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The last time I met Senator Kennedy

Niall O'Dowd remembers the last time he met Ted Kennedy, which coincided with one of the most important days in the history of Ireland

By
NIALL O'DOWD,
IrishCentral.com Publisher

Published Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 3:25 PM
Updated Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 3:34 PM

 

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Senator Ted Kennedy

It was a Tuesday afternoon in Belfast in May 2007, and Senator Ted Kennedy was sitting in his shirtsleeves in a grand executive office in Stormont which, no doubt, once belonged to a Unionist minister.

“Come on in,” he boomed, jumping up from behind the desk in a room which was festooned with pictures of royalty and British lords and ladies of long ago.

I’m surprised the glass in the portraits didn’t crack with what they were witnessing. The day was May 8, 2007, and the Northern Ireland power-sharing government had just come into being.

Seasoned observers including yours truly had rubbed their eyes at the spectacle we had just witnessed at the Stormont assembly.

Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the worst of sworn enemies, had just agreed to share power in Northern Ireland. The world press was agape.

Teddy Kennedy had just traveled through the night, breaking into an already grueling schedule to ensure he was present at the historic moment, one he had done so much to bring about.

To his delight he was the American government’s official representative to the first ever-historic power sharing government - a nice touch by President George W. Bush who designated him.

Titles meant nothing to Kennedy, but I think this was just a little bit special. He brought it up right away.

He put his arm around my shoulder and we strolled to the window and gazed down the long Stormont driveway with its statue of Edward Carson, the Unionist defender of old, seemingly threatening the Catholic neighborhoods that loomed small in the distance. Carson would have fallen off his pedestal to have witnessed this day, I said. Teddy laughed.

I pointed out how Stormont, a magnificent building, was constructed in such a way that it seemed to loom over the Nationalist neighborhoods so that the peasantry would be in perpetual awe of their Unionist lords and master to the manor born -- now this day changed everything.

It was wonderful that Teddy was there. No American had done more to see the day happen.

Thomas Foley, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, and Paula Dobriansky, Bush’s envoy to Ireland, hovered outside, but this was Kennedy’s day. His key decision to push for a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, in 1994 ended the international isolation of the party and may have moved the IRA ceasefire forward by as much as a year.

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