It is 40 years since President John F. Kennedy visited Ireland, the homeland of his ancestors. Joe Carroll looks back at an event that entranced the nation.
Nine days before he was due to arrive in Ireland, President Kennedy asked the Irish ambassador in Washington, T.J. Kiernan: "How are things in Ireland?" Kiernan replied: "Public enthusiasm is working up towards hysteria."
He found Kennedy in "an unusual state of irritation and nervousness" and when he told him that partition would be raised during the forthcoming visit, "the president looked as if another headache had struck him".
The meeting did not augur well for the eagerly awaited first official visit to Ireland of an American president. Kennedy was even worrying over what to wear at the garden party that President de Valera was giving for more than 2,000 guests.
"He seemed most anxious to avoid the formality of morning dress or striped pants and short black coat," says Kiernan. "He would prefer a dark suit, but could not go like that if his hosts were more formally dressed."
Kiernan said he would fix it, but what to wear at the Áras garden party was to dog the visit because of the sticklers for protocol.
By the time Kennedy, followed by the White House press corps, flew into Dublin Airport at 7.56 p.m. on Wed- nesday, June 26th, 1963, normal life had come to a halt, and Ireland was on a high which had not been experienced since the Eucharistic Congress 31 years earlier. The triumphant homecoming of a young president, whose great-grandfather had left Co Wexford to escape the horrors of the Famine 115 years before, had gripped the national imagination.
What Kennedy had first planned as a visit of 36 hours would now stretch over four days and bring him to Dublin, Wexford, Galway, Cork, Limerick and Shannon - but he was to love every minute of it. His White House aide and, later, biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, was to write that Ireland was "a blissful interlude of homecoming, at once sentimental and ironic. I imagine that he was never easier, happier, more involved and more detached, more completely himself" than during his days in the land of his ancestors.
Kennedy arrived in Ireland on a high himself. He had just captured the imagination of a world in the grip of the Cold War with his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in a divided German capital. It was going to be hard for Ireland to match this.
The crowds who lined the route from the airport, waving their stars and stripes, took to the handsome, tanned Kennedy with shouts of welcome and appreciation. "Welcomed like a homecoming hero" proclaimed the next day's headlines.
Kennedy waved back to the crowds while standing in the open Cadillac that crawled at five miles per hour down O'Connell Street, Dublin and around College Green. Reporters noted the enthusiasm of women especially.
"Welcome, Jack" and "Stay with us, Jack", shouted young women from their Dame Street offices. De Valera sat beside the returning hero, beaming at the crowds.
There was no Jackie. She was back in Washington awaiting the birth of her third child. Within months, she was to have a miscarriage and her husband would be dead from assassin's bullets.
But for the next few days, Kennedy was to steal Irish hearts, as he charmed and bantered his way around the endless functions laid on for him. When the occasion demanded dignity and solemnity he played the part equally well, as at Arbour Hill at the graves of the 1916 leaders, and addressing the joint houses of the Oireachtas.
It was a punishing schedule for a man with a bad back and on painkilling drugs. On his first full day in Ireland, he flew by helicopter to New Ross, was driven to the family home for an emotional reunion with his cousins, then to Wexford for more speeches and to be mobbed by the crowds. Next, it was back to Dublin and the Áras garden party, where he was again mobbed, this time by the middle-class matrons and spouses waiting in their finery in the rain. That evening he attended a banquet at Iveagh House, followed by a reception for almost 500 more enthusiastic admirers.
The next day was just as crowded: helicopter to Cork in the morning to be made a Freeman; back to Dublin for lunch with de Valera; wreath-laying at Arbour Hill; to Leinster House to address the joint houses of the Oireachtas; then to Dublin Castle for conferring of degrees by National University of Ireland and Trinity College, followed by the freedom of the city. That night, there was another dinner, this time at Áras an Uachtaráin.
On the last day, it was the helicopter again to Galway, for the freedom of the city at Eyre Square, with more crowds breaking police barriers to mob him. Then he flew on to Green Park racecourse outside Limerick, where the crowds were even more enthusiastic, as he received his fifth freedom of an Irish city.
There were tensions behind the scenes of jubilation, as files now available in the National Archives reveal. The then taoiseach, Seán Lemass, kept a close eye on the preparations. When he saw how the crowds had broken through police lines during Kennedy's German visit, he worried that the same thing could happen in Ireland. He ordered the department of justice, then under Charles Haughey, to review the security arrangements.
Peter Berry, secretary of the department, replied that the main problem would be on the night of the arrival, which turned out to be wrong. Berry wrote that while there could not be "an unqualified guarantee" that there would be no breach of police lines, a senior officer put the risk at 1 per cent. Berry added: "I understand that President Kennedy has been known to boast that on no occasion yet have police precautions anywhere been able to contain the enthusiasm of the crowds."
The assistant Garda commissioner, Patrick Carroll, in his instructions, warned his men that "any laxity could have serious repercussions", as this visit was "perhaps the most important event which has taken place in this country since the establishment of the State". Gardaí were to wear their "best serge uniform", but those who did not have the recent current issue "will be detailed for duty to places away from the presidential route". Lemass continued to fret about suitable dress for the garden party, and wanted the press to be told that Kennedy wished it to be "informal", in case guests would be embarrassed by turning up in formal gear. The invitation had given a choice between "morning dress or lounge suit", in spite of Kennedy's own wish for the latter.
The secretary to the taoiseach, Nicholas O'Nolan, told Lemass that Kennedy would be "unwilling to make such a communication to the press". He would wear "semi-morning dress". This again was wrong.
