Remembering JFK … 3 … Caps over walls

On Nov. 22, 1963, The Irish Press featured a front-page story about U.S. President John F. Kennedy … but not what you are thinking. Published before the assassination in Dallas, the story reported how JFK cited Irish writer Frank O’Connor the day before to promote the U.S. space program.

In his 1961 autobiography, “An Only Child,” O’Connor wrote of how, as a boy, he and his companions would toss their caps over orchard walls, leaving them with no alternative but to scale the barriers, no matter how high or formidable.

In his Nov. 21, 1963, speech in San Antonio, Texas, Kennedy said: “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they must be overcome.” Read and listen to the full speech.

The Press story quoted O’Connor as saying it was “a very brilliant use of the quotation.”

A week later, amid ongoing coverage of the assassination, the Press returned to JFK’s literary interests. A story headlined “Kennedy had library of Irish works” mentioned two titles from his personal collection at the White House: “The Great Hunger,” by Cecil Woodham-Smith, and “The Irish Republic” by Dorothy MacArdle.

Remembering JFK … 2 … Eternal flame(s)

Shortly after being assassinated on 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with an eternal flame. A group of 26 Irish Defense Forces cadets, who traveled to America with Irish President Éamon de Valera, performed a silent drill at the grave site, part of a tribute to Kennedy’s Irish ancestry.

Three years later, in March 1967, Kennedy’s body was re-interred a few feet away with a new flame at the spot now visited by millions of tourists. In June 2013, during celebrations of JFK’s visit to Ireland 50 years earlier, a light from the Arlington flame was carried across the Atlantic and incorporated into the Emigrant Flame memorial a the New Ross quayside, County Wexford.

I was touched to visit both JFK’s grave and the Irish memorial this year.

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Remembering JFK … 1 … St. Stephen church

The 53rd anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is 22 November. I’m posting a few images and words to remember America’s first Irish-Catholic president over the next few days.

I walk past St. Stephen Martyr Catholic Church on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. on my way back and forth to work. JFK was a regular visitor to the church. The parish dates to 1866, the current building to 1961, during Kennedy’s brief administration.

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This memorial plaque is on a pew inside St. Stephen Martyr Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.

Undated photo of Kennedy leaving St. Stephen Martyr on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Undated photo of Kennedy leaving St. Stephen Martyr on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The church opened in 1961, during his term as president.

Supporting books and bookstores in the U.S. and Ireland

UPDATE:

Here are the winners.

ORIGINAL POST:

On our way back from a long, post-election weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my wife and I stopped at Unicorn Bookshop on U.S. Rt. 50, which offers “a full range of secondhand books, everything from the average to the rare.” We walked out with an armful of books, though I couldn’t find any Irish-related titles of interest.

BGE IBA brand mark CMYK blue 2015On 16 November, Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards will announce the winners of this year’s contest at a gala ceremony in Dublin. Established in 2007 by a coalition of Irish booksellers, “the over-riding motivation behind the awards is to celebrate the extraordinary quality of Irish writing, to help bring the best books to a wider readership annually, and to promote an industry under severe competitive pressures,” the contest website says.

Winners are decided by an online web-poll divided into two constituencies, a public vote and a specialist Academy vote, weighted equally and combined to produce the winners. The Academy includes 300 booksellers, librarians, non-shortlisted authors, reviewers, and journalists.

See the shortlist for Fiction Awards in 10 categories, including the Listowel Writers Week Poem of the Year. Nonfiction Awards are being contested in six categories, including cookbook and sport.

 

Trump to continue St. Patrick’s Day tradition at White House

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has invited Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the White House for St Patrick’s Day in 2017, continuing a tradition that dates to 1952. Trump and Kenny spoke with each other for about 10 minutes on 9 November.

“He understands Ireland very well, he was complimentary about the decisions made about the economy here,” Kenny told The Irish Times. “He is looking forward to doing business with Ireland and I asked him specifically about Patrick’s Day, he is looking forward to continuing that tradition over many years.”

Trump owns a golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare, which was “buzzing with activity” the day after his election, the TheJournal.ie reported.

Read my five-part blog series about U.S.-Irish relations at St. Patrick’s Day, which explores 1916, the year of the Rising, and 25-year anniversaries in 1941, 1966 and 1991; plus 1976, the year of the American bicentennial.

Below, watch a U.S. Embassy in Ireland-produced video about the White House shamrock ceremony.

Irish opinion on Trump’s triumph

Here’s a first day sampling of Irish and Irish-American opinion about Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory.

      • On behalf of the Government and the people of Ireland, I am pleased to offer our sincere congratulations to Donald J. Trump on his election as the 45th President of the United States.

Statement by An Taoiseach (Enda Kenny) on the election of Mr Donald J. Trump

  • The republic of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt is now the United Hates of America, held together, insofar as it will hold together at all, by fear and loathing.

Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times.

            • Five areas of immediate concern for Ireland: Undocumented Irish; multinationals; trade; border controls and visa programs; and cross Atlantic relationships.

Philip Ryan in The Irish Independent

            • Why so many Irish Americans voted for Trump? The answer I heard most often was that these voters could stomach [his] flaws because, they believed, Trump would do greater good by “draining the swamp,” that is Washington.

Niall O’Dowd in Irish Central (U.S.)

            • In comparison to Hillary Clinton, who made several visits to Northern Ireland over the past 21 years, Donald Trump is more of an unknown quantity so far as most Stormont politicians are concerned.

