The Diplomat in Spain

José Antonio Yturriaga

Ambassador of Spain

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Spanish Cultural Institute in Dublin (ICD). Neither the Spanish Embassy in Ireland, nor the Instituto Cervantes (IC), which absorbed the centre, have seen fit to celebrate this anniversary. I – who knew and appreciated the meritorious work of this institution – would like to take the liberty of making a spear in its memory. Spain is a medium-sized power in the political or economic sphere, but it is a great power in the cultural sphere, which is why I have always believed that Spanish diplomacy should focus especially on this highly profitable field, but the various Spanish governments have not shared this criterion and have undervalued this wonderful asset, to the point that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when for economic and financial reasons it had to reduce its staff, the first Directorate-General to disappear was the Directorate-General for Cultural Relations.

Spain has neglected the external projection of its extraordinary culture, and the Ministry of Culture has been considered a “Maria” in which to place some flower minister, has shared functions with Education and Sport, and on many occasions has been relegated to the level of Secretary of State. Its budget allocation has always been minimal. Despite the fact that the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations considers the development of cultural and scientific relations between states to be one of the basic functions of embassies, Spanish governments do not provide them with sufficient means to carry out this essential task, even though they are entrusted with the fulfilment of this function. Hence, the exercise of cultural action abroad depends on the capacity of the Heads of Mission and their ingenuity in obtaining resources to carry out this action when they are lacking. The establishment of Cultural Centres abroad was often the initiative of ambassadors, cultural attachés or professors, as in the cases of the Baghdad and Dublin Cultural Institutes.

When I arrived in Dublin, I found that the Spanish Cultural Institute had a well-established system for teaching Spanish and also carried out some cultural activities. In the absence of a budget, I had to continue resorting to the “sablazo ilustrado” system, so that the Mission and the Institute could develop a cultural action worthy of the name.

The ICD was officially created in 1975 on the initiative of the then Reader in Spanish at Trinity College (TCD), Antonio Sierra, with the support of Ambassador Joaquín Juste. That year, the Irish Minister for Education, Richard Burke, and the Director General for Cultural Relations, José Luis Messía, inaugurated the Institute in a villa in a residential neighbourhood of Dublin near the Embassy. The Ministry paid the rent for the premises and the salaries of the director, the librarian and a secretary. The salaries of the other staff – between 5 and 7 teachers, an English secretary, a caretaker and a cleaner -, management costs and cultural activity were financed by income from student fees, which were included in a Special Revenue Account, controlled by the Embassy and the Ministry.

The number of students gradually increased from 379 in 1987 to 950 in 1990. The ICD offered a fairly comprehensive Cultural Information Service and a more modest Commercial and Tourist Information Service, and published a monthly bulletin “Spanish Cultural Institute News”, which outlined its activities and reported on issues of interest to teachers and students of Spanish, and to the Hispanic community in Ireland. It had a Documentation and Cultural Exchange Centre, which provided the universities with Spanish Departments -TCD, University College Dublin, Galway and Cork, Dublin City University, and the National Institute of Higher Education (NIHE) in Limerick- and hundreds of schools and colleges with newspapers, magazines, books, films, records and cassettes. Catalan, Galician and Basque classes were also offered, provided that a minimum of 10 students could be reached, which was never achieved. The few who showed interest were given the guidance of native teachers versed in these languages.

The cultural activity of the ICE was framed within the framework of the Spanish-Irish Cultural Cooperation Agreement of 1980. The Institute regularly held lectures, film screenings and concerts on its premises. The video “España día” and one of the films sent by the Ministry were shown fortnightly. Every year a guitar concert in homage to Andrés Segovia was organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a series on the “History of the Spanish guitar” was sponsored, in which native guitarists such as Alan Grundy, Simon Taylor and Luke Tobin participated.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Dublin at the end of 1987 was to appoint the director of the ICD as honorary cultural attaché, I integrated him into the management team of the Embassy and I took an active interest in the educational and cultural activities of the Institute. I took advantage of the good contacts I had with the heads of the Directorate General for Cultural Relations to ask them to include Ireland in the “tournées” of artists sponsored by them, to which they agreed.

The icing on the cake of the cultural action “gratis et amore”, by means of the “cultural sablazo”, was the organisation of an exhibition on “Spanish avant-garde painting and sculpture”. In 1989, my colleague Álvaro Fernández-Villaverde – who was in charge of international relations at Banco Hispanoamericano – and other senior officials of the bank visited Dublin and I invited them to lunch at my residence. When I heard about the Bank’s great wealth of paintings, my alarm light went on and I asked Álvaro if the institution would lend the Embassy some of its works to hold an exhibition in Dublin. He told me that he would check with senior management and the answer was yes. The BHA provided the works, the Ministry paid for the insurance of the paintings and Iberia for their transport, the Irish Administration provided the Kilmainhan exhibition hall, and the Allied Irish Bank co-sponsored the event with the BHA and covered all the installation costs, thanks to my friendship with its president, the former European Commissioner Peter Sutherland. The brand new President of the Republic, Mary Robinson, opened the exhibition, which was one of the cultural highlights of the year, without costing the Embassy a penny. These were just a few of the many cultural activities carried out by the Embassy and the ICD, but neither the Instituto Cervantes – which absorbed the latter – nor the Embassy in Dublin have had the good fortune to celebrate their anniversary.

© This article is a summary of the published in SevillaInfo