'It's a priority for Ireland to promote our culture and keep it alive around the world'

Marylee Wall, the new Irish consul in Malaga, had the best introduction to the city. She arrived at the beginning of Semana Santa with the job of setting up what has recently been inaugurated as the new Irish consulate for Andalucía, Murcia, Extremadura and the Canary Islands.

Of course she, and the colleague accompanying her from Dublin, got very little done that first week from their office in the central Calle Larios, from where they did, she recalls, have a bird's eye view of processions. However it served as a good introduction to the city she was about to make her home and its people.

“It allowed us just to find our feet a little bit,” she tells SUR in English from the consulate that is now up and running and was presented in society at an inauguration event with local authorities last month.

“The welcome we have received has been overwhelmingly positive and warm,” Wall points out, listing the local authorities, the security forces, the consular corps and the Irish community among those who have helped her settle in.

Previously Ireland had an honorary consul on the Costa del Sol and when he died in 2022 the senior management team in Dublin weighed up the options of seeking a new honorary consul or opening a consulate with a career consul at its helm. A look at the figures made it clear that a consulate general was the best way forward.

The number of visits by Irish nationals to Spain last year was more than three million; of them around 30 per cent went to the Canaries and 25 per cent came to Andalucía. Bearing in mind that the total population of Ireland is currently at 5.5 million, the fondness of the Irish for Spain is undisputed.

Indeed the numbers of Irish tourists and residents in Spain mean that until now the consular team at the Irish embassy in Madrid has been Ireland's busiest consular diplomatic mission in the world.

“In 2025, the embassy provided assistance in 427 consular cases involving Irish citizens across Spain and that represented almost a quarter of all cases dealt with by Irish diplomatic missions around the world,” explains Wall.

The new consul can certainly draw on experience to make comparisons with other countries.

Marylee Wall, 45, is the daughter of a 'Eurocrat': her father worked within the EU for 25 years and she was brought up in Brussels from the age of ten until she went back to her native Dublin to go to university.

She joined the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2008 and since then has had two overseas postings.

“My first was to Lusaka in Zambia, which was a great adventure, and the second was to Helsinki in Finland, which was completely different in every possible way,” she explains.

And back in Dublin she has been a policy adviser to parliamentary committees on foreign affairs and defence and the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement as well as spending five years working as assistant chief of protocol in the Department of Foreign Affairs.

“I also had a role accompanying our president on high-level visits, and also visits that were coming into Ireland, and most recently I was in our Africa unit, working on West Africa and the Sahel, an area that's of a lot of interest to Spain, of course.

“That's what's great about being in the diplomatic service,” she says, “There's a diversity of roles, so it doesn't get boring.”

The post in Malaga is the first time that Wall has moved with her whole family; husband John and three sons, who are 12, 10 and six and are settling into their new home and new school well, she explains.

“I moved abroad as a child, and so I wanted my children to have that type of experience to live somewhere else, to experience a different culture,” she says.

Wall is keen for her family to speak Spanish by the end of her four-year term as consul general. Her own knowledge of the language comes from intensive courses over the years in Seville and Mexico.

“I have a brother who's lived in Mexico for more than twenty years and is married to a Mexican, so I've been exposed to Spanish through them quite a lot,” she explains.

In terms of Irish residents on the Costa del Sol, Wall highlights the diversity of the local community.

“The typical profile of retirees is still very much there. However, I've met a lot of people who've come here as a lifestyle change and are able to work as digital nomads or have decided to set up companies here,” says Wall, citing the recently formed Malaga chapter of the Spanish-Irish Business Network as an example of the variety of profiles.

“I've met a lot of the younger community, working in tech, teachers, people working for themselves in different sectors: graphic design, things like that,” she adds.

The new consul has also had the chance to get to know the younger Irish community through the GAA Gaelic football club in Malaga, who play against teams in Marbella, Seville and Gibraltar.

When it comes to the day-to-day work at the new consulate general, Wall explains that by far their most common task is to deal with cases of lost or stolen passports. “We receive people on a daily basis to have that sorted out,” she explains, “but that's very straightforward”.

“There are other consular cases that take up a lot of staff members' time: organising a medical evacuation if someone is hospitalised, dealing with deaths, sexual assault, mental health cases, child welfare, that type of thing,” Wall continues.

“I know especially from the thanks that we receive that it is something that's really appreciated by citizens often in their time of greatest need. They're abroad, something terrible happens, and they don't know where to turn. We can't take away the problem, but we can just support a person, or a family, as best we can through a difficult time, and relieving some of that administrative burden when these kinds of things happen is an important role.”

Marylee Wall is keen to stress another role of the consulate general: “It's a priority for Ireland to promote our culture and keep it alive around the world,” she explains.

Wall mentions some of the Irish people who played an important role in the history of the city, such as artist George Campbell and army officer Robert Boyd, who was shot on a Malaga beach for his support of General Torrijos' insurrection against the absolutism of King Ferdinand VII.

The consul points out how the local cultural calendar includes events such as Bloomsday, when people read excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses, but the annual St Patrick's Day festivities are by far top of everyone's list when it comes to Irish celebrations.

“I hope for Saint Patrick's Day we'll have dancers and other cultural events,” she says, mentioning some of the celebrations already organised on the Costa del Sol, such as the parade in Benalmádena.

And St Patrick's in 2027 almost runs into Semana Santa, culminating a full, successful and exciting first year for Marylee Wall in Malaga.