Introduction
Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’m honoured to come here today to celebrate what for so many people on both sides of the Atlantic is the Gathering of The Gathering.
Across the years, across Ireland and so much of the world, ‘Kennedy’ is no longer just a collection of letters, a surname, a word. Instead, the three syllables have become an invocation. One of excitement, possibility, hope. Even today the sound is oracular, optimistic. But, equally, it is elegiac. Kennedy, What if?
The Kennedys were and are more than emigrants, politicians, an Irish-American family. They are an idea that endures and fascinates. President Kennedy said 'A man may die... nations may rise and fall... but an idea lives on'. We see proof that it does not alone today but in weeks just past when as a nation we came together to discuss the memories and legacy of an unforgettable Summer in a fateful year.
All this week, even at the G8 Summit, people talked to me about President Kennedy and his family. Extraordinary people from this ordinary homestead who swapped the nightmare of Irish emigration for the American dream. Here at the Kennedy homestead it’s clear that America and the world’s gain was such a terrible loss for the Albatros Factory and John V Kelly.
When President Kennedy arrived in Ireland in June 1963 even the songs on the radio had it right: 'From Jack to a King... From Me to You... Welcome to my World...'. Coming to us in the long light around the Summer solstice he had what he called the best four days of his life. A gift for which there would be no Thanksgiving. Instead, by what President Johnson announced to America as a "midnight of tragedy", he knew what it really meant to make the journey ‘home’.
This home was once the world for an earlier generation of Kennedys. The private world that gave the public world the Kennedys. It is here the Kennedy children were conceived, born and reared. It’s here the Kennedy stories were told. Memories made. Songs sung.
A Mhuintir Ui Chinneide, leis na blianta thainig sibhse ar ais abhaile go Loch Garman chun ceangal a dheanamh le bhur munitir bhur ait fein. Agus chun greim a choimead ar bhur n-oidhreacht uasal.
Members of the Kennedy clan, for many years now you have come here Ireland and to Wexford to make and keep a connection with your people, your proud heritage.
This is your place. A place you are happy to share. And today, with you, we celebrate its official opening to the public.
When Patrick Kennedy stepped out of this famished country to head for England and the Washington Irving, he could hardly have imagined he was stepping into history. With Ambassadors, Congressmen, Senators, Founder of the Special Olympics, an Attorney General and the 35thPresident of the United States of America all to come, all within the Kennedy issue.
I believe it took a special sensibility, in a special family, to light up the world with what we love and celebrate now as the Special Olympics.
We remember Robert – Bobby - who battled for legislative reform, social justice, equality, civil rights. Here today is Jean Kennedy Smith, ambassador and firm friend, who fought so hard for peace on this island. And we think of Edward – Ted - to whom we in Ireland owe such a debt.
President Obama’s visit to Belfast just a few days ago proves that The work goes on... the hope still lives... the cause endures.... That work, that cause, that hope was seen in everything President Kennedy did and said in those June days 50 years ago.
We are particularly honoured to have with us today, his daughter, Caroline Kennedy. Caroline, on the morning after the election your father wanted to give a signed photo of the President elect to a man who was a close friend of his own father and one of his best and most loyal supporters on the campaign. On the phone and hunting for a pen he came across one of your crayons. And it was with that crayon he signed the photograph cherished by that man and his family. It was a powerful and poignant gesture. Today in the official opening of the Kennedy homestead we reflect on a relationship between two countries that is equally powerful and poignant.
It’s a relationship of ‘hope and history’. One of enduring affection between two nations either side of the Atlantic. Today, the Irish story is writ large across America. Now the torch is passed to a new generation. I ask the young Kennedys to keep that ancestral flame alive and in all they do to honour and deepen the Irish-American connection.
Today, once more, we have an Irish-American in the White House. It is said that the Kennedy name may come from the family of our High King Brian Boru and the Dal Cais. But the man from Moneygall, somewhat unusually, says he’s a cousin of Henry The Eighth. And he knows all about the craic. Like President Kennedy, President Obama is a passionate believer in Ireland and the Irish people. For a while perhaps with our strange and new wealth we lived, in a sense, incognito. If anything, the difficulties from which we are at last emerging reconnected us with who we are, our duty to each other. Our recovery reminds us of our innate nobility, our compassion, our creativity and, above all, our dignity and courage as the Irish people.
Today, in the Kennedy homestead, we can remind ourselves of the young President’s faith and confidence in an ancient nation, a young Republic. ‘That our future is as promising as our past is proud.... that our destiny lies not as a peaceful island in a sea of troubles.... but as a maker and shaper of world peace’.
Just this week, world leaders have been meeting on this island to discuss such making and shaping. President Kennedy’s preoccupations - hunger, malnutrition, war, peace- remain priorities today. He said ‘We have the ability, we have the means, and we have the capacity to eliminate hunger from the face of the earth. We need only the will'. 50 years on the ability, means and capacity endure. Given that today a quarter of the world’s children under five are permanently stunted due to under-nutrition, we must all work harder on ‘the will’.
Ireland has used its Presidency of the European Unionmto to do just that. At our direction the EU will accelerate its efforts to tackle maternal and child under-nutrition, stunting and wasting, and to boost financial support to partner countries. It was vital work. A distinctly ‘human’ and humbling counterpoint to the advanced discussions on budgets and banking.
Today these ‘conversations on a homecoming’ are haunted, and rightly, by the refugee crisis in Syria which could reach 3.5 million men women and children by the end of this year. By the end of last year there were more than 45 million refugees in the world. Literally every time we blink, someone becomes a new refugee or is internally displaced.
For generations in Ireland we were displaced, dispossessed, even disposable. A harrowing reality that sent Patrick Kennedy and millions like him in search of a new life in a new world. They did so in grief, shock, with the memory and trauma of the famine buried deep within them. Townlands of men, women and children starving, landless, homeless, hopeless. Mad from hunger, disease, fever, terror.
As a nation we must never forget. I believe it behoves us, as it does no other nation, to make hunger and displacement matters not of charity but of the witness, the social justice, that are the urgent and enduring agenda of the Kennedy family. Muintir Ui Chinneide.
Your presence here proves the love, the respect, your family has for our people and our country.
The Ireland you visit today is a very different Ireland to that of 1963. On this anniversary we are emerging, slowly but certainly, from difficulty. Just as President Kennedy wanted ‘to show the world what a freeeconomy can do’,we want to show the world what a recoveringeconomy can do.
He said 'Time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or the present, are certain to miss the future'.
With the friendship of the Kennedys, the friendship of America, Ireland will not.
I believe that Ireland has a dazzling future. Yes, like the Kennedys’, Ireland’s agenda is ambitious. Like President Kennedy’s own agenda it is and will always be unfinished.
And so, let us continue to strive ahead.
Ends