Former Ambassador to the United States, Daniel Mulhall, will deliver this year’s Michael Dillon Memorial Lecture hosted by the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Ireland (Agri Guild) this week.
As an Irish diplomat, Mulhall also served as Ambassador to the UK, Malaysia, and Germany. He was Ambassador during both the first Trump and the subsequent Biden administrations in the US.
The prestigious biennial Michael Dillon Memorial Lecture, supported by Kerry Group, will take place at a black tie event hosted by the Agri Guild at The K Club, Co. Kildare on Thursday, November 20.
Previous speakers at the Michael Dillon Memorial Lecture include: former European Commissioner and MEP, Mairead McGuinness; former minister, Simon Coveney; and former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson.
Mulhall will deliver the keynote address at a time when geopolitical tensions among trading blocks such as the EU, US, South America, China and others, are tenuous.
Former Ambassador
Since his retirement in 2022, Daniel Mulhall has worked as a consultant with a global law firm and is a director of an animation production company.
Mulhall is also a Global Distinguished Professor of Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Harvard University.
He also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Liverpool, Chatham University (Pittsburg), Neumann University (Philadelphia), and South-East Technological University (Waterford).
Throughout his life, he has lectured and published extensively on Irish history and literature. He is the author of Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books, 2022) and Pilgrim Soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (New Island Books, 2023).
He is honorary president of the Yeats Society (Sligo) and has also been awarded the Freedom of the City of London and of Waterford.
In September 2024, he was inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame.
Michael Dillon Memorial Lecture
One of the founding members of the Agri Guild, the late Michael Dillon was an agricultural journalist, broadcaster, and farmer who was born in Dublin but spent his childhood in Co. Galway.
As well as speaking fluent Irish, Dillon graduated with a degree in agriculture from University College Dublin (UCD).
In the mid-1940s, he worked for McCullough’s in Ballyboghil, Co. Dublin, a progressive dairy and tillage farm, before running a large hill farm that specialised in dairy produce and then going on to lease a farm at Corbally, Co. Kildare in the 1950s.
In 1948 he joined Radio Éireann, where he gave a series of weekly talks that evolved into the ‘Farmers’ Forum’ discussion programme, and later presented ‘Field and Farmhouse’ (1955–1969).
When the Farmers’ Journal was revitalised in 1951, he became joint editor for a time, before specialising in coverage of farm mechanisation and the livestock market.
He continued to write a weekly column until his death, and also wrote a daily agricultural column for the Irish Times from the late 1970s.
He won several journalism awards, as well as the award of honorary life membership of the RDS before he passed away in 1992.
