U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Kevin O’Malley. RollingNews.ie photo.
By Ray O’Hanlon
And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
The U.S. State Department did not say this to U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Kevin O’Malley.
But the incoming Trump administration did - at least in so many words.
The word has gone forth from the incoming administration, via Foggy Bottom, that Obama political appointee U.S. ambassadors must leave their posts by January 20.
The New York Times reported today that President-elect Trump’s transition staff had “issued a blanket edict” requiring politically appointed ambassadors to leave their overseas posts by Inauguration Day.
Citing U.S. diplomats familiar with the plan, the Times report described the move as “breaking with precedent by declining to provide even the briefest of grace periods.”
The paper, citing a “senior Trump transition official” reported that the incoming administration bore no ill will to incumbent ambassadors but that the move was “a simple matter of ensuring that Mr. Obama’s overseas appointees leave the government on schedule” just as thousands of political aides in the White House and in federal agencies are required to do.
Political appointee ambassadors generally are sent to the capitals of countries that are especially friendly with Washington.
Dublin is one such capital.
London and Paris are two other high profile examples.
Diplomatic posts that are more nuanced, difficult, and even dangerous, are generally filled by professional State Department diplomats.
In the case of “friendly” postings there can sometimes be a seeming lack or urgency in moving out an ambassador and moving in a new one.
Under normal circumstances, Ambassador O’Malley might have expected his tenure to last at least few weeks into 2017, if not a few months.
His successor, meanwhile, would require a formal nod from the U.S. Senate.
In this instance, Massachusetts businessman Brian Burns, whose name is attached to the library in Boston College, has been named in reports as O’Malley’s successor.
Mr. Burns might have expected a little time to prepare for a move across the Atlantic and into the ambassador’s residence in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
He might now have to pack a little more quickly though, again, his travel plans would ultimately be decided by the Senate’s schedule.
That there might be a gap between diplomatic occupants of the Phoenix Park residence is by no means unusual.
Mr. O’Malley’s predecessor, Dan Rooney, left the Park in December, 2012.
Mr. O’Malley did not fill the vacancy until the middle of 2014.
The U.S. Embassy in Dublin handled diplomatic matters during this interregnum.
The changing of ambassadors can be a more complicated affair when the incumbents are younger and are parents of school age children.
This has not been the case in Dublin for most of the more than nine decades of relations between the U.S. and an independent Ireland.
Phoenix Park occupants have tended to be on the more senior side.
