’ve been down to Pennsylvania a few times but I’d like to go there more often,” he says, “I’d like to go more to upstate New York, where there are very strong Irish communities. I want to continue that reaching out to Irish and Irish-American communities.”
Having worked in the embassy in Washington during the 1990s, Noel was familiar with the strength of the Irish American community, but he admits to being impressed by the level of engagement of younger generations of emigrants with organizations like the IBO-NY and IIBN. He also professes huge respect for the work done by longer established centers. “What’s great to see, you go to somewhere like the Aisling Centre,” he says, picking one example. “They run a weekly service into the city to bring food and other items to the homeless of Manhattan. I asked them, how many Irish were among the people they were serving. And they’ve come across very few Irish. That’s not the point. There are homeless people and they see it as something they want to contribute back to this city.”
“There are a lot of great things going on in this city,” he smiles.
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