Kennedy relative still feels pain

The last of JFK's Irish cousins has recalled the devastating day news of his assassination reached the rural homestead where the famous Kennedy story began.

Retired farmer Pat Kennedy, 72, said the anniversary will bring emotions flooding back of the clan coming together in shock and disbelief only months after the US president had paid them a celebrated visit.

"I remember the evening when word came through quite well," said Pat, the last direct male descendant of the Kennedys who fled the Irish famine for Boston in the 1840s.

"Sure, we were all shocked. We heard he was shot but we thought he might survive the assassination attempt.

"But it wasn't to be."

Pat, a life-long dairy farmer, was just 22 when he was snapped alongside a beaming JFK in a famous photograph of his trip to his ancestral home in Dunganstown, outside New Ross, Co Wexford.

Five months later and the US president was murdered, in a moment that reverberated around the world and drove shockwaves into the close-knit, pastoral parish where the Kennedys came from.

"It was only on radio that time that we heard because we didn't even have television here," said Pat.

"I was on the farm and when I came into the house my mother and father told me. Everyone was shocked.

"There was nothing really we could do."

As the world talked about the events in Dallas, the Kennedys scattered within a few miles of each other around remote Dunganstown came together to share in their grief and disbelief.

"We met up at the homestead, the family and myself went up to my aunt's and we all discussed it," Pat revealed.

"We had a Mass up in the local church the next morning for him. It was a pity."

As they came together, they recalled the great excitement of JFK's visit to the homestead that June, and how he had secretly planned to make a private trip back - with wife Jacqueline and their children - the next year.

Cousins were taken on helicopter rides from the farm to nearby New Ross - from where JFK's great grandfather left Ireland in 1848 - by US security agents who were camped out at the homestead.

"That was great excitement - we hadn't even been in a plane at that time," remembers Pat.

A direct line to Washington was set up in an old stone-built outbuilding so the president could stay in constant contact with the White House.

Pat's father gave the President a walking stick during the visit and when Pat travelled to Boston to see the JFK Museum many years later, it was the first thing he saw on the wall.

"It was 50 years ago, and people still ask me what did he say to me and what did I say to him," he said.

"What do you say to the president of the United States? You would only be delighted to meet him and it was terrific to have him visit us."

But despite half a century having passed, Pat says he still often thinks about the day JFK made his poignant emigrant-to-president return to Ireland and how that joy was destroyed just months later.

"When he died we got letters here sympathising, even from Japan," he said.

"We got cases full of them. They're packed away. Some we couldn't read them because they're written in different languages. It's amazing the effect he had on people all over the world really.

"The anniversary will bring it all back to us again. It keeps coming back.

"I'll feel sorry."