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The Kennedy administration was referred to as the ‘Irish Mafia’, many of the appointments that the young president made were ethnically-driven but nobody predicted the effect that a visit to the so-called ‘home country’ would have on the guest and on the hosts. Ireland was a country left behind by the glamour that was emerging throughout the world. London was swinging and America rocked and rolled while Ireland plodded along under the leadership of an austere and blind President who represented nothing but the past (not a bad past, but he was yesterday).

The excitement generated by mere talk of a Kennedy visit is still legendary in this country and when he arrived, the scenes that greeted him in Wexford, Dublin, Cork and Limerick would not be repeated until Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979 and which haven’t been repeated since.

There was more than a whiff of glamour about the visit; people (women!) still talk of the thick hair, the sparkling teeth and the bronzed face. The forty-something leader was charm itself and his speeches were, like his beloved Robert Frost, poetry, creating history on the hoof.

When he stepped off the plane to be greeted by a particularly old looking Eamonn de Valera, the contrast could not have been starker. Here was the past; a Civil War hero born in New York, shaking hands with the present and the future, a young, charismatic son of Ireland who epitomised what could happen if you left that small town for an extraordinary land that allowed young Irish Catholics to become President.

Everywhere he went, JFK was mobbed. This was as close as we got to Beatlemania. President Kennedy shirked security considerations (three assassination claims) so he could drink tea (he poured) and eat cake (all home made) with his Irish cousins. He joked that if his relations hadn’t left Ireland, he might have been working at the local factory or in the pub up the road. The crowd went pink with excitement, hanging on every word.

It could be said that what Barack Obama is doing for Africa, John Kennedy did for Ireland. He breathed life and colour into a sterile and bleak island. He was ‘change’, he was the future and he was ‘ours’.