GERALDINE BYRNE NASON (1959-)

Doyenne of Diplomatic Representation in the 21st Century

Student 1977-81

Geraldine Byrne was born in Drogheda in 1959, the eldest of three children (two girls and a boy) of Gerry Byrne, a printer with the Drogheda Independent, and his wife Helen. She attended local national schools and Our Lady's College, Greenhills, from which she went in 1977 to the recognised college of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. There she stayed in the Auxilia Hostel on the new campus, making lifelong friends that included fellow-student Mary Hanafin, a future Minister for Education, at whose wedding she would later bridesmaid, and John O'Donohue, a charismatic student priest of the Diocese of Killaloe.

She graduated with an honours degree in Arts in 1980, thus becoming one of the first alumni of the new regime under which lay students, both male and female, were admitted to undergraduate courses in arts and sciences. Her degree in Literature, which encompassed both the Irish and English traditions, was unusual in its combination of interests. But, with her post-graduate studies for the degree of Master of Arts, also undertaken at Maynooth, it led her on a path of understated scholarship that resulted in her being elected to the Royal Irish Academy some thirty years later.

Sadly her father, who had been her great supporter in her undertaking of university education, died in the year of her study for the Master's degree, where a post-graduate bursary involved study of the academic content of civil service exams, particularly in the context of representing Ireland's cultural interests overseas. Her familiarity with the field eventually led her to take the exams herself and after succeeding at the first attempt, she embarked on a diplomatic career that took her to early assignments in several European cities, including Vienna, Brussels, Geneva and Helsinki, as well as in North America, where she served on the staff of Ireland's UN delegation.

In 1989 she married Brian Nason, a career diplomat who, like Geraldine, had worked in Paris, Geneva, and New York,as well as in the Belfast Anglo-Irish Secretariat and was Irish Consul in San Francisco at the time of their wedding ceremony which was conducted in that city by her friend Fr. O' Donohue. Mr. Nason was later Chief of Protocol at the Department of Foreign Affairs Headquarters in Dublin, and Ambassador to Belgium, a post from which he retired in 2010. They have a son, Alex, born in 2001. Sadly Fr. O'Donohue, having left the priesthood in the mid 1990s and become a world-famous counsellor and author, died suddenly in 2008.

She was Director for Governance at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris during the 1990s, headed Ireland’s Nations Forum on Europe from 2004 to 2005 and served as Deputy Permanent Representative to the European Union from 2008 to 2011. 

She served as Second Secretary-General in the Department of the Taoiseach from 2011 to 2014, with responsibility for European Union affairs, the Economic Management Council and the office of the Tanaiste. With her colleague Jim O'Brien from the Department of Finance she took the lead in re-establishing Ireland's reputation in the economic sphere following the crisis of 2008-11.

Ms. Byrne Nason was Ireland’s Ambassador to France and Monaco from 2014 to 2017, when she was appointed Ambassador at Ireland's Permanent Representation to the United Nations, a return to New York with a critical assignment as Ireland seeks a seat on the UN Security Council for the 2021-22 term.

In 2015 she was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature by Maynooth University in the first year of its existence as a completely independent entity under its own name.

In January 2020 she was awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Drogheda, the first female native of the town to be so honoured