Obama for Ireland

St Patrick’s Day put Ireland back in the spotlight, for good reasons, and the presidential visit will raise the spirits even higher. Peter Cheney sums up the 2011 trip.

“Miracles do happen,” declared a buoyant Taoiseach, addressing his most powerful counterpart in the East Room a week after calling at the Áras. “One week in office” was enough for God to make the world and “if we keep this up, Ireland will be great again inside a very short time.”

Clinching a full day in the president’s diary is a major ask for anyone, yet Ireland fills it with an almost ordinary regularity.

Diplomats from other small countries regularly spectate at St Patrick’s Day in Washington, wondering how they can earn that access. An island of 6.3 million people, roughly the same population as

Paraguay, annually charms a superpower of 307 million citizens.

This was a much lower key occasion than last year, when the focus was very much on the North’s justice devolution. Crises in Japan and Libya were looming. And leaner times meant a leaner trip, as seen in the smaller numbers jetting to Washington.

In warm tones, Obama remarked how he could not imagine “a better place to be than right here with the sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who wish they were” and recalled “just how many strands of green are woven into our American story.”

On an Irish visit in 1845, anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass “quickly found common ground with the people locked in their struggle against oppression.” A friendship was struck up with Daniel O’Connell, who taught him how “change could be achieved peacefully through rule of law.”

There was no better time for Enda Kenny to take office. A quip that “never has a single apostrophe meant so much to so many” went down well while, on a somber note, he contrasted the Irish famine emigration “to freedom” with the African crossing “to slavery”. St Patrick “came to redeem the soul of a people” yet was himself a slave.

The presidential visit would co-incide with the start of Bealtaine, the feast of the bright fires, Kenny mused.

Britain is also anticipating the Obamas on 24-26 May and for practical reasons, the Irish tour is expected either side of that. Queen Elizabeth is also likely to make her arrival in Ireland, making the month doubly historic. Final dates had not been confirmed at the time of going to press.

The North looks set to miss out, but has had more than its fair share of stops: three by Clinton and two by Bush.

Having an official visit means fewer trimmings than a state one and more time to stop at Moneygall, and perhaps Kilkenny, Mayo or Cork, as far as the schedule allows. It will also undermine the myth, believed by many American conservatives, that Obama is Muslim.

His ancestral connection, through shoemaker’s son Fulmuth Kearney, was uncovered by Church of Ireland rector Stephen Neill in 2007, and prompted Brian Cowen to formally invite the President. The former Taoiseach, now a private citizen, does not expect a formal role on the day but will no doubt be following the preparations.

As always, it was a night for oratory and sentiment but sentimentality can only get you so far. Ireland was America’s gateway to Europe, he reminded the White House audience.

Kenny had met Vice-President Joe Biden, his most strategic Irish-American contact, at breakfast and would later confer with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Elsewhere, Eamon Gilmore held his first meeting with Hillary Clinton with the State Department press office titling the Labour leader as ‘his excellency’.

Gilmore and Clinton discussed the Irish economic situation, immigration reform and the Middle East crisis. For her part, Clinton’s travel plans were unpredictable but she loved to be in Ireland “under any circumstances”. As Gilmore looked on smiling, she concluded that this was a “very good news story” in a time of “very big challenges”.

The Tánaiste concurred, by telling reporters how this was a “huge vote of confidence in Ireland”. In times like this, Ireland needs its friends and none love Ireland as much as Americans.

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