Category Archives: Irish America

Pence hit for cross-Ireland commute; Brexit comment

UPDATE:

The entrance of Trump’s Doonbeg golf course in County Clare during my July 2016 visit.

The Doonbeg boondoggle: “Pence’s stay at Trump’s resort reeks of corruption.” Washington Post editorial

“As Pence read from the autocue and Irish eyes definitely stopped smiling, it was clear he was channeling His Master’s Voice. Trump is a fan of Brexit and of Boris.” — Miriam Lord in The Irish Times

ORIGINAL POST:

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is being roundly criticized for spending his two nights in Ireland at the Doonbeg, County Clare, golf resort owned by his boss, U.S. President Donald Trump.

Most of Pence’s business is in Dublin, 180 miles east on the opposite side of the island. In America, this would be like Pence staying in Allentown, Pennsylvania, while he conducted business in Washington, D.C. Cue the Billy Joel classic.

“… the opportunity to stay at the Trump National in Doonbeg, to accommodate the unique footprint that comes with our security detail and other personnel, made it logical,” Pence said, according to Politico.

The bigger story is that Pence (and Trump) appear to be throwing Ireland under the Brexit bus. The Irish Times reported the Veep’s meeting with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar “did not go entirely to plan” as the American leader “made an unexpected intervention … on Brexit that is far from helpful as Ireland enters a crucial period in the those negotiations.”

Varadkar told Pence that Ireland “must stand our ground on the withdrawal agreement, an agreement which was carefully negotiated to overcome all these risks. … And so Mr Vice-President I ask that you bring that message back to Washington with you. This is not a problem of our making.”

Pence refused to take questions from dozens of assembled reporters, The Guardian reported.

U.S. Vice-President Pence signs the guest book at Áras an Uachtaráin. Also shown, left to right, Sabina Higgins, Irish President Micheal D Higgins, and Karen Pence. MAXWELLPHOTOGRAPHY.IE

 

St. Colman’s Cathedral celebrates its centennial

UPDATE:

  • At the centenary Mass, Bishop of Cloyne William Crean said: “One hundred years on an unimaginably different Ireland, Europe and global reality prevails. In the North of Ireland, the ancient divisions have eluded resolution. In the south, a liberal secular world view seeks to suppress the Christian narrative.” Notwithstanding the church’s clergy sex abuse scandals and other challenges, he was confident “the prophets of doom were mistaken” in condemning the church to “a dire future”. Coverage from The Irish Times.
  • Engineers Journal detailed, “The building of St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, 1868-1915“.

ORIGINAL POST:

One of Ireland’s most iconic Catholic churches, St. Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh, has reached its 100th anniversary.

A special Mass will be celebrated Sunday, Aug. 25, by Bishop William Crean, joined by Archbishop Jude Thaddeus Okolo, Apostolic Nuncio, and clergy and parishioners from the 46 parishes of the Diocese of Cloyne in County Cork. Irish composer Bernard Sexton has created special music and hymns for the centenary.

The foundation stone for St. Colman’s was laid in 1868, a year after the Fenian Rising. The neo-Gothic church was substantially completed in 1915, when the harbor town was still known as Queenstown. The war-delayed consecration took place Aug. 12, 1919, followed two weeks later by solemn commemoration ceremonies overseen by Cardinal Michael Logue, according to this diocesan history.  

The Irish Examiner exclaimed:

A splendid symbol of the undying faith of the Irish people–a faith as firmly fixed as the granite walls of the Cathedral itself–the Mother Church of the Dioceses of Cloyne looks on the heaving waters of the eternal sea, and proclaims that Catholic Ireland discerns truth beyond material mundane affairs … Ireland and Irish Catholics can feel a justifiable pride in the imposing edifice that overlooks Cork Harbour, which is now finished and devoted to the service of God. … St. Colman’s Cathedral now stands for all time a monument to the Faith and zeal of Irish Catholics …1

St. Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh, formerly Queenstown, in County Cork.

The cathedral was not the only big building opened that summer in Cork. In July, the first tractors rolled off the Ford plant assembly line on the site of a former city park and racecourse on the south bank of the River Lee. The plant had 330,000 square feet of covered floor space. It provided employment for nearly 2,000 workers in the desperate post-war economy.

