The Tánaiste meeting Meryl Streep and other things you may have missed at the UN General Assembly
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You will have noticed this week that the President, Taoiseach and Tánaiste were all in New York.
It was there that Michael D Higgins accused the Israeli embassy of improperly spreading a letter he wrote to the new Iranian President and where the subsequent incredibly tense press briefing with the President took place among other briefings given by the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Transport Minister Eamon Ryan.
Here are some things you may have missed during the week.
Irish people tend to have a good view of the work of the UN's agencies — UNESCO, UNRWA and UNIFIL which oversees our peacekeeping troops particularly — but the actual body can be seen as a bit of an ineffective talking shop. Recent vetoes of votes on Gaza and Ukraine by the US and Russia respectively haven't helped and this year's UN General Assembly week or UNGA came at a time of a fractured world order.
The UN's Secretary General Antonio Guterres challenged world leaders to attend his “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to multilateralism and repair the aging world architecture for a changing global environment.
He told journalists that the summit “was born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them". While leaders signed up to a 54-point pledge afterward, there wasn't a massive amount of optimism that it would be remedy needed.
The Tánaiste met with arguably the world's finest actress at an event co-hosted by the Permanent Missions to the United Nations of Ireland, Switzerland, Indonesia and Qatar, on ‘Ways to Include Women In the Future of Afghanistan’.
The event included the screening of a documentary on the lives of Afghan women participating in Doha peace talks with the Taliban. Afterward, Mr Martin said that the three-time Oscar winner was "lovely".
Mr Martin said that Ms Streep "captured the enormity of the injustice to women and girls in Afghanistan better than anybody else in that room".
"She talked about the cat having greater rights than a young girl in Afghanistan, when she spoke about a squirrel being able to go into a wildlife park and a young girl not being able to go into a nature park in Afghanistan. She spoke poetically and with great impact."
At one point as the general assembly got underway, Ireland's delegation was not sitting next to its alphabetical neighbour, Israel, raising eyebrows. However, it is understood that this was merely to accommodate President Michael D Higgins and put him closer to the aisle.
If you've ever been in New York, you'll know that midtown traffic is best described as "glacial". Imagine that with major chunks of it completely shut off. The arrival of 100 or so world leaders brings with it travel chaos.
Add in the fact that the US President's motorcade can shut off whole streets while it takes two minutes to pass and it can be a nightmare. At one point, this writer was held for 35 minutes waiting to cross a street because Joe Biden was expected.
Given that 25 million people are at risk of acute hunger, Sudan should feel like a bigger deal. The Taoiseach and Tánaiste both argued as much in briefings with the press, but with Israel's bombing of Lebanon and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in town, the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan was both on and off the agenda.
Towards the end of the week, Ireland announced further humanitarian aid for the country which has been engulfed in a conflict that erupted in April last year and has killed thousands of people.
It seems incongruous that 40 years after Live Aid and being discussed in one of the richest cities on the planet, that access to food remains a global issue.
President Michael D Higgins said that this was a failing of the West and that while crisis reactions are good, the measures to prevent a crisis needed to be better.
"The public shows a willingness very often, to respond to humanitarian crisis, but I think they refuse...to enable you to prevent future crisis," he said.
While much of the substantive debate at UNGA was centred around the threats to multilateralism, of the application of the rule of law and of the double standards between the international reaction in Ukraine and Gaza, the US President Joe Biden used his last UN speech to talk about...US President Joe Biden.
In a 10-page speech, the departing leader of the free world spoke about his contributions to the global agenda, voting against apartheid and for removing Slobodan Milosevic.
His section on the Middle East, however, was perfunctory at best. The number killed in Gaza was reduced to "thousands and thousands" and the only responsibility placed on Hamas.
Well, you wouldn't have missed it, so much as it hasn't happened. Overseas aid minister Sean Fleming will read Ireland's national speech on Monday. The order of speeches begins with the two heads of the UN — Secretary General and President of the General Assembly — before Brazil speaks as recognition for Brazil being willing in the first 10 or so general assemblies to be the first to speak.
Then the US as host nation, before a convoluted diplomatic horse-trading exercise lays out the speaking order, largely linked to who is speaking — heads of state are given precedence over heads of government, who are given precedence over ministers and so on.