Tom Barry (Cork East, Fine Gael)

I would like to take this opportunity to invite a member of President Obama's visiting party to County Cork to visit the ancestral home of an Irishman who exerted considerable influence on the formative years of the United States of America, that is, Edmund Burke. If Burke's vision of co-operation and trade had been embraced and implemented earlier, it would have dramatically changed the course of American and world history. We might be living in a different world today. However, Burke's early recognition of America's great potential as a market of singular global importance marks one of the earliest and most significant political connections between Ireland and America.

Killavullen in north County Cork is the ancestral home of Edmund Burke, one of the greatest political writers and orators of his or any other time. He intervened passionately on behalf of the American colonists in the 18th century in an attempt to avert war.

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