On Tursday Sept 7 Ragnar Almqvist presented his credentials to Hungarian president Katalin Novak, formally marking the start of his term as Ireland’s Ambassador to Hungary and cementing a great moment for the Swedish-Irish community that was decades in the making.
Wearing a pair of cufflinks gifted to him by his late father, academic Bo Almqvist, the newly-appointed Ambassador engaged in a day packed with symbolism as he entered into the next stage of his career representing Ireland abroad, with his Swedish heritage never too far behind.
Before presenting his credentials Almqvist laid a wreath at Budapest’s Heroes’ Square, and he also paid a visit to the synagogue at Dohány Street to honour a man he described as a “personal hero” – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Second World War before suddenly disappearing in Budapest on January 17, 1945.
The son of a Swedish father and an Irish mother, Ragnar spent some of his formative years working for the Department Of Foreign Affairs here in Sweden, and he went on to work in the United States as well as at the department’s headquarters in Dublin.
During his time in Stockholm and Sweden, Ragnar was an immensely popular and highly-energetic member of the community, and both he and his wife Ailbhe were very active in the Stockholm Gaels and other organisations.
Tall and angular with a calm disposition as he went about his diplomatic work, all that went out the window when he took his place between the posts as goalkeeper for the dominant Stockholm Gaels team of the time, and a fiery competitive nature made itself known.
His occasional deployments at midfield in group-stage games gave him even greater room to emulate one of his Gaelic football heroes, Dublin’s Stephen Cluxton, and his accurate kicking and superb reflex saves provided the foundation for several of the Gaels’ Nordic championship victories during that period.
A fluent Irish speaker, Ragnar was also heavily involved in the celebration of Bloomsday every year, and together with the Spuds & Sill theatre group he breathed new life into the celebration of James Joyce’s world-renowned novel Ulysses, as well as using the day as an opportunity to showcase Irish literature and culture generally.
However, as is the case with even the most loved and appreciated diplomats, his time in Stockholm was destined to be brief, and the Department chose to move him on to pastures new, but his rising through the ranks to the status of Ambassador to Hungary is a source of great pride to all who knew him as a young diplomat, and we hope that we will see him at some point in the future in the Swedish capital.