The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Samantha back in the fold
BIDEN’S PICK TO LEAD AID AGENCY MAINTAINS CLOSE TIES TO WATERVILLE WHICH HOSTED HER WEDDING IN 2008
JOE Biden’s links to Mayo are well documented but one of the new US administration’s leading figures also has very close ties to south Kerry, and to Waterville in particular.
In terms of its Irish connections, the Biden White House is expected to be the ‘greenest’ since the Kennedy administration and among the President’s key appointment’s there are none more than Irish than Samantha Power who has been nominated to lead the US international aid effort.
Born in Dublin, Power and her mother moved to the US when she was nine. Following an early career as a journalist and war correspondent Power entered academia and was an influential part of Barack Obama’s inner circle in the early stages of his Presidential campaign.
Power had to quit the Obama campaign when she was recorded calling his then rival for the democratic nomination Hilary Clinton a ‘monster’ but within a few years she was back in the fold first appointed to the National Security Council and later, in August 2013, becoming US Ambassador to the United Nations.
In that role she was said to have persuaded Barack Obama to intervene militarily in Libya and campaigned vigorously for humanitarian interventions in several trouble zones a foreign policy area she had covered in her 2003 Pulitzer winning book ‘A Problem from Hell.”
Though she spent her early years in Dublin and has spent most of her life in the US, Power has family connections to Kerry and is a regular visitor to the county.
On the Fourth of July 2008, Power married her husband Cass Sunstein – whom she had met on the Obama campaign – at Mary Immaculate Church in Loher on the cliffs overlooking Waterville.
The pair’s three day wedding party at the Waterville Lake Hotel was described as a ‘boisterous affair’ with one guest, during a toast, comparing it to “a cross between ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ and the Bataan death march”.
Since their wedding the couple and their two children have been frequent visitors to the area and Power was actually in the Waterville area on holiday when Chemical attacks in Syria prompted an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council – to be Power’s first – that she was unable to attend as she couldn’t get back to New York in time.
In the coming weeks Power – who has cousins Kerry and has spoken of wanting to buy a second home in the county – is expected to be confirmed as the new head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which, with a budget of over $27 billion, is the is one of the biggest aid agencies in the world, and accounts for more than half of all US foreign aid.