An Irish Diplomat Reports from Armenia, 1983

In May 1983, Padraig Murphy, Irish ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1981-1985, travelled through the Soviet Republics of Georgia and Armenia on official visits. These trips were undertaken almost a decade after the Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Garret Fitzgerald and his Soviet counterpart Andrei Gromyko agreed to exchange embassies between Dublin and Moscow in September 1973 – making the Republic of Ireland the last Western European nation to establish diplomatic relations with the USSR (Quinn 2014, 87). Murphy was the second Irish ambassador to Moscow, succeeding Ambassador Ned Brennan. Yet Irish-Soviet contacts have a longer history stretching back before the establishment of the Irish Free State itself (see, for example: ibidem; O’Connor 2004; Casey 2016a). Indeed, Murphy’s trip to Armenia was not even the first journey by an Irish emissary to a periphery republic of the Soviet Union. By comparing Murphy’s 1983 journey with an unusual precedent, the 1930 visit of Irish Republican David Fitzgerald to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, we can establish a wide historical backdrop for the full report. In August 1930, David Fitzgerald, a veteran of the anti-Treaty side of the Irish Civil War, set out from London for Leningrad as a delegate of the Irish Friends of Soviet Russia1. During a six week journey, Fitzgerald and comrades such as the veteran suffragette Charlotte Despard and the artist Harry Kernoff, visited several Soviet cities including Baku in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Like Armenia, Azerbaijan was one of the original Soviet Republics which had the Red Flag raised above it as soon as Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War allowed them to take the Tsarist banner down. Fitzgerald certainly saw himself as an emissary of a government in the same mould as Murphy, though Fitzgerald’s government, the Second Dáil of the post-Treaty Republican tradition, was a continuation of the revolutionary Republican parliament of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic of 1921-1922 rather than an internationally recognised state.