O’bama earns the apostrophe, but green tie was for Chicago. Full stop
Standing beside the president was Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. He was not wearing any green.
“Conrad didn’t get the memo!” the president joked. It was a normal working day in Washington. An American president could go a whole year without hearing about Ireland, but for one day each year Irish-Americans make themselves felt with major St Patrick’s Day parades in places like Boston, New York, Savannah, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Obama’s power base was in Chicago, so he is aware of the political influence of the Irish-American lobby, but nobody should confuse that with Ireland’s influence. It was significant that when they met for the now traditional handing over of the bowl of shamrock, Obama mispronounced the Taoiseach’s surname.
This might have indicated a lack of proper preparation for the meeting, but he did mention that he and the Taoiseach had something in common.
“He hails from Co Offaly and it was brought to my attention on the campaign that my great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side came to America from a small village in Co Offaly as well,” the president said. “We are still speculating on whether we are related.”
At a lunch in Congress, hosted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Obama returned to the theme of his Offaly connections. “When I was a relatively unknown candidate for office, I didn’t know about this part of my heritage, which would have been very helpful in Chicago. So I thought I was bluffing when I put the apostrophe after the O. I tried to explain that ‘Barack’ was an ancient Celtic name.”
“Taoiseach,” Obama continued, “I hope our efforts today put me on the path of earning that apostrophe.” I wonder if anyone told him the Irish Examiner gave him the apostrophe in its front page headline next morning?
For the first time ever the water in the White House fountain was dyed green, just as they dye the river in Chicago each year. But this was not done to make the Taoiseach feel at home; it was a gesture for the Irish-Americans invited to Washington to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.
From the Irish standpoint, the appointment of Dan Rooney as the new US ambassador to Ireland was much more significant not because he is the owner of the Superbowl champions, the Pittsburgh Steelers, but because he was the co-founder of the American Ireland Fund. He, like many Irish emigrants and their descendants, has demonstrated a real interest in helping this country.
Each year around St Patrick’s Day there is a chorus of gripes about the exodus of politicians going abroad. But the occasion affords enormous opportunities for publicity to promote Irish interests. It is often said there are only two kinds of people in the United States on St Patrick’s Day — the Irish and those who wish they were Irish.
Other American presidents had even closer connections to Ireland than John F Kennedy. Andrew Jackson’s parents were from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, James Buchanan’s father was born in Rathmelton, Co Donegal, and Woodrow Wilson’s grandfather, James Wilson, was from Strabane, Co Tyrone.
Like Obama, James K Polk, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland, Chester Arthur, William McKinley, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all claimed distant Irish ancestry. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had an Irish grandmother from Kerry, but she was not apparently proud of it.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was proud to highlight his Irish connections, as did a number of his international contemporaries in the 1990s, such as Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada. James Brendan “Spud” Bolger, —the prime minister of New Zealand from 1990 to 1997 — was the son of Irish emigrants. His parents left Wexford following their marriage in the 1930s. In fact, his Gorey-born mother was alive throughout his premiership.
In nearby Australia, Prime Minister Paul Keating traced his ancestry to Co Galway. His predecessor, Bob Hawke, also claimed Irish blood. Hawke said when he arrived in Shannon in 1981 that he felt as if he had come home.
“Bob Hawke is nowhere near as Irish as I am,” Keating told the Dáil when he visited here in September 1993. “If Bob felt at home, it must be I never left.”
That political leaders should vie with each other in claiming Irish ancestry should be recognised as a national resource. We should be making the best of it.
Within a fortnight of stepping down as president of France, Charles de Gaulle visited this country for an extended holiday. It was his first visit and he surprised many people by announcing he was happy to be here in the country of his maternal ancestors, the MacCartans. His great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was a MacCartan from Co Down. Her father or grandfather was actually killed in the Battle of the Boyne. When people talk about the Irish on St Patrick’s Day, all too many speak about us in terms synonymous with fighting and drinking. Those fractious and inebriated images really belong to a bygone era — a highly depressed period in which our people were not only economically backward, but also grossly exploited and largely uneducated.
There is now much of which the Irish-Americans can be justifiably proud. Now when Americans talk about “The Fighting Irish” it usually has an educational dimension, for it is the nickname of the University of Notre Dame, which has arguably the most famous college football team in the United States.
SAINT Patrick’s Day affords our politicians a tremendous opportunity to promote this county and what we have to offer to the world because the day has long been important to Irish emigrants and their descendants. We should support the ministerial visits as means of cementing and promoting ties with the Irish diaspora.
Obama may not give two hoots about Ireland, but he cares about what Irish-Americans think. The next presidential election is almost four years away, but if he is a politically shrewd as he appears, he is already campaigning for re-election. Of the 37 different US presidents in the last 170 years, just nine won re-election after four years in office, and only three of those — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton — were Democrats.
Obama clearly recognises that the support of Irish-Americans will be important.
“May we govern with the hindsight to know where we’ve been, the insight to know where we are, and the foresight to know where we are heading,” the president said in what sounded like some kind of Irish prayer.
At that moment I couldn’t help thinking Brian Cowen was like Christopher Columbus. He started out as Taoiseach not knowing where he was going, nor where he was when he got there. Yet he wants us to believe he is going to lead us out of the present morass.
For more than 10 months he and his Government have been floundering around without any indication that they really understand where they have led us, much less show the foresight to lead us out of it. Now is the time to show real leadership.
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