Ambassador adrift in Emerald Isle

A Yankee in de Valera's Ireland: The Memoir of David Gray by David Gray, edited by Paul Bew

**Royal Irish Academy, €25.20**

**Reviewed by Dermot Bolger**

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Irish ambassadors tend to be schooled career diplomats, carefully shunted between posts by successive governments which appreciate their incrementally-accumulated diplomatic skills and how their trained eyes interpret nuances of local politics in the countries where they serve.

Such grooming and rotation does not automatically weed out ...