Innocent days when our world was always going to be happy

There’s been a fair bit of reflection and reminiscing over recent weeks as the 60th anniversary of the first visit of a US President to the Republic of Ireland and what it meant at the time to a fledgling country that was barely four decades old.

For better or worse (I think I’ll take the positive side of that statement), it’s an occasion I can remember quite vividly as my father took a ‘family decision’ on the Saturday morning of June 29, 1963, to drive us all in to see one JFK, or John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I was either in ‘high infants’ or ‘low infants’ at the time in the days before the posher terms of ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ came in to categorise that first year or two of formal education.

The black Ford Anglia with just four gears, three forward and one reverse, had a solid 10 shillings worth of petrol poured into its tank the evening before, and off we traipsed into Galway, my second ever trip into the big smoke, on what was of course a very happy occasion.

My first visit to Galway city was a far more painful one, when I caught two of my fingers in the spinning chain of an upturned bike as it was being oiled at home, and a surgeon Murphy at ‘The Regional’ had to perform a bit of skin grafting to repair the damage. (One or two attempts to escape from the hospital through a window thankfully proved to be unsuccessful!).

That late June morning in 1963 was in its own way still quite an unnerving experience for a ‘ladeen’ many years away from leaving the short trousers behind.

There seemed to be crowds of people everywhere and a rather eerie noise from the skies which was of course with the benefit of hindsight, the helicopters bringing the presidential party and White House press corps to Galway city.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.