After its factories died and its port withered, New Ross, a town perched by the River Barrow in south-east Ireland, decided in the 1990s to tap a unique asset: John F Kennedy.
The US president’s great-grandfather had sailed from the quays of New Ross to America during the 1840s famine, leaving behind a modest homestead that JFK twice visited, including a few months before his assassination in 1963. Like many Americans, not least the current US president-elect, Joe Biden, Kennedy was proud of his Irish connections and keen to re-emphasise the links.
New Ross gambled that tourists would be enticed by those links, too, and set about reinventing itself as a de facto shrine to the Kennedy dynasty. A museum was built at the homestead. The dilapidated quays were transformed with a new boardwalk, a bronze statue of JFK, a visitor centre and an emigrant hall of fame. Most ambitious of all was a full-size replica of the ship on which the president’s ancestor had sailed.
The plan worked. In an average year, more than 20,000 tourists visit the homestead and 70,000 visit the ship, the Dunbrody, generating 50 jobs and an estimated €3m in spinoff spending, adding up to a big impact on a County Wexford town of just 8,000 people.
There is also a park, the JFK Arboretum, which draws about 110,000 people a year, mostly locals, and an annual “Kennedy summer school” festival of Irish American culture and politics.
“In the late 80s and early 90s the town was in decline, really down at heel,” said Sean Reidy, the chief executive of the JFK Trust from 1991 to 2014, during which New Ross built up its Kennedy heritage industry. The result of the effort was employment, optimism and a physical renaissance around the quays, he said. “It’s developed a pride of place.”
It has also created a blueprint of sorts, because the inauguration of Joe Biden on 21 January will give three other Irish towns the opportunity to alchemise their own Oval Office connection into tangible benefits.
One branch of the president-elect’s family tree leads to Ballina in County Mayo, where the Blewitt clan claim him as one of their own, and another branch leads to Carlingford in County Louth, home of the Finnegan wing. The village of Maree in County Galway has emerged as a third claimant to another Biden great-great-grandfather.
Biden is the most Irish American president since JFK. He made multiple visits to Ireland when he was a senator and vice-president, and cited his heritage in the campaign for the White House when he accused Donald Trump of belonging to a caste of plutocrats. “They look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics and like me,” he said in a debate.
After Biden won the election, one of his first overseas calls was to the taoiseach, Micheál Martin.
Laurita Blewitt, a third cousin of Biden, organised a gathering of the clan when he visited Ballina in 2016 and remains in close contact with his family. Biden’s sense of Irishness is genuine, she says. “It’s not just something he created for the election, it’s very much part of him.”
Ballina has a pop-art mural of Biden that has drawn visitors and international TV crews to Market Square. The town’s hospice, for which Biden turned the sod, has a plaque honouring his late son, Beau.
Residents of the town have expressed their hope Biden will visit them again during his presidency, as have the people of Carlingford and Maree.
Reidy advised the towns to find creative ways to personalise the emigration experiences of Biden’s ancestors. “If they have any physical remains of the family homesteads that would be an opportunity create something.”
New Ross’s claim to JFK benefited from the fact that the president cast his 1963 visit as a sort of homecoming. “It took 115 years to make this trip, and 6,000 miles, and three generations,” Kennedy told locals and the travelling White House press corps in a quayside speech.
“That was a priceless piece of intellectual property for the town, and that’s what we tried to exploit,” Reidy said.
The spot where JFK spoke is marked by a statue and an “emigrant flame” dedicated to the diaspora, lit from the eternal flame by his grave in Arlington, Virginia.
In a recently published book, Dunbrody, A Famine Odyssey: How JKF’s Roots Helped Revive an Irish Town, Reidy had a cautionary tale about being too eager.
Upon learning that the flame might first travel around parishes and appear on RTE’s Late Late Show before reaching New Ross for a 2013 ceremony, JFK’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, “blew a gasket” at the perceived commodification. It took a week of Irish government shuttle diplomacy and a revised itinerary to mollify her. “We sorted it out, she came and it was brilliant,” Reidy said.
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