Clodagh Finn: Remembering the first female envoy who paved the way in foreign affairs

Josephine McNeill opens an exhibition of Irish paintings at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, with the city’s Mayor Arnold Jan d'Ailly. Picture: Elsevier Photo collection courtesy of Nationaal Archief/Anefo  

When Cork-born Josephine McNeill became the first Irish woman to head a diplomatic mission abroad in 1949, she might have thought an Irish female foreign minister could not be far behind.

Then again, perhaps not, because she once commented in a letter to Seán Nunan, secretary for external affairs, that “the special combination of qualities and experience desirable in diplomacy is less frequently to be found in women than in men”.

Yet, she did have the temerity to ask her superiors why she was paid less in her role as Irish minister to the Hague than her male counterparts. They didn’t even reply.

I wonder what she would make of this week’s promotion of Helen McEntee to minister for defence and foreign affairs, almost eight decades after her own appointment.

She would, no doubt, be heartened to see that women now lead 53% of Ireland’s diplomatic missions across the world. 

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By contrast, women make up about 25% of the Dáil.

While this week’s mini-reshuffle elevated Hildegarde Naughton to the role of education minister, there are still only marginally more women in Cabinet than there are men in the Dáil called James, as Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns pointed out.

Of course diplomacy is not the same as politics, but I couldn’t help noticing that Ms McEntee took up her new role on Josephine McNeill’s anniversary — November 19.

When our first female envoy died on that date in 1969, many tributes were paid to a woman who had lived several lives since she was born to James and Ellen Ahearne, shopkeepers and hoteliers in Fermoy, Co Cork, on March 31, 1895.

One obituary put it like this: “There were several Josephines, the rebel who became a servant of her people, the musician, the art lover (she had real taste), the practical enthusiast, the feminist…”, although she was “quick to deny being a feminist”, to use one journalist’s words in an interview published in 1949.

The tribute went on to conclude that she achieved “more than any three or four women usually achieve. And yet she left the impression of one whose full potential —perhaps from unconquerable shyness — was never fully realised”.

What a tantalising comment; one that leaves you a little wide-eyed in admiration when you see all that Josephine McNeill did achieve.

She was a teacher, a linguist, a member of Cumann na mBan, a diplomat with posts in the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria, chair of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, a cultural adviser, a collector of porcelains and paintings, an amateur pianist, and a beauty columnist. And that’s not even a complete list.

We might start with the latter because it provides an unexpected insight into a woman who could write on social, cultural, and economic issues and then, change tone, to give readers of the Sunday Independent advice on how to balance the joys of gardening with the toll it takes on “lilywhite hands”.

“If you are particularly catty,” she wrote in 1936, “you will cast your eyes over the hands of your gardening friends next time you play bridge with them, or when next they pour you out a nice friendly cup of tea. You will notice that they are particularly rough and red, I am afraid.”

Ouch.

But there was a solution. The celebrated beauty columnist entreated red-handed gardeners to enlist the help of a female accomplice to make a batch of skin food (1oz oatmeal; 12 drops simple tincture of benzoin; a dessert spoon of hydrogen peroxide, mixed into a paste with warmed olive oil) and then massage it into chapped hands after a long, hot soak in Epsom salts.

If that seems frivolous (and very middle-class), it is just one of very many strands to Josephine McNeill who began her working life as a teacher after completing a BA in French, German and Irish at University College Dublin.

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She taught at St Louis Convent, Kiltimagh, at the Ursuline Convent, Thurles, and at Scoil Íde, the Irish school managed by her friend Louise Gavan Duffy. Her interest in the Irish language, music, art and literature is evident not just in her role in Cumann na mBan, but in the friendships she kept throughout her lifetime.

Her papers at UCD include correspondence with WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Lady Augusta Gregory, Seán O’Casey, and William Orpen.

Before she left to take up her appointment in the Hague, the journalist visiting her home in Dublin noted her “fine collection of modern Irish paintings”, which included many women artists from Evie Hone and Norah McGuinness to Grace Henry.

Through a culture lens alone, Josephine McNeill’s life would tell us much about Irish culture in the mid-twentieth century, but that is only part of the broad canvas of her life.

The potted biographies of her life offer a single line about her engagement to Pierce McCan, who died of influenza in Gloucester jail in March 1919, but it must have been a devastating blow.

McCan kept diaries in the form of letters to Josephine during his detention, but was not allowed to post them.

Four years later, Josephine Ahearne married James McNeill and was introduced to the world of diplomacy when he was appointed Irish high commissioner in London in the same year.

According to Michael Kennedy of the Royal Irish Academy, who along with historian Ann Marie O’Brien has done much to cast a light on our early women diplomats, she took to it reluctantly.

“Her charm and intelligence were immediately apparent, and in a period when Joseph Walshe, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, viewed married diplomats and diplomatic wives with disdain, McNeill was a noted hostess, both in London and later in Dublin, where James McNeill was governor general of the Irish Free State (1928–32),” he writes.

But she was shy and, to quote her obituary writer again, ill at ease in the stiff world of diplomacy. Underneath it all, “this apparently conventional woman, with the air of a hostess in a Pinero play, was an adventurous and romantic spirit”.

It is the conventional public servant rather than the romantic adventurer who comes to the fore in the interviews that followed her appointment as Ireland’s first minister to the Netherlands. Here was a capable representative setting out to nurture cultural and trade links between the two counties.

She also spoke of wanting to meet members of the Dutch Countrywomen’s Association, having been so deeply involved in the organisation here.

She was, after all, “a Cork woman, and a countrywoman by birth, tradition and personal inclination,” as one interview put it.

Her diplomatic career lasted more than a decade and took her to Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. She stepped down in 1960, but came out of retirement a year later to run for the Senate.

Perhaps diplomacy and politics are not so far apart after all.

She wasn’t elected. What a shame as it might have allowed Josephine McNeill to realise some more of that supposedly unfulfilled potential, not to mention show a little more of the rebel who, alas, remains hidden to us.