Happy St. Patty’s Day | Ambassador of Ireland to the U.S. Geraldine Byrne Nason

The people-to-people relationship is absolutely the basis on which we began this love affair between the two countries. And it’s driven forward by that link. I feel that as an Irish Ambassador in Washington, I’m stunned by the welcome, but also by the interest that people have in Irish links with each other. President Biden, your current president, happens to be probably the most Irish president since John F Kennedy. And I would say poetically that this is the 60th anniversary since John F Kennedy visited Ireland, and we intend to mark that in June in Ireland. You know, he and his family are beloved on the island of Ireland.

And President Biden, as it happens, comes from — his Finnegan part of his ancestry comes from my home county, County Louth. So, when I was introduced to him just before Christmas, it was like two Louth people having a first chat. He immediately raised our common Louth roots.

So, all of this revolves around, you know, it’s not macro level diplomacy, high vision and trade deals that make a relationship. It’s the people-to-people relationship.

I would have to say, since I’ve arrived here in Tennessee, that I’m also so struck by how big a part music plays in that relationship and that traffic of our musicians in both directions. I know you sent the banjo to us and we’ve made very good use of it. But also listening to your amazing Bluegrass music, the Country and Western music you hear in this region. It’s so resonant of traditional Irish music. And we’re so thrilled that that cross-pollenization has taken. And I know that here tomorrow I’m going to go to Compass Records who record an extraordinary amount of traditional Irish music, probably the biggest player in the field. So, bringing a very new and modern link between our two cultural offers,

We, you know, we want to grow that relationship. We claim Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, as well as Davy Crockett and your presidents. Garth Brooks was just in Ireland and took over the whole island for a few weeks. And people are culturally interested in the United States, and we like to think that our music and our dance — Riverdance are here at the moment, I spent a lot of my youth as an Irish dancer. I believe it’s one of the more extraordinary expressions of our cultural offer here in the United States.

And I’m also delighted to see, which is a new, relatively new development that a number of your universities have Irish studies programs. I’ve just come from a number of years in New York where at the Irish Center, Irish Glucksman House at NYU in New York has a very vibrant Irish studies program. I know that we have them in Boston. We have them on the West Coast in several universities. I’d love to see more US students engaging in those. That opens up the window then as many US students who go on their year abroad spend time in Dublin. We’re very welcoming. Most of our universities have numbers of U.S. students.

So, our cultural ties, that’s what binds us. They’re deep. They’re sincere. But I like to use the phrase that they’re also ties that bind us they’re with nostalgia but we’re looking ahead. So, it’s nostalgia with a keen eye to the next generation and the future. And I hope over my time as Ambassador I at least manage to grow that one little bit. And I’ll be back to Tennessee to see how the roots are growing.