Fin Keegan

Here’s a telling insight from Fintan O’Toole:

I sometimes think that much of the public life of [Ireland] since 1963 has been an attempt to fill the hole in our self-image that Kennedy’s visit [to Ireland] had exposed. We were supposed to be a deeply spiritual people, concerned with God, the land and the nation. The ecstasy evoked by the appearance among us of the first citizen of the great republic of the West revealed to us how utterly bedazzled we were by all the things we were not meant to want: his cool, sexy, glamour, his impregnable aura of wealth and his ability to embody the fridges and TVs, the porches and pools that our American cousins conjured up in those family photographs. We were embarrassed by our sudden, naked impulse to worship the golden calf

Source: Fintan O’Toole What We Think of America Granta #77, March 28th, 2002