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Irish remember Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Tributes pour in for the founder of the Special Olympics movement

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY,
Irish Voice Reporter

Published Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 9:24 AM
Updated Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 9:58 AM

 

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Irish President Mary McAleese presents Eunice Kennedy Shriver with a Waterford trophy during the Special Olympics in Dublin in 2003.

FATHER TIM | EUNICE'S SPECIAL GIFT FROM GOD: HER SISTER ROSEMARY | CLICK HERE

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 88, a member of the most prominent Irish American family in the nation and an accomplished trailblazer on behalf of people with disabilities, died early Tuesday morning at the Cape Cod Hospital, near to the Kennedy family retreat at Hyannis.

Shriver, a founding member of the Special Olympics, had been in poor health for months, having suffered a series of debilitating strokes.

Sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, for decades Shriver advocated tirelessly on behalf of the mentally disabled and many political commentators have called her contributions to the disability rights movement the greatest Kennedy legacy.

Two days before she was first hospitalized in November 2007, Shriver was honored for her work with the disabled at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. That year she also traveled to Shanghai to attend her final Special Olympics, the sports competition for the mentally disabled that she helped found in 1968.

The Special Olympics first grew out of a summer camp that Shriver started at her family farm in suburban Maryland, and it went a long way toward erasing the long-held stigmas and taboos about mental disability that the Kennedy family knew well because Eunice had a sister Rosemary who was mentally disabled.

“I had enormous affection for Rosie,” Shriver said in a radio interview in 2007. “If I never met Rosemary, never known anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace.”

In Ireland President Mary McAleese led tributes to the founder of the Special Olympics. “Eunice Kennedy Shriver was a visionary who devoted her life to creating a better and more inclusive world for people with disability. She created an organization and a community in which people with disability could demonstrate their talents and where all of us could participate and learn,” McAleese said.

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