THERE'S nothing like getting back to your home ground or at least somewhere close to it.
Last weekend I took a trip to my native County Wexford. It wasn't to Enniscorthy, my place of birth, but to New Ross which is about half-an-hour's drive away. Each town has a special history. Enniscorthy featured in the 1798 rebellion and was one of the few locations outside Dublin to take part in the 1916 Rising.
New Ross is the birthplace of Michael O'Hanrahan (1877-1916), journalist and novelist, who took part in the Rising in Dublin and was executed the day after Patrick Pearse. I remember how extracts from one of his novels, 'A Swordsman of the Brigade', were read aloud in my English class at school: not for political reasons but because it was so well-written. It’s the story of a participant in the Irish Brigade, composed of Irish exiles, which was part of the French Army from 1690 until 1791.
He wasn’t the only person with a New Ross connection who made a mark in the world. President John F Kennedy was a great-grandson of a young man from just outside the town who left famine-stricken Ireland for the USA in October 1848. Aged 25 at the time, Patrick Kennedy didn’t live the American dream and died in poor circumstances in Boston on November 22, 1858, the same month and day that JFK was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. John's brother Bobby was shot dead on June 1968 as he campaigned for the presidency, but another brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, lived to the age of 77 and played a significant role in the Northern Ireland peace process, as did their sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, who was US Ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to ’98 and died two years ago at the age of 92.
There’s a colour photo of the three brothers smiling broadly on the wall at St Michael’s Theatre in New Ross. Five months before his death, President Kennedy came to the town as part of his four-day visit to Ireland and of course received an ecstatic reception. The Kennedy Summer School takes place annually at St Michael’s and in the nearby JFK Memorial Park & Arboretum. It has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, bringing back boyhood memories of seeing the president whizzing by in a state car during his famous visit and later meeting Ted Kennedy and his sister Jean on numerous occasions in my capacity as a journalist.
This year’s speakers included Bertie Ahern who, in an address to the school the day after Queen Elizabeth’s death, gave an insider’s account of the monarch’s Irish state visit in May 2011. Preparations were going on for years and he described a conversation with Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace after the Good Friday Agreement where she said she had been to Australia 21 or so times, but never to the Republic of Ireland and she wanted to go there. A draft programme put together by the Irish government included numerous suggestions, with the Garden of Remembrance tactfully placed well down the list but that was the one the queen prioritised above all the others. It was the highlight of her four-day trip when she bowed her head at the garden as a mark of respect to those who had fought and died for Irish freedom and she also laid a wreath with President McAleese.
It should be mentioned that the two heads of state also visited the Islandbridge memorial to the 49,400 Irish soldiers who died in World War One. Ahern revealed that Martin McGuinness expressed regret to him that Sinn Féin had abstained from participating in the visit, but in June the following year he famously shook hands with Queen Elizabeth at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. I was waiting in the street with my notebook when it happened and it was a measure of the political risk McGuinness was taking that he said on the way out: “I’m still a republican!”
I once met John Kennedy Jr, son of JFK, who tragically died in a plane crash along with his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette, in July 1999. His third birthday took place on the same day as his father’s funeral and many of us remember the little boy’s charming salute as the casket was carried out of St Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington DC. It was good at the weekend to see his sister Caroline, now US Ambassador to Australia, reminiscing about the queen on the BBC1 programme, ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’. Despite all setbacks, the Kennedys go on forever.
Email: Ddebre1@aol.com; Twitter: @DdeBreadun
