Michael Walsh has represented the Republic of Kiribati in the UK since 1996 as their Honorary Consul. He talks to Kath Skellon about his dedication to the people of Kiribati, performing in a folk band and life in rural Monmouthshire.

“I was born in 1949, in Singapore, to an Anglo-Irish/Welsh father and an English/Scots mother. My father had just served three years in Japan as part of the post-World War Two occupying forces, with my mother and two sisters joining him later; I was born on their way home.

When I was about 18 months old my father was stationed at Caerleon. We lived in a Nissen hut by the Brecon Canal, as there was no housing. When I was four he was sent to Washington DC as the British Military Attaché.

I didn’t go to school until I was nine: I was taught by my mother because she didn’t trust the American educational system.

In 1956 we came back to the UK. In 1958 my father retired from the army and we went back to live in Ireland; he spent the rest of his career at Dublin University. However I was sent to boarding school in England. My education included three years at Clare College, Cambridge, where I took a degree in Economics.

Whilst I was at Cambridge I went on an expedition to Kurdistan with a group of botanists, which got me interested in the economies of developing countries (as well as in plant hunting). I also played in an Irish folk group called ‘The Maglory Dengluch’. We made an LP record in 1969. In the group the others played guitars and I was the ‘funny instruments man’: banjo, harmonica, tin whistle, a Turkish instrument called the saz, the Applalachian dulcimer, the washboard and the jug.

When I left Cambridge, I applied to the Ministry for Overseas Development and was offered a post in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, a British dependency in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You could say that my career has been downhill ever since, because there I was, aged 22, with the official title Economic Adviser to the Government. I was the first economist ever to be resident there.

The Gilberts became Kiribati (pronounced as Key-ree-bass) on independence. The country is made up of 33 islands, spread out over a distance equivalent to that of London to Moscow to Ankara and Madrid. The islands are individually tiny and in terms of land area the whole of Kiribati is almost exactly the same as that of Monmouthshire. The islands are atolls, and there is nowhere higher than 10 feet above sea level.

Life is utterly different there. The majority of people live off the land, what they catch in the sea, and what few crops will grow there; they make their own houses.

I stayed for five years. It was a really interesting time in the run up to internal self-government and independence. As well as giving day to day advice on policies, projects and budgets, I was instrumental in putting into place a lot of the ‘economic infrastructure’ that has supported them since.

At the time, the Gilberts were regarded as too small and undeveloped to sustain themselves as an independent country. I made common cause with the younger generation of I Kiribati people to dispute this. I also married one of that younger generation, Nei Rotee Tekee, in October 1975; we shall celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary later this year.

I am very proud of Kiribati. They have been independent now for 36 years, and although still poor they have managed their economy well. Unfortunately their capital has got overcrowded and polluted; but when we last went back to Kiribati in March 2014 we spent much of our time up in Rotee’s home village, where life has not changed much in the last 40 years.

In 1976 Rotee and I settled in London, where I worked in the FCO and then for the Crown Agents for Oversea Governments and Administrations, who were the second organisation under Mrs Thatcher’s then new government to be selected for privatisation. I was working as their Strategic Planning Director and so was right at the heart of the privatisation process - at a time when nobody knew quite what it was or how to go about it; interesting times indeed.

I then jumped ship to the private sector and became a management consultant for the rest of my career, specialising in public sector procurement.

In the early 90’s kind people invented the laptop, which meant that I no longer had to go to an office to use a computer (which by then had become an essential part of office life). As a result Rotee and I took our own strategic decision, to move to somewhere we wanted to live, as we hated London. By then we had had three children - a daughter and a son a year apart, and a second daughter six years later.

We chose Monmouthshire, from where one of my great-grandmothers came, as the place where we wanted to settle. We searched for the right house for nearly four years; we must have looked at 50 houses before we found The Great House, where we have lived since 1993. We didn’t start with the intention of buying a house quite as big; and it was on the cusp of being irrecoverable: it had been neglected for 30 years.

We had to buy 15 dustbins to catch rain coming through the roof. It had death watch and other destructive beetles and dry rot was just getting a hold. It was full of rats. In fact by buying it we confirmed everyone’s opinion that we were quite mad. We have been working on the house for 21 years now, and still have ten rooms to restore.

About the same time, in 1996, the third President asked me if I would represent the Kiribati in the UK as an Honorary Consul. Kiribati is too small and poor to afford much overseas representation, and so a small band of us provide it (mostly in Asia and Australasia) on a part time, unpaid basis. I am in fact their only representative in Europe.

Ever since I became Honorary Consul I have kept a list of my notional functions - as defined by the titles to which people write to the Consulate. There are now over 55 of them, ranging from His Excellency the Ambassador (which of course I am not) to various imaginary first, second and third Secretaries, and down to more mundane but equally imaginary officials like the Property Manager and the Car Pool Administrator. My favourite is a Texan company that regularly writes here, to the Air Force Attaché, offering to sell used helicopter parts to the Kiribati Air Force. (There is no Kiribati Air Force).

People also get fazed by the fact that Kiribati is represented from Wales rather than London, but in fact the vast bulk of the workload is by letter, email or phone. Much of it is information giving; I have a bigger postbag than you might expect. In theory I am also the Liaison Office between Kiribati and 42 international organisations. There used to be a lot of visa-issuing but these are no longer required for EU Citizens, so nowadays it is only for the odd Norwegian.

There are also about 50 people of I Kiribati origin in the UK and we have an active association to teach our children and grandchildren about Kiribati culture, especially dance. Rotee has taught them how to perform traditional dances for the last 20 years and their group has performed at prestigious places including Westminster Abbey, the Millennium Dome, and many international festivals.

In time, our own children grew up and went off to university. Our son now lives in London and our two daughters in Bristol, and we now have three grandchildren. All of them come back to Wales whenever they can.

By 2001 I had had enough of big business and resigned in order to set up my own company, with a colleague, which we ran until we sold it in 2009.

However, although nominally retired, we are just as busy as ever with five acres of garden, where we grow our own fruit and vegetables, make wine, and indulge our passion for unusual trees (we’ve planted more than 200 different species). I am fulfilling an ambition to write: family history, a memoir of my time in Kiribati, and possibly a historical novel set in Kiribati at a time of great political disruption and civil war in the 17th century (long before they had been discovered by Europeans).

In 2011 I discovered that someone had bootlegged a copy of the Maglory Dengluch’s 1969 LP and was selling it on Amazon and other outlets (without our knowledge or permission). This prompted us to re-form the group; and we made a second LP, Back from the Dead. Despite the fact we hadn’t played together for four decades it was as if it had been without a break.

I never drive out from The Great House without thinking how very lucky we are to live here. Moving to South Wales was a wise thing to do.”