Kara Owen may be the newly installed British ambassador to Ireland, but she is not newly arrived. Indeed, there can be few ambassadors who have ever taken up a role furnished with such connections to her posting.
First, she is married to an Irish man and a former Irish Defence Forces officer to boot, William Tierney from Ballinasloe, Co Galway, and the mother of daughters, Lila and Saoirse – the latter probably the only British diplomat’s daughter to bear that name, she jokes.
Second, she has already lived in Ireland, between 2009 and 2012, when the couple returned from an assignment she had in Vietnam, so that her husband could take up duty at Cathal Brugha barracks in Dublin.
“I wouldn’t call it Portobello. That would make me look like I’ve got notions. It’s off the South Circular,” she says, with a laugh, of her pre-ambassadorship Dublin home.
Owen has lived in Dublin again for more than a year, ahead of taking up the ambassador’s role.
The family is now installed in the British ambassador’s residence in Glencairn on the southern edge of Dublin.
Owen and Tierney met in Aceh, Indonesia, when they both worked in 2005 on secondment for the European Union’s Monitoring Mission, which helped to supervise a peace deal that brought an end to a conflict th
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