“On the edge of the sidewalks in Cork there is a human curbing of idle men,” Chicago Daily News correspondent Ruth Russell reported. “Just now most of them are sons of farmers or farm hands, for the farmer of the south is turning his acres back to grazing and extra hands are not needed.”2

These two developments, spiritual and commercial, happened as the Irish revolution continued to gather pace. By October 1920, the hunger strike death of Lord Mayor of Cork Terence James MacSwiney shocked the city and the world. His funeral was from the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Anne, about 10 miles from St. Colman’s in the heart of Cork city.

St. Colman’s was the last dominate structure hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants viewed as they sailed to America from Queenstown/Cobh in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My Kerry-born grandmother and grandfather were among this cohort, leaving six years before the dedication ceremonies. I am certain they would have wandered up the hill to whisper a prayer inside St. Colman’s before their departure. Because of that, I was as emotionally moved to enter St. Colman’s as to walk the Cobh waterfront the first time I visited Ireland in 2000.

May God grant that St. Colman’s of Cobh stands to welcome the faithful of Ireland and the world for another 100 years.

Back to Ireland as blog reaches seventh anniversary

This month marks the blog’s seventh anniversary, which is a good opportunity to thank readers for their interest in my work. I am grateful to my email subscribers; people who have written to me about the content; and those who help share it on social media. I’m also grateful to the archivists, librarians, and historians who have guided me along the way.

Please explore the site, including this year’s centennial project on American reporting of Irish independence in 1919; and earlier work such as Nora’s Sorrow and Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited, which each deal with the Land War period of the 1880s.

Other highlights include my St. Patrick Churches feature; Links and Places to Visit pages; and monthly and annual roundups.

My wife, Angie Drobnic Holan, has lovingly contributed to this effort as editor and webmaster. She and I will be traveling in Ireland and Northern Ireland over the next two weeks, and we will post words and images about the island’s natural beauty and contemporary culture.

Further ahead, I’ve been asked to present my Irish-related research at the American Journalism Historians Association‘s annual conference in Dallas; and the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland annual conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Details coming this fall.

For now, thanks again for supporting the blog, and watch for our posts from Ireland. MH

Angie and I at the Marian Year, 1954, shrine in Lahardan townland, County Kerry, in 2012. My grandfather was a born near this hillside holy well in 1894.

The Twelfth, 1919: Carson tells America to butt out

UPDATE:

“It is an anxious time for Northern Ireland’s unionists. Catholics will soon outnumber Protestants … and Brexit is wobbling the UK’s constitutional edifice. Conceivably, within a decade, a majority could vote in a border poll to join a united Ireland, as permitted under the Good Friday agreement,” the Guardian reported about this year’s Twelfth celebrations.

ORIGINAL POST:

In a fiery July 12, 1919, speech near Belfast, Ulster Unionist Party leader Sir Edward Carson warned that changing Ireland’s government to a republic or home rule status would result in him calling out the Ulster Volunteers, an implicit threat of arms against the British authorities.

“Don’t let us talk. Let us be prepared for all and every emergency,” Carson bellowed before a large crowd of Orangemen.3

Carson also had a message for America: butt out.

I today seriously say to America: You attend to your own affairs and we will attend to ours. You look after your own questions at home and we  will look after ours. We will not brook interference in our own affairs by any country, however powerful.

He took aim at the American Commission on Irish Independence (ACII), the three-member, non-government, delegation that visited Ireland in May on a side trip from its advocacy at the Paris peace conference. Carson said:

What right had the American mission to come to this country? To come here in a breach of hospitality on one nation toward another–to attempt to stir up strife in matters in which they were not connected? … The encouragement that those men gave to the Sinn Féin Party has created for His Majesty’s Government far more difficulty than they ever had before. I believe that the visit of these men and the encouragement they gave to lawlessness, which was being preached throughout the land, has added greatly to the campaign of assassination of innocent policemen …

Edward Carson, in 1919.

Carson also mocked Sinn Féin leader Eamon de Valera, “who is now working against you in America with the help of the Catholic Hierarchy … and who imagines in his vanity that one day or the other he is going to march through Belfast and Ulster and you will all willingly take off your hats and bow the knee to the head of the organization, which in the darkest hour of the war for the world’s freedom shot his Majesty’s soldiers in the streets of Dublin.” De Valera was then one month into his tour of America to raise money and U.S. political support for an Irish republic.

