June 6, 1993. The faces in the crowd reflect the divides that Robert F. Kennedy managed to cross in his short life, as black and white, rich and poor, government officials and civil rights leaders stand together to pay homage and join together in a “Mass for Courage and Reconciliation,” on this the 25th anniversary of his death.
There are many Irish faces, of course, among the thousands who journeyed from all over the country to Arlington Cemetery on this Sunday in June.
Faces that were passed down from ancestors who left small villages, and plots of lands, and hard times in Ireland to make a new life for themselves in the New Land. Surely the spirits of Patrick Kennedy, who left his 25 acres in County Wexford in 1848, and Bridget Murphy who arrived in Boston on the same ship and married Patrick one year later, were present here today in the six sons and four daughters of Robert Kennedy, his grandchildren, and in his many nieces and nephews including Caroline and John Kennedy who must have been thinking of their own father President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose grave was just a few short steps away from their uncle’s.
With all the emotion that the ceremony conjured up, it was hard not to think of Ireland and the contribution that this one Irish family had made to America. Hard not to think of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the mother, old and frail now, who had given up three of her sons in the service of their country.
As I look at the faces of the fatherless children of Robert and John Kennedy, I think of families the world over who are mourning their dead. What is the latest body count in Bosnia, in Somalia, in Sudan? How many sons and daughters have been left fatherless in our own Northern Ireland? How many mothers are mourning their children? How many more will die because we have failed, in the words of Robert Kennedy, to “end the divisions and the violence.”
Father Creedon, the Irish priest celebrating the Mass, speaks of a visit – Robert Kennedy made to the Navajo Indians and how deeply disturbed he was by the high suicide rate on the reservation.
I wonder what Robert Kennedy would say if he were alive today and I told him that Derry, in Northern Ireland, was the suicide capital of Europe.
I wonder what this man who tried to bring people together would say of the last 25 years that have torn the people of Northern Ireland even farther apart. What he’d say to Paul Hill sitting in the audience with his daughter Courtney.
Paul from Belfast spent 15 years in jail in England for nothing more than being Irish in the wrong place. What would Robert Kennedy say to the British soldier convicted of killing a teenaged joy rider in Belfast?
Would he speak to the families of the Hunger Strikers, the victims of rubber bullets, and the Enniskillen survivors?
What would he say to the new President who quotes him so often? Would he say send a peace envoy? That 25 years of death and destruction are enough?
Would he say that we must, even as the British and Irish governments maintain that it’s an intermal problem, help those in the land of our ancestors work out a peaceful solution? (They have had 25 years since you’ve been dead Bobby, and they haven’t gotten anywhere.)
President Clinton, in remembering Robert Kennedy said, “He went to places most leaders never visit and spoke words most leaders never speak.” Perhaps President Clinton will find courage in Robert Kennedy’s heroism and go where no other American President has ever gone, a place that has given America several Presidents – Northem Ireland.
As young Joseph Kennedy, the Congressman from Massachusetts, said, “He was a man — my father. If we are to have him a hero, let us recall all he wanted to do and all he’d be willing to put on the line to achieve these goals.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July August 1993 issue of Irish America. ♦
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