White House furnace shock for shamrock

PRESIDENT Barack O’bama received the traditional bowl of shamrock yesterday to mark St Patrick’s Day, but if you thought the leader of the free world might add it to his garden patch, forget it.

Despite First Lady Michelle Obama starting work on a White House vegetable garden a year ago, our shamrock won’t be making the cut.

Instead, once passed to the President, it is swiftly taken away and plunged into a furnace, presumably by a cabal of CIA security staff legging it through the White House in the style of 24’s Jack Bauer.

The shamrock meets such a swift end because of security regulations which state that any food, drink or plant presented to the President be “handled pursuant to Secret Service policy”.

It may seem an unjustly blunt end to a journey which has seen it pass from field to Taoiseach and o’er the ocean to Washington, but the humble shamrock is in good company: over the years all sorts of divine edibles and exotic plants have been consumed by flames at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At least the President gets to keep the bowl and there have been a few unlikely uses for those over the years.

Ronald Reagan used one of his Waterford Crystal bowls to hold jelly beans.

The humble origins of the shamrock-giving ceremony back in 1952 saw then-Irish Ambassador to Washington, John Joseph Hearne, go to the White House only to find President Harry Truman was out. The ambassador had to leave the shamrock and be on his way.

The attitude of White House residents towards the shamrock ceremony was summed up when George W Bush’s scriptwriter, Matthew Scully, revealed that writing those March 17 platitudes was almost as dreaded a chore as penning the State of the Union address.

At least President Bill Clinton liked his shamrock. The green stuff may have been incinerated just minutes after he received it, but the bowls were kept and proudly displayed in the White House.

Quite what happened to his collection of green ties is unknown.