An Associated Press report of Carson’s speech was widely published in U.S. and Canadian newspapers, which focused on the charge of American meddling and the ACII, not de Valera. The Chicago Tribune Foreign News Service cabled from London, “Sir Edward Carson’s simultaneous declaration against the British government, the  Sinn Féin, and the United States over the question of changing the present form of government in Ireland has met with general condemnation from the London press.”4

The Brooklyn Times Union was not fooled by the Carson’s hypocrisy, and noted on its editorial page:

Sir Edward Carson’s record for loyalty to his own country is not so immaculate that the citizens of the United States need feel greatly pained by his reckless and absurd animadversions … The politician who threatened to fight the British Government with arms rather than submit to the laws of the British Parliament manifestly does not speak for the majority of the people of Ireland and presumably speaks only for a small and bigoted moiety of any British constituency.5

The Kentucky Irish American published a rebuttal to Carson by ACII member Michael J. Ryan,  who noted that “Carson now asks that America should attend to its own affairs. This, however, is a change from the plea when the cry for help came across the ocean when England’s army faced certain defeat.” The piece also said the Ulster leader “represents intolerance and organized ignorance in Ireland.”6

The Irish Press, Philadelphia, dismissed Carson’s “Belfast outbreak” with an uncharacteristically restrained shrug.

We have in America–even if the breed be unknown in Britain–some politicians who ‘play politics’ and who recognize the elemental fact that there are men in this country who give or withhold their votes from an American candidate in an American contest because of his policy toward Ireland. So they act accordingly. But there was no need for Sir Edward Carson to warn the mass of the American people off the grass.  They were not on it.7

The centenary of Carson’s 1919 Twelfth speech comes as the Oct. 31 deadline for Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain to withdrawal from the European Union–Brexit–draws closer and talk of a united Ireland grows stronger.

“No flag will fly in Ulster but the Union Jack,” Carson was reported saying at the 229th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.8  Whether that remains true in five or 10 years remains to be seen.

The Union Jack flutters at a housing estate in the unionist Shankill Road section of Belfast in July 2016.

U.S. Independence Day in Ireland: Bans to boycotts

U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Edward F. Crawford, left, and Irish President Michael D. Higgins.

Aodhán Ó Riordáin, a Labor party member of the Irish Senate, has renewed his 2018 call for Irish politicians to boycott the U.S. Embassy’s Independence Day reception in protest of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Frankie Feighan, a Fine Gael senator, has replied, “I have issues with Donald Trump and I do not agree with him, but a boycott of our friends in the United States is not a way forward,” according to The Irish Times.

New U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Edward F. Crawford, who earlier this week presented his credentials to Irish President Michael D. Higgins, will host the 4 July event at the ambassador’s official residence in Phoenix Park.

This “white house,” known as Deerfield Residence, was completed in 1776 for Col. John Blaquiere, chief secretary of the British government in Ireland. The first U.S. envoy to Ireland moved into the residence in 1927. “It was appropriately coincidental that the United States, which declared its own Independence in 1776, should establish the president’s representative in the residence completed in the same year,” the embassy website notes.

One hundred years ago, an American independence celebration in Cork was “proclaimed” (banned) by British military authorities. Remember, this was seven months after the separatist Sinn Féin election victory and establishment of the breakaway Dáil Éireann in Dublin.

The scheduled procession from the National Monument to City Hall was to conclude with an addressed by Sinn Féin politician Liam de Roiste “on a matter of great national importance,” the Irish Examiner reported.9 The military prohibited the event just a few hours before it was set to begin.

“There was no display of military or police on the street; the only unusual sign being that the American flag flew from the Sinn Féin rooms,” the Examiner wrote. About the time of the scheduled 8 p.m. start, “rain set in and continued without cessation until a late hour.”

De Roiste and other pro-Irish independence supporters instead gathered in nearby Lough, where they passed a resolution that said, in part:

Be it resolved that this public meeting of the citizens of Cork, assembled on American Independence Day, 1919, sends fraternal greetings to the people of the United States of America, and records the appreciation of the people of this city on the action which is being taking by the American people on behalf of Ireland’s independence …

A two-sentence Associated Press brief about the “forbidden” celebration in Cork was published in dozens of U.S. newspapers. It did not mention the Lough meeting or the resolution.

Read “Declaring Independence, America 1776; Ireland 1919” , a lecture by Irish Ambassador to the United States Daniel Mulhall, delivered 2 April 2019, at the University of Virginia.

U.S. Ambassador to Ireland’s residence in Phoenix Park, Dublin.

