SEARCH EFFORT:AS IRISH efforts continue to assist Haiti in the wake of last week's catastrophic earthquake it has emerged that an Irish citizen and senior United Nations official is among the missing.
The Department of Foreign Affairs is liaising with the US state department in trying to establish the whereabouts of Andrew Grene (44), a political affairs officer with the UN’s department of peacekeeping operations, who is based in the capital Port-au-Prince.
Mr Grene who has dual Irish/US citizenship, is a special assistant to the head of the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti, Hedi Annabi, who died in the earthquake when the UN’s headquarters collapsed.
The UN has confirmed that 40 members of the peacekeeping mission have been killed and 188 are unaccounted for. Mr Grene was born in Chicago and grew up between the US and Co Cavan, on a small farm outside Belturbet. His late father David Grene, a classics translator and professor at the University of Chicago, was born in Donnybrook, Dublin.
His mother Ethel May Weiss is an emergency room doctor who was born in Chicago. His half-brother Nicholas Grene is a professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. Mr Grene has a twin brother Gregory, who is a founder member of US-based Celtic rock band The Prodigals. Mr Grene’s wife Jennifer is from Belfast and the couple’s two eldest children Patrick (20) and Alex (19) were born in Belfast. His daughter Rosamund (14) was born in Chicago.
Gregory Grene said yesterday that “we are simply on edge in a way that words cannot fathom”, waiting for news of his whereabouts.
He outlined his brother’s career and said that Andrew “went to the University of Chicago, then to Trinity College Dublin for an MPhil, then to Medill School of Journalism, winning a national journalism award for investigative journalism on patronage in the Illinois court system.
“He worked as a speech-writer for [former UN secretary general] Boutros Boutros Ghali and then moved into peacekeeping strategy.”
