February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Jack Holland
Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain’s ambassador to Ireland since 1999, regrets that he cannot take the train on his frequent trips from Dublin to Belfast — for "security reasons," he said.
It is a reminder that the conflict of the not too distant past, in which one of his predecessors was assassinated and another came close to being murdered, still resonates through the complex relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Though he maintains that he doesn’t "worry too much about history," he is himself a somewhat unusual product of it. He is probably the first British ambassador to Ireland whose father was born in Belfast of a Welsh father and an Irish mother, Teresa Moore.
"My grandfather was Welsh," he explained on a visit last week to the U.S., "and he went to Liverpool to find a job. There, he met Teresa Moore, my grandmother." She was an Irish Catholic, he a Welsh Protestant. The two tried to get married, but Protestant-Catholic unions were frowned upon by the Catholic church in Liverpool. The couple could not find a priest to marry them, Roberts said.
Amazingly, they went to Belfast, more known for its intolerance than its ecumenical spirit, where they found a priest willing to cement their union.
Roberts’s father was born in Belfast in 1914 and spent the early years of his life in the Oldpark area of North Belfast. During the troubles of 1920, North Belfast became a dangerous place (as it would be again 50 years later) and the family fled back to England.
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"I like to think of myself as a product of the Isles," said Roberts, who was in the U.S. to meet with some prominent Irish-American political activists and officials at the State Department to brief them on the state of the peace process. His message is a relatively upbeat one — based on the belief that devolution works, for Northern Ireland as for Scotland and Wales.
"Borders become marks not of division, but distinction", he said, quoting Hubert Butler.
However, Roberts has no fear of the nation-state disappearing, which must be reassuring for ambassadors everywhere.
The message he wanted to stress on this trip was the importance of the economic relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom. He pointed out that Ireland is Britain’s fifth largest market, worth some £12 billion in exports and £9 million in imports per year.
With diplomatic experience in Yugoslavia, during the Bosnian War, and in Spain, where he took particular interest in the Basque situation, Roberts is clearly no stranger to conflict zones or to nations burdened by a history of conflict. During intense negotiations with Bosnian Serbs about the fate of several British soldiers taken hostage, he was subjected to a three-hour monologue on the oppression of the Serbs under the Turks.
"Ireland has now the self-confidence not to indulge in that kind of approach," he said.