 

Catching up with modern Ireland: June

We’ve reached the halfway point of 2019. My monthly roundup follows below. I will be in Ireland from late July through early August, posting about my travels. The monthly round up will return at the end of August. MH

  • My piece on Éamon de Valera‘s 1919 visit to Louisville, Kentucky, where he was drawn by up-and-coming caricaturist Wyncie King, was published on The Filson Historical Society Blog. The accompanying watercolor image probably has not been seen in 100 years.
  • Edward F. Crawford, 81, a wealthy Ohio businessman, was sworn in as the new U.S. ambassador to Ireland, more than two years after the Trump administration came into office.
  • “So let’s not wrap the death of “rural Ireland” in a shroud of nostalgia. Piety has never done the real rural Ireland any good. Dying worlds attract romantics and since “rural Ireland” has been dying for 170 years, it has been romanticised up to its neck,” Fintan O’Toole writes in a column for The Irish Times, part of a five-story exploration of rural Ireland.
  • New “mortality differentials” from the Central Statistics Office show Irish women live longer than men; marrieds longer than singles; professionals longer than unskilled workers; and Protestants longer than Catholics.
  • Fodor’s is dropping online and print references to Belfast’s political murals after the BBC suggested it guides pandered to damaging, unhelpful and unfair stereotypes of unionists. The guides described Catholic murals as “wildly romantic” and “aspire to the heights of Sistine Chapel-lite” while Protestant murals “resemble war comics without the humor.” The guides also said, “In Northern Ireland they say the Protestants make the money and the Catholics make the art.”

“King Billy” mural in Belfast, from my 2016 visit.

  • The Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) has secured one year of operational funding while it continues to look for long-term support. Ulster University announced earlier this year it was closing the highly-respected source of information about the Troubles and politics in Northern Ireland, drawing the ire of journalists, historians, and others.
  • Ivan Cooper, a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and civil rights leader in Northern Ireland, died at age 75.
  • TheJournal.ie has introduced an “Ireland 2029” podcast. The first episode explored whether Ireland (and the rest of the world) is ready for a four-day work week.
  • “A previously confidential government study detailing 142 areas of life in Northern Ireland that will be impacted by Brexit has been published, revealing risks to everything from cooperation on congenital heart disease and cross-border child protection to rules preventing the looting of national treasures,” The Guardian reported.
  • Niall Gibbons, the chief executive of Tourism Ireland, has rejected claims by the DUP’s Ian Paisley that the marketing agency favors the Republic of Ireland over Northern Ireland. Read Gibbons’ statement to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster.
  • Arranmore Island, three miles off the coast of County Donegal, is trying to attract immigrants to boost its dwindling population of fewer than 500 people. The community council is promoting the island’s high-speed internet service and laid-back lifestyle will attract knowledge workers to the remote local.

Árainn Mhór Island

Select newspaper editorials on de Valera’s U.S. arrival

This is part of my year-long series of posts about American reporting of Irish independence, 1919, including the centenary of Éamon de Valera’s arrival in America. Below are select U.S. newspaper editorials from the start of his 18-month tour. The three Irish-American newspaper are hyperlinked to the corresponding page of the digitized issue. MH

The Brooklyn (New York) Daily Eagle, June 26, 1919

Crazy as the de Valera ideas may have seemed a few months ago, Premier Lloyd George has himself to thank for making them a serious element in the international situation … Delay in enforcing home rule was not inexplicable before the armistice. Since then the pernicious influence of Sir Edward Carson and the new dependence of the Premier on Tory support established by the [December 1918] parliamentary election are conditions, not explanations or justifications, for procrastination.

The Irish Press, Philadelphia, June 28, 1919
Ireland’s President Visits America

The common people, who after all are what really count, do not feel themselves constrained to draw distinctions in the same way as Government officials. They do not believe that a Republic which has the support of the people living under it is a pretense–something to be named inside quotation marks–just because a foreign army is on its territory. … Few of the chief executives of republics represent so large a proportion of their people as does President de Valera. To emphasize these we need go no further than President Wilson (who in 1912 and 1916 received less than 50 percent of the popular vote, but put into office by the Electoral College.) … That ordinary people are indifferent to diplomatic formalities, and recognize Mr. de Valera as President of Ireland, is proved by the acclaim with which he has been greeted since his appearance in this country. … The friends of Ireland, who include all true Americans, will welcome the President, and will assist him in his efforts to make the heads of the American Government recognize the true status of Ireland.

