Samantha Power pays tribute to Cork mother with 'Dancing Queen' pick on Desert Island Discs
Samantha Power visiting Mount Anville Secondary School in Goatstown, Dublin, in 2017.
Every week on Desert Island Discs Lauren Laverne of BBC Radio 4 asks guests what eight songs they would take with them if they were to be trapped on a desert island.
This week features former US Ambassador to the UN and proud Irish woman Samantha Power, who is quick to bring up her roots, dedicating her first song choice, Dancing Queen by ABBA, to her mother Vera.
“This is a song that just reminds me so much of my beloved mother who grew up in Cork City, the daughter of a policeman. She longed to become a doctor when she was a kid and was deterred from pursuing medicine because she was a girl. But in her mid-twenties went back and got her medical degree. Talk about intense. But amid that intensity [there is] just this joy, this desire to dance,” Power tells Laverne.
Power was born to Irish parents in London in 1970 but spent her early years in Dublin. She moved to the US with her mother and brother when she was nine years old and worked hard to get rid of her Dublin accent to fit in at school, little of which can be detected today.
Her mother, Dr Vera Delaney, is a nephrologist (kidney specialist) and former emergency room doctor who graduated from the University of London as well as University College Cork, the same college that would present her daughter with an honorary degree years later. Power credits her mother’s closeness to her patients for her empathy and ability to connect with others.
Dr Delaney is also an avid sports fan and former hockey and champion squash player, with Power saying the only time she saw her mother sit still was watching a match. “Sitting cross-legged, face-pressed up to the TV, as she would urge me never to do, watching every point of every match that was broadcast in Ireland,” Power laughs.
She has previously told of her mother’s “brazenness”, explaining how as a young woman on the pitch, she’d want to watch as her bloodied knees were stitched up.
Dr Delaney fell in love with her boss, Dr Edmund Burke, who is also Irish, after her first marriage to Power’s father fell apart. The couple are married and now live in Yonkers, New York, where she is an Assistant Professor at the renowned Mount Sinai Hospital.
As a child, Power was also close with her father, Jim Power, a Dublin dentist. The family was separated, however, due to her father’s troubles with alcoholism. Divorce wasn’t an option at the time, and Dr Delaney moved her kids to Pittsburgh and later to Atlanta in 1979.
Power was devastated when the news of his death came at aged 14. On a trip to Ireland in later years a bartender in his favorite pub, Hartigans in Dublin, told her that his drinking had significantly increased when the family left.
“As my mother’s career and as her sporting conquests progressed, I think he began to feel a little shut out or a little left behind and he had always been a straightforward Irish drinker, someone who liked to go to the pub,” Power says.
“I was his sidekick. Probably between the ages of three and nine I’d have been there with him with my Fanta and Planters peanuts. At the time it was the only environment I really knew.”
Power hadn’t seen her father in five years when he died and was unable to attend the funeral. She dedicated a Cat Stevens song to him for her next disc choice, citing her fond memories of watching him play the piano as a child. ‘Morning Has Broken’ was also the song she walked down the aisle to at her Waterville, Co Kerry wedding.
Another noteworthy choice was ‘Thousands Are Sailing'' by her favorite band, The Pogues. “It's a song about immigration, coming across that big Atlantic ocean, the hardship of coming to a new land, a longing for what you've left behind, and the determination to dance,” she says.
Her other choices were influenced by the Bosnian war, racial injustice, her husband, and her eight-year-old daughter, Rían. For her castaway book, the mother of two chose her friend Colm Tóbín’s .
The 50-year-old has an impressive CV. Starting out as a sports reporter and then war correspondent after graduating from Yale University, she went on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book before becoming a policy advisor for Barack Obama. She was appointed to her diplomacy role in 2013, the youngest ever to take up the position, and held it until 2017.
She is also a professor at Harvard University and has been chosen by President Biden to run the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“I don’t have a middle gear,” Power says. “I certainly love music, I love sport, I love to dance. I may be intense in how I do all of those things to a fault but there’s a lightness that comes with not taking myself too seriously.”
- Dancing Queen: ABBA
- Morning Has Broken: Cat Stevens
- Thousands Are Sailing: The Pogues
- Crazy: Seal
- Boots of Spanish Leather (cover): Mandolin Orange
- Why? (The King Of Love Is Dead): Nina Simone
- Alexander: A Million Years
- LUXURY ITEM: A Guitar
- BOOK CHOICE: The Irish Times Book of Favourite Irish Poems by Colm Tóibín
- CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Tonight Will Be Fine by Teddy Thompson
