Chelsea digs Shannon connection

SHANNON provided the “little piece of Ireland” that then President Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea took with her as a teenager and which she has to this day.
This was disclosed by the former First Lady and now US Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton when she delivered the keynote speech to the national gala dinner of the America Ireland Fund on the eve of Irish-American St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington DC.
The occasion was the first time that Chelsea Clinton had set foot in Ireland, the Secretary of State recalled. She was then a teenager and was on a presidential flight when it stopped at Shannon to refuel. She joined her father, the 42nd President of the United States, and her mother when they stepped off their US Air Force One aircraft.
“As we got off the airplane, she went up to one of the officials standing there to greet us and she was engaged in a very serious conversation,” the leading figures in the America Ireland Fund were told.
Confessing that she did not quite know what her daughter was up to, the former First Lady recalled that when Chelsea rejoined her parents she announced, “They’re going to let me do it”.
When her mother asked what Chelsea was going to do, the daughter replied, “They’re going to let me leave the airport and go out and actually touch the ground of Ireland”.
Chelsea not only touched the ground of Ireland at Shannon, she also brought part of it back to the United States, her mother recalled.
“She gathered some soil from Shannon Airport and placed it in a bottle. She brought that home with her to the White House, where it resided until she went off to college and she has kept it ever since.”
“Ireland has meant a great deal to me and to Bill,” the Secretary of State told her audience, when she also revealed how charmed she and her husband have been by the variety of claims to the Irish ancestral roots of President Clinton. She said her husband keeps finding people who insist that they have identified the authentic roots.
“He now has about five pictures of the small little house that his family was alleged from; all of them different and all of them displayed as though they were the real place,” she said.
Having amused her audience with the inside family stories, the Secretary of State commented, “It shows how strongly Bill and so many of us feel about this connection we have to Ireland and the stake we feel we continue to have in Ireland’s future.”