The Irish Standard, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 28, 1919
Welcome President De Valera

Of American birth himself and imbued with the American ideals of truth, justice and humanity, [de Valera] is particularly fitted to present the cause of Ireland to the America people. Of pure life, stainless character, and noble spirit and engaging personality his appeal cannot fail to engage the consideration of all Americans who cherish the traditions and policies of this great Republic of the West, and who are free from the obsession of British propaganda. A new Parnell has come to plead the cause of Ireland, but under circumstances that are far more promising and inspiring than those existing in the decade [1880s] of the visit of the great Home Rule leader; and he is asking not merely for colonial or dominion government of Ireland, but for absolute and complete independence, and in this stand he is sustained by more than three-fourths of his fellow countrymen. He seeks recognition of a government that is unquestionably of right as subjected to the tests of democracy and Americanism.

The Decatur (Illinois, 200 miles south of Chicago) Herald, June 29, 1919

These schoolmasters! One of them [U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a former college professor] brought his country into a successful war, defined the conditions of peace which brought the war to an end, and was the leading spirit a world court of peace enforcement. Another [de Valera] was a professor of mathematics in Dublin … [Though] there is nothing about Prof. De Valera suggesting the fiery Irish patriot of history … Ireland probably made no mistake in the gravely professorial Mr. De Valera. Schoolmasters have been known to turn out fairly successful politicians.

Kentucky Irish American, Louisville, Kentucky, July 5, 1919
Leader De Valera

…Irish skill and daring, in the hour of Ireland’s need, outmatched the might of the empire–outreached the lion’s claws! Like an eagle from the clouds, sudden [de Valera] is among us. … We are asked only to fill the war chest; to give a little work and a little money; to provide an Irish Victory Fund with which the last grim struggle on the field of world-wide public opinion may be waged and won. The Irish republic is a reality; but so is the British army of occupation in Ireland–and so is the British propaganda in America.

Describing Éamon de Valera before social media

Éamon de Valera in 1919.

In June 1919, commercial film, radio, and television were still in their infancy. Photography, after nearly a century, was on the verge of overcoming its earlier technical limitations and moving into widespread use. 

It was not until 1919, with the launching of New York’s Illustrated Daily News, that American newspapers began to feature photographs routinely. The lighter cameras and “faster” lenses introduced in the 1920s brought about a revolution in news photography, ushering in the age of photojournalism.10

The dozens of reporters who gathered at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel for the American debut of Éamon de Valera as the president of Ireland had to describe their subject as well as detail his pronouncements. There would be photos of de Valera’s U.S. tour, to be sure, but they were not disseminated as widely or as easily as today’s digital and broadcast media. 

Below are some of the reporters’ descriptions of de Valera published in June 24, 1919, editions of U.S. newspapers. Some are from wire service dispatches and appeared in numerous papers across America. I’ve highlighted some common reference points. This roundup begins with the best description I found, and ends with a quote that hints of the shift to journalism bolstered by images in addition to words:

Standing six feet, one inch tall, he easily overlooked the crowd about him. He was clad in a dark business suit, with white waistcoat, and wore a turn-down collar with a dark four-in-hand tie. But for all his pleasantry, his face has the look of one who has seen more than thirty-seven years ordinarily betoken.

His visage is thin, doubtless so because of his harrowing prison life, and the deep, long seams about his mouth spell a knowledge of troublous, weary days. Behind his nose glasses, his sharp eyes, deep set, penetrate his auditors, giving the impression of unflinching determination.

As he stood addressing the reporters … he looked much like the pedagogue, as indeed he has been, and doubtless the clear, crisp, studied enunciation, with its touch of brogue, comes as the result of his teaching days.

Brooklyn (New York) Times Union

Here are a few more:

“He wears glasses, his brown-black eyes are deep set, his nose is rather prominent, his upper lip is clean shaven, and the general expression of his face is one of eagerness. Upon arrival yesterday he was attired in a salt-and-pepper tweedish mixture, wore a collar almost of collegian highness and a big blue tied tied in a big knot. … a brogue that was just an echo of a brogue was apparent.” The New York Times

“…a tall man with a face lean and lined with care. … [his] brogue is most pronounced. When he used the word “merchant,” for example, it sounded like “mare-chint” and when he said “reduced” it sounded like “rejuiced.” New York Tribune

“Mr. De Valera, a tall, smooth-faced, clear-eyed, young Irishman, was born in New York in 1882, but said he “renounced” his American citizenship when he became an Irish soldier.” Pittsburgh Daily Post

“… a tall, bronzed, smooth shaven man wearing eyeglasses … with a smile and speaking with well modulated voice with a mellow Irish brogue …” The San Francisco Examiner

“By those who had seen portraits and moving pictures of the professor he was easily distinguished and recognized.” St. Louis Star and Times, below, which included a photo of de Valera addressing an 1918 anti-conscription meeting in Ireland, with inset images of Count Plunkett and Arthur Griffith.

