When JFK Went To Ireland
Ed Curtin, Portland Hibernian, delivered the following words on December 13, 2023 at the Oregon Potato Famine Memorial.
Sixty years ago this past June, less than five months before he was assassinated, President Kennedy journeyed to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, for a homecoming he called “one of the most moving experiences” of his life. Kennedy’s eight great-grandparents all migrated to Boston during the Great Famine, the Great Hunger, of the late 1840s, seeking to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the U.S. – not unlike our own parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and especially the great-greats, who left during those famine years.
In her poem Quarantine, the late Eavan Boland, one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature, described it as “the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people.” William Butler Yeats added: it was a time when “an eerie stillness descended over the land” as a million died and a million more fled.
As for those who emigrated, his ancestors and all of ours, Kennedy spoke the following in Dublin:
“And so it is that our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history. No people ever believed more deeply in the cause of Irish freedom than the people of the United States. And no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony, and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived. They left behind hearts, fields, and a nation yearning to be free. It is no wonder that James Joyce described the Atlantic Ocean as a bowl of bitter tears. And (Irish poet Ethna Carbery) wrote, "They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay."
But today (Ireland) is no longer the country of hunger and famine that those emigrants left behind. It is a free country, and that is why any American feels at home here.
There are those who regard this history of strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use a phrase that Yeats wrote, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. “
See and hear JFK’s 1963 Speech here: