Ambassador O'Hara

Aidan O’Hara became Ambassador of Ireland to Ethiopia in 2012. He presented his credentials to the then President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, His Excellency Girma Wolde-Giorgis, in October 2012.

Message from the Ambassador

As home to Lucy, the three million year old hominid fossil, Ethiopia can truly lay claim to being the cradle of civilisation. It is a vast country, about the size of France and Spain combined, with a population in excess of 90 million. It is also a land of enormous contrasts between the lowlands and the highlands and between the 80 different cultures or nationalities which are said to inhabit the country. Christianity came to Ethiopia before Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland and the beautiful Ethiopian Orthodox manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, dated to between the 17th and 19th centuries, are a testament to this ancient civilisation and to Ethiopia’s long (and almost unique in Africa) reliance on the written word.

This is my first posting abroad as a Head of Mission and the short time I have spent here has been a huge learning experience. Ireland has had a diplomatic presence in Addis Ababa since 1994 and our bilateral cooperation programme has focussed for most of that time on health and agricultural programmes in the Tigray region in the north and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s region. Our current five year strategy maintains that focus on health and agriculture but also brings nutrition and climate resilience into the equation as well as continuing to work with other development partners on strengthening the role of civil society across all nine regions. Our work is intended to complement the Ethiopian Government’s own Growth and Transformation Plan and to help the country reach middle income status by 2025.

In line with Ireland’s new policy for international development, “One World, One Future” the Embassy is committed to deepening our engagement with the private sector and we are doing so, for example, through a Dairy Innovation Fund, and by concluding a number of bilateral agreements between both countries which, we hope, will facilitate two-way trade and investment.

I am also accredited on a non-resident basis to South Sudan, the world’s youngest country. South Sudan has enormous potential but tragically a conflict which broke out there in 2013 is tearing it apart and runs the risk of destroying the future the people there fought so hard for prior to independence.

Finally, my roles as Permanent Observer to the African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa, and Permanent Observer to the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development give me privileged access to discussions on a variety of issues and challenges affecting the region and the continent as a whole.