‘The Irish Press’ withheld news of de Valera’s U.S. arrival

In June 1919, The Irish Press of Philadelphia obtained one of the biggest international news scoops since the end of the Great War. It sat on the story.

Irish leader Éamon de Valera, who evaded British authorities to sneak aboard the S.S. Lapland at Liverpool, arrived June 11 in New York City. Reports that he was missing from Ireland and possibly heading to America were just beginning to appear in U.S. newspapers.

Éamon de Valera

For a dozen days, de Valera’s whereabouts remained a secret kept by a small circle of supporters, including  Joseph McGarrity and Dr. Patrick McCartan, publisher and editor of the Press, respectively. McGarrity met de Valera on his first night in New York. A few days later he welcomed de Valera to his home in Philadelphia, where McCartan briefed the visitor on American efforts to help Ireland.11

Joseph McGarrity

McGarrity and McCartan were both natives of Ireland: the publisher used his business fortune to bankroll the newspaper and other nationalist efforts, the editor was an elected member of the first Dáil Éireann. The “primary concern in the Irish Press remained the cause of recognition of the Irish Republic in the United States,” McCartan wrote of this period.12 A look at the paper’s June 14 and June 21 issues reveals just how deeply they deceived their readers to serve that cause, rather than transparent journalism.

Harry Boland

The front page of the June 14 issue reported that Harry Boland, another member of the Dáil, “recently arrived” in the U.S. as “special envoy” to America. In fact, Boland had been in the country for over a month. Shortly after his arrival he met with McGarrity and McCartan in Philadelphia.13 Boland also joined McGarrity to welcome de Valera the night of June 11 in New York .

Even more audacious, however, was the page 3 guest column by the Irish leader: Application of Our Principals Means Free Erin, Says De Valera.  The sub-headline, “President of the Irish Republic Forwards Statement to People of the United States,” implied that de Valera had mailed the commentary from Ireland. It is unclear when, from where, or even if he penned the piece:

All liberty-loving nations of the world owe to the Irish the recognition of the independence of Ireland, not only because of the indisputable right of the people of Ireland to govern their own national destinies, but also because that right is deprived by England on grounds which are a negation of national liberty everywhere, and subversive to international peace and order.

The deceit continued in the June 21 issue of the Press. Tucked in the bottom right corner of the front page were two small briefs that speculated about de Valera’s whereabouts:

  • The first, dated June 17, suggested “well-informed circles” in Paris reported he was in Switzerland, but “the nature of the mission could not be learned.”
  • A June 11 Universal Services dispatch from Dublin suggested de Valera left Ireland June 1 “on an unknown mission” to England. “The news comes as a surprise to all Ireland. Speculation as to the purpose of his trip and his present whereabouts is intense.”

Dr. Patrick McCartan

This was pure nonsense and misdirection, truly “fake news,” from McGarrity and McCartan, who knew de Valera had been in America for 10 days. Their newspaper was just playing along with similar stories in the mainstream U.S. press. McCartan wrote:

We kept secret the manner of his coming. His arrival when announced, created a great sensation, and the mysterious ease with which he had eluded the British added to the popular interest in him. … Nothing was lacking to make him a popular hero. And America was eager to see him and to do him homage.14

Finally, in its June 28 issue, the Press headlined:

Irish President Reaches America

Eamon de Valera, Head of Republic, Arrives in New York.

To Work for Recognition.

The story was dated June 25, two days after de Valera’s public debut at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. McGarrity and McCartan were among the hundreds of supporters packed into the ballroom reception.15 The Press story was silent as to when de Valera arrived in America, but noted that speculation about him “had been reported for some days … [and] concoctions of all sorts had been published in the newspapers.”

The Irish Press had perpetrated the biggest concoction of all.