Kennedy asked for white tie for the Iveagh House dinner and reception, causing problems for guests, as the dress-hire shops did not stock many swallow-tail jackets. The Irish Times editorial writer had fun about "many Irishmen now facing one of the gravest crises in Hibernian sartorial history. Men like Cúchulainn, Brian Bórú, Art McMurrough Kavanagh and Danny Boy have left us a tradition of masculine haute couture, a reputation of daring to be different. Is this to be dashed in the dust by a returned exile?"
Lemass asked for a weather forecast for the period of the visit. He was told that the Met Office expert "was sure at first Thursday would be bad, but there is now some possibility it will be good. For Friday and Saturday, the weather generally is too unsettled to give any view, but he feels that if Thursday is good, Friday will be bad".
The clerk of the Dáil was fussing over the joint sitting of Dáil and Seanad, claiming that it would be unconstitutional. It would be a case where "the two houses are sitting separately but together physically. There is a certain fictional element in this position but it may be legally tenable". The attorney-general had to be called in to make the peace.
Lemass had wanted to have the government confer honorary citizenship on Kennedy, who, when sounded out by Kiernan, was enthusiastic. But this turned out to be not in accordance with the US Constitution, which forbids foreign titles and honours. The plan had to be dropped.
Partition was not raised publicly, to spare Kennedy embarrassment, but it was discussed between him and Lemass, who told his guest that "any form of international pressure would not alter the basic situation". Kiernan had told Dublin in advance that Kennedy is "by education British-inclined" and "makes no secret of his firm attachment to Britain".
The prime minister of Northern Ireland, Capt Terence O'Neill, had made the faux pas of inviting Kennedy to open the new national park at the Giant's Causeway during his Irish visit, without clearing it beforehand. Kennedy turned it down graciously as not being able to fit it into his schedule, but O'Neill was ridiculed by unionists and nationalists alike.
For Kennedy, the visit to the ancestral home in Dunganstown with his sisters, Eunice Shriver (in Dublin this week for the Special Olympics) and Jean Smith, was the emotional high point. As a young member of Congress, he had made a point of going there, when he was staying at Lismore Castle in 1947, for his first meeting with his Irish cousins.
One biographer says that his parents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, had "discouraged Irishness in their children", and that some of them, notably President Kennedy, "would acutely feel the lack of contact with his Irish roots and would make a concerted effort to compensate for it".
To stand as president of the United States in the home which his great-grandfather, Patrick, had to leave to seek a new life in Boston must have been an intensely personal experience for Kennedy. But he covered his emotions with jokes and charm.
On New Ross quay he told the delighted crowds that if his ancestor had not gone to America, he himself might be working in the Albatross fertiliser plant across the way, or sitting in the nearby Kelly's bar, instead of being fêted as the most powerful leader in the world.
He liked to toy with the idea of what he might have been if history had turned out differently. He told the TDs and senators assembled in the Dáil chamber the next day that if Ireland had got independence 100 years earlier, his ancestor might not have left New Ross and "I might be sitting down there with you - but, of course, if your own president had not left Brooklyn, he might be standing up here instead of me".
Kennedy flew from Shannon after telling the crowds: "This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection, and I certainly will come back in the springtime."
Being there: memories of JFK
Brian Farrell, broadcaster
"I remember the visit extremely well. I was doing radio coverage. It was my initiation to live commentary on radio. I was so fortunate to be under the care of Seán Mac Réamoinn, that veteran broadcaster. I remember standing on the roof of the old VIP lounge in the old Dublin Airport and huge numbers of people being there. All of a sudden I saw below us a group of people and a beautiful young man amongst them. He looked so handsome, so young, so welcomed."
Patrick Murphy, chairman of the Arts Council
"My mother shook hands with him and she wrote to me to tell me that she had. I was in Dublin working in Guinness at the time. I remember watching it on TV. It was the year before I got married. We are faintly related to the Kennedys on my mother's side through the Ryans. It was the biggest thing that ever happened in New Ross [where Murphy comes from]. I remember Andy Minihan, chairman of the town council - a great character - as he was introducing him saying the amplification system isn't working - and it was, and everybody heard him. Kennedy made a great speech, and said 'if my ancestors hadn't emigrated I might have been working in the Albatross factory across the river'."
Colm Tóibín, writer
"I must have been eight in 1963. I am from Enniscorthy and I went with my father to Wexford to see Kennedy. We stood on the quays as he came around the corner in an open car. What was astonishing was the quality of his suntan. He was tanned a very deep brown, like he was in technicolour with all the glamour which that implied, and the world around (and indeed our own skin) was black and white, or a more washed and primitive version of colour. I suppose it was before package tours to Spain, but I had never seen anyone that colour before. He waved and smiled. In the afternoon, as he drove to New Ross from Wexford, I have a clear memory of going into someone's house in Wexford and watching the TV and it showing the road from Wexford to New Ross (the ditches, the villages) as he would see it, so that we could see our world but through his eyes. Somehow, that was riveting too."
Síle de Valera, Minister of State
"I was a girl growing up in Dublin and I remember the great excitement in the household. At the lunch in Áras an Uachtaráin, my grandmother was sitting beside Kennedy. There was a rapport between them. She mentioned a poem about Shannon, and he took out an envelope and wrote down the lines as my grandmother recited it. Then he was flown to Shannon by helicopter. He recited it when he arrived, but he got some of it wrong because he couldn't read his own writing. My grandmother got great amusement out of that."
Compiled by Catherine Foley