UK’s Vatican Ambassador celebrates his Galway roots

Date Published: 24-Feb-2010

The UK Ambassador to the Holy See may have seemed an unlikely guest to mingle among the 120 people who gathered to celebrate the golden wedding jubilee of Sonny and Kathleen Killarney of Ryehill, Monivea.

But according to his fiercely proud aunt Kathleen, Francis Campbell has never had any airs or graces despite his illustrious career as private secretary to Tony Blair followed by his appointment as emissary to the Vatican, the first Catholic to hold the position since the Reformation.

“He’s so friendly, so nice, so simple. He’d shake anyone’s hand. That’s what I like about him. I used to say the same to my lads. If you come home with a degree, come home they way ye were.”

The only girls of the Cosgrove family of six from Briarfield, Ballinasloe – Kathleen and the ambassador’s mother Brigid – were identical twins.

They would cut quite a picture during their many outings to the races around the province, with their long auburn hair and looks that nobody could tell apart. Brigid, an asthmatic, died aged just 60 nearly 14 years ago.

Sadly it was before her son was inaugurated to the plum diplomatic post by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

The young Francis would come from their home in Rathfriland, near Newry, with his three brothers on summer holidays to Monivea.

Their father Dan was forced to leave the family farm because of the shortage of work and sectarian violence and find work in the mines in Canada.

For 17 years, he would return for a few weeks just once every year or 18 months.

The ambassador, his father and his three brothers all turned up for the party last Saturday at the Salthill Hotel, the place where Kathleen and Sony used to dance every Thursday for 20 years.

Despite his heavy schedule since joining the Foreign Office, he has always managed a few days with his aunt every year to visit Salthill and the Poor Clares in Nuns Island, the places that his mother used to take him.

“We all call him ambassador, but he just laughs at you. He loved it here as a child. He always speaks of everyone here as family.”

For full story see this week’s Connacht Tribune