Obama enjoys the luck of the Irish
Well, the US President pronounced Cowen as Cohen, but that apart, this was a flawless performance.
The jury is still out on whether Obama will be a good commander-in-chief, but he was certainly an amazing campaigner. It was easy to see why yesterday, his natural charisma and warm, easy demeanour very much in evidence.
The Taoiseach, for his part, was honest enough to admit he couldn’t hope to match such star quality.
“The only thing I can say to him is he’s not going to share a slate with me over there [in Ireland], because I can’t compete with this man, even in Offaly,” Mr Cowen quipped as the two men posed for pictures in the Oval Office.
Still, the Taoiseach wasn’t bad at all, his own warm demeanour coming across in a way it often doesn’t back home.
As the two men switched to the Roosevelt Room for the traditional exchange of shamrock following their private meeting, they performed something of a double act, seemingly much at ease in each other’s company.
“It turns out that we have something in common,” the President said of Mr Cowen.
“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 this county as well.
“We are still speculating on whether we’re related,” Mr Obama deadpanned, to laughter from those assembled.
“I just want to say that I have checked, and unfortunately there are no Kearneys on the electoral register anymore in my district,” Mr Cowen responded in a nod to Mr Obama’s ancestor, Falmouth Kearney.
“If there were, I assure you, I’d have them on my campaign.”
But there were sombre moments too during the ceremony, with both the President and the Taoiseach referring to the recent murders of three security officers in the North.
Mr Cowen spoke of the “evil minority” that had challenged the democratic institutions in the North, but said the people had “risen to that challenge” and spoken with one voice to reject violence and division.
Obama said the people of the North had responded “heroically”, adding: “They’ve shown they judge progress by what you build and not what you tear down. And they know that the future is too important to cede to those who are mired in the past.”
After seeing former adversaries in the North mourning, praying and working together following the killings, Obama said he was never more confident “that peace would prevail”.
From that point, he returned to the day’s key focus: it was a day, he said, for America and Ireland “to celebrate our shared history and our shared future” with joy and with cheer.
“So I can’t think of a better place to take the Taoiseach for lunch than Congress,” he quipped, a good-humoured swipe at the partisan nature of the US houses of parliament.
The assembled guests — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator George Mitchell, new US ambassador to Ireland Dan Rooney, Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin and Irish ambassador to the US Michael Collins — cracked up at that one, and Obama also chuckled heartily at his own joke.
“We’ll be heading there shortly for the annual speaker’s St Patrick’s Day luncheon, a tradition in which Democrats and Republicans put aside partisanship and unite around one debate only: who is more Irish than whom?” he added.
“So I thank the Taoiseach in advance for bringing relative peace to Washington for at least this day.”
Mr Cowen, meanwhile, was borrowing Labour leader Eamon Gilmore’s line for his sign-off.
At a labour conference last year, Mr Gilmore adopted Barack Obama’s famous campaign phrase and translated it into Irish.
Mr Cowen gave the President a flavour.
“Mr President, there is a phrase in the Irish language: ‘Is feidir linn’. It may seem familiar. In translates as ‘Yes, we can’.”
Obama tried out the phrase himself. “Is feeder linn,” he said first time round, before nailing it on the second go.
There may just be a bit of Irish in him after all.
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