When President Barack Obama visited Ireland 10 years ago, he was supposed to stay the night and enjoy some downtime, but a pesky volcano had other ideas. Obama's speechwriter, Cody Keenan, told Claire Byrne that the US Air Force made the call that meant the presidential party didn't stay overnight at the Merrion Hotel and enjoy a session in O'Donoghue's Pub, arranged by the US Ambassador.
"That volcano was going on in Iceland and the Air Force said, 'Look, we can't fly through this. Particles get in the engines and that's not good.' So we had to leave and we didn't even get to stay the night and it was heartbreaking."
So an over-nighter turned into a single, very packed, day. And when it was time to go, Cody says, they were given almost no warning. Even so, they managed the sneaky pint:
"We got an email that we had to load the buses, you know, they said, 'We'll pack your bags for you. We gotta get out of here at this certain time.' So we had, like, 15 minutes left. So Ben Rhodes and I ran over to – one of our other speechwriters – we ran over to O'Donoghues and just made sure to get a pint really quickly and then got on the buses just before they took off."
Claire asked if Cody had been expecting the warm welcome that Obama got on his visit. He had an idea, he said, just because of the reputation of the Irish people, but the people who stood waiting all day in the rain in Moneygall were, he says amazing and then there were the thousands in College Green for the president's speech.
"It still takes your breath away when you see the crowd stretched out down around the corner. I framed the cover of the next day's Irish Times with this beautiful shot of him speaking to the crowd."
Cody makes a pretty startling point about President Obama's heritage, which isn’t often remarked upon:
"You know, it's easy to just say, 'Oh yeah, sure, everybody's Irish.' I mean, his family came over more recently than mine did from Ireland. And, you know, people forget he was raised by his white mother and his white grandparents. He was raised by that Scots-Irish stock."
Another major speech that Cody references in his chapter of a new book called From Whence I Came: The Kennedy Legacy, Ireland and America, was delivered in Charleston, South Carolina, after a white supremacist had shot and killed nine people in an African-American church during a prayer group. The speech was particularly notable for the president singing Amazing Grace, but this, Cody says, was not his idea:
"No, that was [Obama’s] idea. We built the speech kind of around the lyrics, around the concept of grace and that was his idea too and he told me that morning, before we left Washington, you know, he said, 'If it feels right in the moment, I might sing it.'"
Cody told Claire that he's writing a book about the 10 days in America that started with the Charleston shooting and took in the US Supreme Court deciding that Americans had a right to healthcare and a right to marriage equality. It's due to be published next year.
You can hear Claire's full conversation with Cody Keenan by going here.
From Whence I Came: The Kennedy Legacy, Ireland and America, edited by Brian Murphy and Donnacha Ó Beacháin and featuring contributions from a range of academic and political figures, including Cody Keenan, is published by Merrion Press.
Niall Ó Sioradáin