Gift elephant resulted in jumbo transportation bill

STATE GIFT:THE DEPARTMENT of Foreign Affairs reluctantly paid £4,000 to transport an elephant to Ireland which was a gift from the Tanzanian president to the Irish president.

President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania made the the offer on a visit to Ireland on September 9th, 1979.

On September 12th, Dublin Zoo director Terence Murphy wrote to President Dr Patrick Hillery in response to a phone call. “We would of course, be very happy to receive a young African elephant at any time,” he said.

The three-year-old elephant, named Mimi, arrived the following year.

Newly released records show the Tanzanian ministry of foreign affairs wrote to the Irish Embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1980 asking to be reimbursed for shipping costs, much to the bewilderment of officials.

“The Embassy will recall that the Government of Ireland undertook to pay air freight charges in respect of one live elephant which was presented to the president of Ireland as a gift from the president of the United Republic of Tanzania,” the letter reads.

The ministry has “the honour to request the reimbursement” of the cost of “transporting by air the live elephant referred to above”.

The first secretary of the Embassy wrote to the Department of Foreign Affairs asking it to verify if the government undertook to pay for the elephant. Foreign Affairs referred it to other departments.

In December, the Tanzanians again ask the Irish Embassy for payment. “Have received further reminders. Surely subject matter is not that weighty that other departments have not yet given approval,” the first secretary in the Irish Embassy writes in a telex to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

“Do you have £4,000 spare? None of the other departments we have had to contact in an attempt to sort out this mess has either,” a civil servant at the Department of Foreign Affairs wrote in a telex.

“The upshot of the whole affair is that we are left holding a weighty baby and are stuck with the freight.”

It would have been helpful to know in 1979 that this payment was in the offing, he wrote, giving the Embassy permission to pay the account.

Later that month the Embassy sent a cheque to the Tanzanians urging them to cash it before December 31st.

Newspaper archives from May 1980 show that three-year-old Mimi the elephant in Dublin Zoo was a gift from the Tanzanian president.

A report in The Irish Times on the 150th anniversary of the zoological society in 1980 said Dr Hillery “has already come to know the elephant without at the time appreciating that she is playful and also unruly”.

According to Dublin Zoo, Mimi was sent to a zoo in England in 1983.