Worrying times when the wrong man is at the helm

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’ve been to a few places in my time, but only once to America, and then my visit was largely confined to New York, but it is a fascinating country from its huge urban conglomerates to the more peaceful beat of slow-moving country life.  It’s a country full of contrasts from climate to riches and poverty, where often the space in the middle is quite thinly populated, but it’s a country indelibly linked to the fortunes of Ireland and a destination that absorbed large swathes of our population during times of famine and poverty.

America is often regarded as the ‘policeman of the world’ and while they mightn’t have exactly covered themselves in glory in places like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, at times they do produce a little reassurance when we see at firsthand the threat of more extreme fundamentalist groups and nations.

We have often had a kind of old-fashioned grá for US presidents and especially since the time JFK (John Fitzgerald Kennedy) visited our shores and traced his Irish roots. We positively fattened on it.

I remember as a very young boy being brought into Eyre Square in my father’s Ford Anglia car to see a cavalcade pass by. I’d love to say that I remember seeing JFK’s face but all I can recall is a few big cars passing by surrounded by burly men in light-coloured suits and led by a convoy of motorbikes.

That date was Saturday, June 29, 1963, but less than five months later, on Friday, November 22, 1963, nearly everyone in Ireland over the age of three of four years, remembers where they were when they heard the news that JFK had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Probably no other US President captured the hearts of the Irish people in the same way JFK did and that’s understandable given his Irish background but since then, American presidents have always enjoyed high enough popularity ratings in Ireland from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

It was never, though, a blind loyalty and back in the Summer of 1984 the then Bishop of Galway, the late Eamonn Casey, was involved in a local anti-Ronald Reagan demonstration because of the US policies in Central America and the murder of Archbishop Romero in San Salvador. Our current President, Michael D. Higgins, was never behind-the-door either in highlighting what he saw as grave injustices in US foreign policy.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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