February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Harry Keaney
When Irish diplomat Adrian McDaid was posted to Baghdad in August 1989 after having served for five years in Moscow, a friend in the Department of Foreign Affairs jokingly told him that he was going "from the fridge to the fire." With a subsequent stint in Brussels and now New York, where he has just been promoted to deputy consul general, McDaid has, all told, been an eyewitness to history, to watershed developments such as the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the move toward greater integration in Europe and, now, the Irish peace process, a development driven in large part by U.S. involvement.
McDaid, who is 42, grew up in Derry, where his five brothers and two sisters still live. He was 12 when the first civil rights marches began, he was 15 when Bloody Sunday occurred. After attending St. Columb’s College, he went to Cambridge University to study history, graduating in 1978.
He was working about eight months with a firm of chartered accountants in London when he was offered a job in the Irish diplomatic corps. When he was posted to the Irish Embassy in Moscow, he was just 24 years old.
"It was a particularly fascinating time," McDaid said. "Brezhnev was there and, when I left, in January 1986, Gorbachev was in power."
But if Russian history was being created in the guise of such notions as glasnost and perestroika, McDaid also created his own little piece of personal history thanks to his great passion, chess. He became a member of the Central Chess Club of the USSR, the first Western diplomat to join any soviet sports club. On one occasion he even played world champion Anatoly Karpov, who offered him a draw. McDaid refused, Karpov then went on to beat him.
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McDaid had learned to play chess when he was 16, having been hooked on the game after the 1972 world chess championship in Reykjavík, Iceland. Bobby Fisher became the first American world champion by defeating the Russian Boris Spassky.
On returning from Moscow in early 1986, McDaid worked in the trade section of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ economic division until August 1989. Then he was posted to Iraq, a country that was important to Ireland for a variety of economic reasons, particularly as a market for Irish beef. Also, a hospital in Baghdad was staffed and run by the Irish company PARC, a subsidiary of Aer Lingus. Irish diplomats in Baghdad were also credited to Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus.
In late July 1990, McDaid went to Beirut to follow up on rumors that Belfast-born hostage Brian Keenan, held by an Islamic fundamentalist group, might be released. He arrived back in Baghdad on Aug. 1, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three months later he became the first Irish diplomat ever, or since, to be expelled from a host country.
If McDaid had witnessed upheaval in Russia and the Middle East, his next posting, Brussels, placed him in the midst of an emerging creation.
"The big issue was the Maastricht Treaty, turning the European Community into the European Union, and allied with that the question of European monetary union," McDaid said.
After four years, in August 1995, McDaid returned to Dublin to work for the secretariat attached to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation set up by the Irish government in the wake of the first IRA cease-fire of Aug. 31, 1994.
After another 18 months in Brussels, McDaid succeeded Dermot Brangan as press officer of the Irish Consulate in New York.
"It is one of the most exciting times to be an Irish diplomat in New York," he said. "Something that struck me was the sense of regard for Ireland in the U.S. This has been harnessed and used in the peace process and also in the underpinning of the peace process through economic support."
McDaid has not yet gotten around to playing chess in New York, but one senses it might not be long. He pointed out that in chess, like diplomacy, a person can study all the angles, analyze all the positions but, in the end, one has to make a judgment.
"Life is all about judgments," he said.