Waiting for a flight to Dublin recently, I scribbled a few notes ahead of the speech I was due to make to their Chamber of Commerce that evening. I’ve made so many speeches in my time that to keep my own interest, I always try to find something I have never said before.
So, randomly, I found myself asking ChatGPT how many days had passed since the Brexit referendum. 3,040, came the answer. Excellent… “it’s not that I’m not over it,” I scribbled, “it’s just that I’m still counting the days… 3,040 in, and still on the hunt for the first Brexit benefit.”
Then, “how many days since the Good Friday Agreement 1998 was reached?” 10,057, said ChatGPT! Blimey… The Brexit date game got me a good laugh at the dinner, and I did even better with GFA 10,057.
“Ten thousand is a nice anniversary-type number, a time to do something special, and ’57 is the year of my birth. So surely, today is the day that I should be awarded an Irish/EU passport in recognition of my contribution to the peace process?” Cheers from some of the 1,200 businesspeople, laughter among the rest, before I pointed out to former Taoiseach turned foreign minister Simon Harris, with whom I had been chatting at the top table, that I was deadly serious.
Part of my new “never be old” philosophy, courtesy of Eden Project creator Tim Smit, is to keep setting new objectives for myself, and one is to MAKE ALASTAIR EUROPEAN AGAIN, by getting my hands on an EU passport before I die. It would be wonderful if it was a British version, but for now Ireland is my target.
A lack of Irish blood (78% Scots, and a bit of Scandi, I’ve done the tests) may seem an insurmountable obstacle, but that is the kind of old-person thinking I refuse to allow.
I was seated opposite Ireland’s police chief, Garda commissioner Justin Kelly, who had been busy dealing with nights of rioting outside a Dublin hotel housing asylum seekers. The rioting followed a sexual assault on a 10-year-old girl near the hotel in the early hours.
More than 2,000 protesters gathered within hours, riot police were charged by horse-drawn carts, a police helicopter was targeted with lasers, police cars set on fire, officers injured, water cannon deployed. Bleak stuff.
The commissioner explained that as soon as news broke of the sexual attack, far right influencers from around the world hit the social media buttons to urge Irish men and boys to get up to the hotel. Among them was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, self-styled Tommy Robinson, posting from Israel, where he had been a guest of a hard right government minister and paraded around in a Maccabi Tel Aviv shirt. A far right activist from Canada not only urged Dubliners to get down to the hotel, but got on a plane and flew there himself to join in the trouble.
The internationalisation of far right activity makes the policing of local flare-ups a lot harder, while Elon Musk’s ownership of X has helped the thugs of the world to unite in the creation of mayhem. The US ambassador to Dublin, Trump appointee Ed Walsh, was also at the dinner, and I took the opportunity to urge him to help get Musk out of our politics. Why so, he asked? Because what Musk calls free speech, I call the promotion and funding of fascism.
An assault on a young girl, whoever is responsible, is vile. But so is the attempt to turn any and every such attack, before facts are even known, into an excuse for violence, division and racist hatred. The extent to which racism is being normalised, here and in the US, is alarming, and needs to be fought at every level. “Read against racism” (and every other thing against racism) was never more needed.
From Dublin to another great European capital, Warsaw, then a drive to Poland’s fourth biggest city, Łódź (pronounced Wooj!). My brother Graeme, sadly no longer with us, lived there for a fair chunk of his life after marrying a Polish woman, Ania, and it was lovely to catch up with her.
Graeme used to describe Łódź as “like Manchester in the 1970s”, and he did not mean this as a compliment. So, invited to speak at a “Freedom Games” conference, I had fairly low expectations. They were surpassed.
Clean, efficient, good local transport, OK parks, nice restaurants and cafes, wide roads (and boy, do they respect the “do not cross until the light turns green” laws!), the biggest collection of Polish art, a famous film school recognised by Unesco, and so much history, not least as home to the second-largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Europe.
More than 200,000 Jews were sent from there to the extermination camps and by the end of the war, only 877 Jews were still alive in Łódź.
The city has been transformed since the war, and further transformed since the days my brother was making his unflattering comparison with Manchester of old. My sister-in-law was not the only one to remind me that Poland is on course to surpass the UK’s standard of living.
Like everywhere, it has its challenges – not least the palpable sense that Poles feel they are already at war with Russia. Even with (or maybe even because of) that threat, it really feels like a place confident in its own skin.
I asked the deputy prime minister, Radek Sikorski, if his government faced any political problems as a result of the tough choices needed to devote 5% of GDP to defence. “We would face political problems if we didn’t,” he said. “People know the score, and expect the government to step up.”
George Clooney was the really big draw at the conference, which gave me the opportunity to deliver one of the most flattering lines I have perhaps ever delivered to a woman.
I had arranged to meet Melinda Simmons, the UK ambassador to Poland, at 6.30pm, close to the entrance of the main hall. At 5.30pm, the organiser took me to one side to tell me that in an hour or so, ie at 6.30pm, he would be hosting a “small, select reception” for Clooney ahead of the A-list film star’s appearance on stage. “You’re invited,” he whispered.
I was thus able to begin my meeting with the ambassador by telling her: “I turned down George Clooney for you.” She seemed suitably touched and flattered, but then the diplomatic niceties escaped her, as she admitted: “I can’t be certain that I would have done the same for you.”
Both in Dublin and Warsaw, our ambassadors are recently appointed, and both are women. Indeed, 43% of UK ambassadors are women – double the global average.
In Dublin, the job is in the hands of someone I first worked with as far back as 1998, when she was a junior diplomat working on the handover of Hong Kong to China. Kara Owen made a real impression on me back then, and is making a real impression on the Irish now.
Meeting to present her credentials to the president, Michael Higgins, on his last ceremonial activity before being replaced by Catherine Connolly, she spoke in Irish Gaelic. It is not uncommon for ambassadors to learn the language where they are posted, but given that everyone in Ireland speaks English, this is being seen as something of an early diplomatic masterstroke.
And as I know from my dad’s attempts to teach me Scots Gaelic as a child, as languages go, it is not easy.
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