Head of State
Given that a head of state sends a letter of credence to a fellow head of state, the converse is true also. The person who sends a letter of credence is by implication a head of state (unless they are acting as the representative or designate of a head of state; for example, a governor-general). This became a source of dispute in independent Ireland from December 1936 to the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, when from 1937 to 1949 Ireland had both a President of Ireland and King George VI, who had been proclaimed King of Ireland. Given that under the External Relations Act the role of representing Ireland in the accreditation of ambassadors belonged to the King of Ireland on the advice of the Irish government, between those years the Irish head of state was unambiguously the King of Ireland. After April 1949, when that role was given by law to the President of Ireland, the President became Irish head of state.
In 2005, Canada changed its Letter of Credence and Letter of Recall by removing all references to Elizabeth II as Queen of Canada, Canada's head of state, instead having them run in the name of the Governor General, who is the Queen's representative. Australia and New Zealand have since followed suit, in consultation with Elizabeth II's Private Secretary. There is currently a movement to reverse these decisions by the Monarchist League of Canada.
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Famous quotes containing the words head of, head and/or state:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice or wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“When the Revolutionaries ran short of gun wadding the Rev. James Caldwell ... broke open the church doors and seized an armful of Watts’ hymnbooks. The preacher threw them to the soldiers and shouted, “Give ‘em Watts, boys—give ‘em Watts!””
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)