“People of her calibre don’t grow on trees,” said a senior Government source, laying on a charm offensive aimed at Prof Louise Richardson, chair of the Government’s forum on security.
The forum, which kicks off on Thursday, is the Government’s attempt to calibrate security and defence policy – and ultimately, to ascertain the fitness of the current incarnation of Irish neutrality – for a rapidly changing world.
Both the forum and its chair were thrust to the centre of a controversy following remarks by President Michael D Higgins in the Business Post at the weekend, where he shared his concerns about what he saw as a “drift” away from the keystone policy of military neutrality.
He included a few incautious barbs at Richardson, clumsily calling out her title as dame of the British Empire, and wondering aloud about whether he could have come up with any candidates for her role.
‘Puppets of Putin’: Dáil suspended amid heated row over junior minister’s comments
Ireland receives just €11.6m in EU defence grants despite contributing many times that amount to fund
Ireland ‘scrutinising’ Russian diplomats’ visa applications amid spying concerns
Varadkar attends ‘Davos for Defence’ for first time to discuss neutrality and push for Gaza ceasefire
Perhaps he could, but the Coalition believes any of the President’s suggestions would struggle to match the CV of the Waterford-born political scientist and former vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. One of seven children, her father Arthur was a sales manager for Esso and she recalled her mother Julie as a great reader in a 2017 interview with The Irish Times.
“The expectation,” she said of her childhood in the same interview, “was that I would get married. That was the expectation in those days of girls. And maybe the smart ones would be a teacher.”
[ Gerard Howlin: President Higgins should withdraw all of his remarksOpens in new window ]
She was the first woman in her family to attend university, and she did marry, having three children, and a stellar academic career. A 2009 profile in the Financial Times detailed how the then-”rabidly republican” 14-year-old had to be locked in her Tramore bedroom to stop her going to march for civil rights in Newry following Bloody Sunday. After obtaining her BA in history from Trinity College Dublin, where she was active in student protests including against apartheid, she obtained an MA from UCLA and an MA and PhD from Harvard University, where she spent 20 years, focusing mainly on terrorism and counterterrorism.
Her star was ascendant when in 2006, at the height of the war on terror, she wrote What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat, alongside other works on terrorism which captivated and challenged the post 9/11 policymaking zeitgeist. Her work focuses on understanding the political roots of extremism, according to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the renowned philanthropic organisation which she is president of. She has nine honorary doctorates and sits on many boards, including the Booker Prize Foundation. In 2020 she negotiated a deal with AstraZeneca to develop and distribute its Covid-19 vaccine at the cost of production. This work, and her focus on ensuring access to Oxford for undergraduates from deprived and non-traditional backgrounds, was recognised with the DBE in 2022.
She also waded into fraught culture war issues during her time in Oxford, including the controversy over whether a statue of the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes should be retained at the university. During the debate, Richardson, who is on record as saying as a 14-year-old she would have joined the IRA “in a heartbeat”, defended the retention of the statue on the grounds that Cromwell’s still stood outside Westminster.
Coalition sources described her on Monday as “formidable”, insisting that there had been no fallout to manage after President Higgins’s intervention. Whether or not that is the case, the Government, and Tánaiste Micheál Martin in particular, will be hopeful the distraction passes after she was unexpectedly being embroiled in the now-familiar fallout from another intervention from President Higgins.
[ The prime of Prof Louise Richardson, the Irish president of St Andrews UniversityOpens in new window ]
His comments about Richardson come against the backdrop of a long-running series of skirmishes between the Government and the Áras, and have distracted from President’s main message while providing a legitimate avenue for those who want to criticise his intervention but skirt the main issue of whether he should have said what he said.
The chair of the forum is not merely a convener: she is tasked with producing a report afterwards to be delivered on to the Tánaiste. As Martin proceeds with attempts to evolve security and defence policy with typical incrementalism, the report will help frame the next stage, inform Government deliberations and potentially buttress any policy decisions taken next.
Keeping Richardson, and her credibility, as part of the show will be important for the Tánaiste.