Hiding Disney’s Florida land deals

Other newspapers have withheld information from their readers for what publishers believed to be a greater good. In the early 1960s, for example, Orlando, Florida, newspaper publisher Martin Andersen tamped down news that entertainment entrepreneur Walt Disney was buying huge tracts of acreage in the central part of the state for a second Disneyland theme park. The Orlando Sentinel recalls the story.

The hair was in Clare (Trump in Ireland)

(This post is now closed. Thanks for following our coverage. MH)

SELECT COVERAGE:

  • “Whether or not each succeeded is up for debate – but any suggestion that the reception from official Ireland was on the fawning side ignores the fact that it was pretty muted compared to US presidential visits.” From TheJournal.ie.
  • “President Trump’s visit to Ireland also highlighted the fact that he is a polarising figure. I see this regularly in the US. In the media, in Congress and on the streets, you encounter a level of admiration from his staunch supporters matched only by the level of disdain from his detractors.” Brian O’Donovan, RTE Washington correspondent.
  • A Washington-based government watchdog group complained that Trump’s Doonbeg golf resport used its Twitter feed to promote the president’s visit, blurring the line between business and government interests, The Hill reports. @TrumpDoonbeg  later deleted its two tweets. @realDonaldTrump has not mention of Ireland on his feed.‏
  • Trump walked off the fairway at his Doonbeg golf resort Friday morning in the middle of his round to visit with a small group of children and teachers from the Clohanes National School, which adjoins the links. “They were are absolutely gobsmacked; they just can’t believe it,” one of the teachers said.
  • About 50 U.S. journalists covered Trump’s visit to Ireland, and media organisations from around Europe also sent correspondents, though not as many as Irish officials had been expecting, The Irish Times reported. It’s roundup of U.S. coverage highlighted The Washington Post’s description of Trump’s “money-losing golf course threatened by climate change.”
  • About 3,000 demonstrators inflated a six-meter tall Trump baby blimp Thursday in Dublin to protest the president’s visit to Ireland. The demonstration took place at the Garden of Remembrance and was organised by a coalition of civil society organisations, political parties and campaign groups who said the protest was designed to show solidarity with those “damaged” by President Trump’s policies, RTE reported.
  • “The Irish … have some colorful phrases for inveterate bullshitters. A “gasman” is someone whose patter can be funny. A “gobshite” merely spouts nonsense. Since Trump is only unintentionally amusing, the latter term is the one that is best applied to him …” A Gobshite American President in Ireland, from The New Yorker.

ORIGINAL POST:

U.S. President Donald Trump is in Ireland for a two-night stay at his golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare.

“Doonbeg’s residents decked the streets in American flags and stars and stripes bunting, crediting Trump with securing their livelihoods when in 2014 he bought the nearby golf resort where he will spend the next two nights,” Reuters reported. “While the main protest for Trump’s Irish visit is planned for Dublin on Thursday, on Wednesday it was the adoring locals in Doonbeg who outnumbered the demonstrators that greeted the U.S. president upon his arrival at Shannon Airport.”

Trump arrived at the Limerick airport after a few days in London. On Thursday, he will attend D-Day commemorations in France, return to Doonbeg in the evening, then play a round of golf Friday before flying home.

Trump was greeted at Shannon by Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. The two leaders discussed E3 visas for Irish citizens, Ireland trade surplus with the U.S., and Brexit, according to The Irish Times. It also emerged that the U.S. Senate will vote next week to confirm Ohio billionaire Edward F. Crawford as ambassador to Ireland. The position since Trump became president more than two years ago.

From the Times‘ Mariam Lord:

For the most part, the Taoiseach’s face remained frozen in a polite smile. Leo Varadkar was a study in statesmanlike serenity, face tilted attentively towards Donald Trump as the U.S. president blithely spouted off-kilter comments about Brexit.

There was almost a Melania-like quality to Leo’s sangfroid in the face of Trump’s witless remarks comparing the controversy over the border in Ireland to his controversial plans to build a wall between the US and Mexico. …

“I think it will work out and it will all work out very well. Also, for you, with your wall, your border. . .” [Trump said. My emphasis.]

There was a quiet gasp from the Irish.

“We have a border situation in the United States and you have one over here, but it’s going to work out very well. I think it’s both going to work out very well.”

Here is the official White House transcript of public comments by Trump and Varadkar. Read it … and weep.

The rain swept view to the sea from the clubhouse at Trump’s Doonbeg golf resort, taken during my July 2016 visit, four months before he was elected president. Trump’s name is above the clock face.