July 9th, 1949:WITH TRAVEL to Europe so simple and cheap it is easy to forget that it was not always so. In pre-EU and pre-EEC days there were bureaucratic issues of passports and visas, and getting permission for Continentals to visit Ireland was sometimes more difficult than for Irish people to get visas to go elsewhere. Kees van Hock's foreign affairs column, The Way of the World, touched upon this:
Some months ago when I was about to set out on my Italian journey, I discussed the waste of time and money which the getting of an Italian visa still involved for Irish nationals. Actually, as I gathered later in Rome, it was even more troublesome for an Italian citizen to get an Irish visa.
At least the Italian Legations and Consulates gave the visa automatically, the moment one had complied with forms and photographs: whereas, for an Italian national to get an Irish visa involved reference back to Dublin. Some years ago, as I was told in Rome, the Italian Government had suggested reciprocal abolition, and it was the Irish Government who played the nigger in the woodpile.
There may, of course, have been some ground for that hesitation, since there are, undoubtedly, many more Italians interested in settling down in Ireland than there are Irish citizens likely to stay on in Italy.
On the other hand, our Department of Justice and its Aliens branch at the Castle have, time and again, proved to be so efficient that Ireland could easily have followed earlier when even Britain, an ex-enemy of Italy, led so much before . . .
Colourful Counterpart
I hear that our Minister to Italy is thinking of retiring before long. Few men had such an interesting career as Michael McWhite; in fact, . . . he is probably the most colourful personality in the [diplomatic] service.
A sturdy farmer’s son from near Skibbereen, the years appear to have gone lightly over his still unbent frame, and his dark hair is only of late beginning to grey slightly at the temples.
Neither have the years and his rise in the world brought the slightest change of inflection in his endearing Cork brogue, or in his straightforward ways. He is one of the shrewdest observers of international affairs that I know and his position as doyen of the Minister accredited to Rome (not, of course, of the Ambassadors) must have shed added lustre our young Foreign Service.
His personal contacts in Washington, where he was accredited as Minister before he came to Rome, were prodigious, so much so that one wonders whether they have, either before or since, ever been rivalled by another Irish Minister there.
They were also lasting; every distinguished American who came to Rome in post-war years, from ex-president Hoover downwards, made it a point of calling on Mike McWhite in his apartment at the Grand Hotel, those third-floor corner rooms right above the last residence of the late King Alfonso Xlll of Spain.
Michael McWhite is one of those small band of young men who assisted Seán T O’Kelly, when our present President [O’Kelly] established our first official representation abroad of the (then still unrecognised) “Provisional Government of the Republic of Ireland”, in the Grand Hotel in Paris, in 1919.
Another in his bunch of budding talents was the present Irish Ambassador to the Holy See, Joseph Walshe, who . . . did more than any other man, save Éamon de Valera himself, to shape the Department of External Affairs.
We have no orders of knight- hood in our Republic and the only Irish ambassadorship in the world was a fitting reward for the great services which Joseph Walshe rendered to his country during the exceedingly difficult years of war.