Ray Bassett is a former Irish diplomat. Bassett was born in Dublin and attended O'Connell School and Trinity College Dublin. At the latter, he earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1979. He served as an ambassador from Ireland to Canada, Jamaica, and the Bahamas and joint Secretary to the British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference in Belfast before retiring in October 2016. He is the senior fellow for EU affairs at the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange. He is also the author of Brexit: Options for the Border and Brexit and the Border. In 2020 Bassett published a book, Ireland and the EU Post Brexit, which was sharply critical of Ireland's former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Bassett noted that Varadkar 'had done everything in his power to thwart the democratic outcome in the UK [the Brexit vote