Footage received by IrishCentral shows a one-minute clip of President John F. Kennedy in Ireland in June 1963, and it looks eerily like what happened five months later in Dallas, Texas before his assassination.
During his visit to New Ross, Co Wexford, JFK was even less well protected than he was in Dallas with no Secret Service insight.
The Irish American President is captured standing up straight and waving from a limousine with no protection whatsoever around him as massive crowds turn out for the president’s Irish homecoming.
The lack of security, in retrospect, is shocking.
The woman who took the footage, local amateur historian Peggy Walsh, used a 16mm color recorder and filmed 20 minutes of the president passing by her house followed by street scenes of people attending the event in New Ross where the Kennedy family lived before emigrating to America.
Kennedy appears incredibly youthful and happy waving at the crowds on both sides as he makes his way to the quayside ceremony where the famine ships left from. It is hard to accept that just months later he would be cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
The 20-minute long color video capturing the visit of President John F. Kennedy to New Ross in County Wexford in June 1963 is to be donated to the Kennedy Book and Research Archive at New Ross Library during this year’s 2021 Kennedy Summer School. It was aired in full for the first time, to the public, during the Kennedy Summer School.
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