On the energetic U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt's Irish cultural interests... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to Teddy's Irish Bards, by former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Daniel Mulhall above.
When you have lived abroad for as long as I have, you tend to find echoes of Ireland in the most unusual of places. That was the case last August when I spent a short holiday in the Dakotas, two huge, sparsely populated western American States.
Even today they are hard to get to and are often among the last of the fifty US States visited by enthusiastic travelers seeking to see all of America. In the late 19th century they were remote frontier societies that attracted the ambitious and the adventurous.
Theodore Roosevelt, who had a privileged upbringing in New York, fled to the Badlands of North Dakota in the 1880s to seek solace on the American frontier following the death on the same day of his wife and his mother.
When I found myself in the North Dakotan town of Medora, I stayed at the Rough Riders Hotel where the memory of Teddy Roosevelt's two-year sojourn there is richly celebrated...
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