BBC NI Political Editor Mark Devenport

            • The election of Donald Trump … is America’s Brexit vote. He is its Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Duterte, wrapped into one unique, grotesque, autocratic form, and, yes, also a cry of despair. But caveat emptor U.S. voters have no idea what they have bought.

“They Know Not What They Do,” editorial in The Irish Times

The entrance of Trump's Doonbeg golf course in County Clare during my July visit.

The entrance of Trump’s Doonbeg golf course in County Clare during my July visit.

Exploring the beauty and history of Irish lighthouses

Ireland is an island, and lighthouses were once essential in preventing shipwrecks along the rocky coast, The New York Times reminds us in a beautiful Travel piece.

“The golden age of lighthouse construction in the country was in the mid-19th century; between the 1830s and 1860s alone over 40 lighthouses were built. They thrived for more than a century, but technology changed and automation spread. In 1997, the Baily in Howth Head, in County Dublin, was the final lighthouse to be automated.”

The story explores how these historic landmarks are finding new life with the help of the Great Lighthouses of Ireland, a tourism trail introduced in 2015 that highlights 12 exceptional examples from all around the island, both sides of the border. Watch their video:

https://youtu.be/C1rVBnDe4u4

On Chicago, baseball, rugby and Irish news coverage

UPDATE:

The “black stain in Irish rugby has been removed,” with a first ever victory over the New Zealand All Blacks in 29 attempts, 40-29, before more than 63,000 in Chicago.

ORIGINAL POST:

The Chicago Cubs’ historic World Series victory, which ended a 108-year championship drought, generated plenty of headlines on Irish media websites. The same was not true in print the last time the team won baseball’s fall classic.

I searched the Irish Newspaper Archive but couldn’t find any Cubs coverage from October 1908. Two days after Chicago’s Series win over Detroit, the Freemans Journal reported on a “big fire” that destroyed a railroad office and corn elevator in the city. A few weeks later, Kilkenny People detailed the sensational  case of a native-born priest who survived being shot twice outside of his Chicago church “by a ruffian whom he was attempting to arrest.”

Most contemporary Irish media coverage of the Cubs’ 10-inning win over Cleveland also included references to the 5 November rugby match between Ireland and New Zealand at Chicago’s Soldier’s Field. The teams have played 28 times over 111 years, with Ireland’s best result a 10-10 draw in 1973. Maybe another championship drought will come to an end.

Meanwhile, Cubs fans can select from plenty of Irish gear at the team’s official MLB shop.

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Belfast boyhood and beyond

Shaun Kelly, global chief operating officer for KPMG International, was born in 1959 and grew up in the Catholic Falls Road section of Belfast during the worst of the Troubles. One of his uncles was shot and killed by the British Army, which mistakenly believed he was holding a gun. Kelly said he didn’t meet a Protestant until he was 19.

“You didn’t realize what you were going through,” he said during a 25 October Irish Network-DC event. “It’s really only when you look back” that the turmoil of the period can be put in perspective.

Shaun Kelly, left, interviewed by journalist Fionnuala Sweeney at Irish Network-DC event 25 October.

Shaun Kelly, left, interviewed by Irish journalist Fionnuala Sweeney.

Kelly attended University College Dublin with the help of a British government scholarship Ironically, it allowed him to continue playing Gaelic football, though he acknowledged being much smaller than the lads from Cork and Kerry. 

“Dublin in the late 1970s was not quite third world, but it was still developing,” Kelly said. “The cars and roads were not as good as in Northern Ireland.”

Kelly qualified as an accountant in Ireland and joined KPMG in 1980, soon relocating to the firm’s San Francisco office. His tenure included a return to Belfast during an upsurge of violence in the 1990s. At the time, KPMG managed the Europa Hotel, known as the most bombed hotel in Europe.  

After one of those bombings, Kelly said he discussed the possibility of shuttering the operation with hotel staff. They would hear none of it. “The IRA didn’t close this hotel, some short accountant is not going to close it,” Kelly quoted one of the workers saying to him.

His global travels and experiences with his native city have convinced him that economic development helps reduce violence by creating opportunities on both side of the sectarian divide. He acknowledged that Brexit will challenges both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

“That border makes no sense from a business perspective,” he said. “There is much more to be gained from an open economy.”

Here’s a more lengthy profile of Kelly from the October/November 2015 issue of Irish America.   

John Kerry receives Tipperary International Peace Award

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has received the 2015 Tipperary International Peace Award in recognition of his efforts to end conflicts in several global hot spots.

The south central Republic of Ireland town and county was internationally associated with war because of the song “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” according to a history of the organization. In 1983, the founding committee of the Tipperary Peace Convention felt it was time that Tipperary should be known for peace.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Irish Foreign Minister Charlie Flanagan address reporters at the Aherlow House Hotel in Tipperary.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Irish Foreign Minister Charlie Flanagan address reporters at the Aherlow House Hotel in Tipperary.

Kerry, who lost a 2004 bid for the U.S. presidency, joins past recipients such as former Irish President Mary McAleese; U.S. diplomat to Northern Ireland Richard Haas; Good Friday Agreement broker and former U.S. Senator George Mitchell; the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy; and Irish musician Bob Geldof.

In remarks, Kerry said Brexit must not impact the push for peace in Northern Ireland, and also announced the expansion of a one-year internship program for Irish J1 students in America, RTÉ reported.