Book Review: deconstructing the relationship between Ireland and The White House
US president Joe Biden’s Irish connections are impeccable. ‘Irishness,’ as the author tells us, ‘is baked into his identity.’ Picture: Susan Walsh/AP
- The Green and the White House
- Lynne Kelleher
- Black & White Publishing, £17.99
WHEN it comes to American Presidents, the alacrity with which we seek to embrace them as “our own” never ceases to amaze me. Richard Nixon was a criminal, Ronald Reagan was a charlatan (both were guilty of crimes against humanity), yet we’re never happy until we can establish their Irish “links” and lineage.
Reagan funded the Contras in central America - death squads who murdered priests, nuns, teachers and labour activists just because they had left-wing sympathies - yet we rolled out the red carpet when he came here in 1984.
I was part of the Irish Press team of reporters who covered his visit to Ballyporeen, and this included a protest march. In fairness to Lyne Kelleher, in this meticulously researched book she doesn’t skip over this, noting the “hostile demonstrations” against the Reagan visit and the “calculated snubs from the Catholic hierarchy”.
The darling of all the US Presidents, of course, from an Irish viewpoint, was John F Kennedy, who came here in 1963 just months before Dallas, yet for all his sentimentality about the “ould sod”, he did precious little for this country.
All that said, Ms Kelleher is to be commended for the thoroughness of her research, and for having shaped all of it into a very readable, informative and entertaining package. She tells us that her interest in Irish-American presidents was sparked when her first job out of journalism college was to help escort the former US ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, around the byroads of Co. Limerick. And it has paid off handsomely.
I really thought we were overreaching ourselves when Barack Obama became the 44th President of the US, not least because he was born in Hawaii, and was black. When I first learned that the search was on for his Irish ancestry, I thought “This is utterly ridiculous”.
Well, I was wrong. The link between Barack Obama and Moneygall in Co.Offaly was genuine. On 3 May 2007 ancestry.com issued a press release to virtually every news agency in the world which confirmed that baptism and probate records linking the Obama family line back to Moneygall had been unearthed.
In many ways, the chapter on Obama is the best in the book, not least because he was such a class act. “My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way,” he said when he visited his ancestral home in May 2011. Even the silver-tongued JFK would be hard pressed to match that.
Joe Biden’s Irish connections are impeccable. “Irishness,” as the author tells us, “is baked into his identity.” And she illustrates this with a nice story.
“As Joe Biden made his way through a crowded corridor during the 2020 election campaign, BBC’s New York correspondent, Nick Bryant, shouted out: ‘Mr Biden, a quick word for there BBC?’ Without missing a beat, the president looked around and answered: ‘The BBC - I’m Irish . . .’ before flashing a cheeky grin.” This shows in other ways too. “James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats . . . the list goes on. Lines from his favourite poets find their way into Joe Biden’s speeches in the most surprising of places.”
Biden’s commitment to safeguarding the Good Friday Agreement illustrates the importance of the special bond between Ireland and US Presidents, beginning with Jimmy Carter. “It was Carter, not Kennedy or even Nixon, who is credited with becoming the first US president to set out America’s interest in resolving the turmoil in Northern Ireland,” Ms Kelleher reminds us.
In his foreword, Sean Donlan, former Irish ambassador to Washington, emphasises the on-going political importance of the White House connection.
Irrespective of my personal reservations about some US Presidents, this is without question the best book so far on the special link between Ireland and the White House.
