The Week That Was at the UN General Assembly: Jennifer Bray’s New York diary

What is usually a busy week of staid bilateral meetings and dry multilaterals was anything but for the President, Taoiseach and Tánaiste at the UN General Assembly, the annual gathering of world leaders in New York City.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty Meryl Streep, Taoiseach Simon Harris secured a diplomatic coup by bagging a second White House visit, and President Michael D Higgins reignited a controversy over his letter to the newly elected president of Iran.
Green Party Minister Eamon Ryan also announced his own good news while in Manhattan, confirming that he is likely to be asked to lead talks at the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Azerbaijan.
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Mr Higgins normally keeps out of the headlines but he made them this week.
The Taoiseach must have been breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t his comments on homelessness and immigration (where he linked the two) that became the story of the week – instead it was the unclear statements made by Mr Higgins about the Israeli embassy circulating his letter to the president of Iran.
The Áras confirmed that the President did not send letters to Russian president Vladimir Putin or Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on their “re-elections”. But he did, the Áras confirmed, congratulate Israeli president Yitzhak Herzog on his election in 2021. What isn’t clear is how the President decides who to congratulate.
In his second press conference in Manhattan, he was visibly angry that the media wanted to ask him, repeatedly, to clarify his comments instead of asking about the topics he was discussing in his UN meetings. Some Government officials looked like they had certainly had better days at work.
[ Meryl Streep joins Irish and other officials at UN women’s rights eventOpens in new window ]
Then, on Monday, Mr Martin was pictured chatting to Hollywood actor Meryl Streep. Streep introduced a short documentary on the participation of four Afghan women leaders in the Doha peace talks in 2020 before the Taliban takeover. She spoke later and said that cats have more freedom than women in Afghanistan. Asked how his engagement was with Streep, Mr Martin said it was “lovely, very nice”.
“She spoke poetically and with great impact. She’s a very genuine person and she’s very committed to that issue, and I am so privileged to have met her in those circumstances,” he said.
Mr Martin had a packed schedule, including meetings with Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, but he also found time to open a swish new home for the Consulate General of Ireland in New York in the iconic Met Life building. He was presented with a framed picture of his father by CIÉ Tours, which will also be based in the new Ireland House. Martin’s father was a CIÉ bus driver. He said the new location “will deepen the close and dynamic relationship Ireland has with the city of New York, the region and the United States as a whole”.
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By that stage, the diplomatic staff on the trip were already buzzing with the news that Ireland had secured a second outing in the Oval Office with US president Joe Biden. The invitation was issued through normal diplomatic channels in the last couple of weeks. The Taoiseach’s camp were keeping schtum on the date. But the date was of great interest to the press corps, however, given the intense general election speculation.
The Irish Times sat down with Mr Harris in Fitzpatrick’s Hotel on Wednesday morning, and put it to him that he’d be back in the States in “no time”. “Yeah, two weeks,” he said, before catching himself and realising he had given the date away.
[ President Higgins’s letter and Israel: What is the controversy all about?Opens in new window ]
Mr Harris had also popped in to an informal dinner on Sunday night, whereupon he was further peppered with questions about the election. He gave nothing away. The Irish Times did hear him categorically rule out two dates throughout the week, though: November 8th and November 15th. Now the speculation is that it will all happen very quickly.