Senator Thad Cochran recoils when it is pointed out that it will be 50 years ago this September that he first passed through the front arch of Trinity College Dublin to study international law.
The Republican, who has served as a Mississippi senator since 1978 and is the fourth most senior member of the Senate and second most senior Republican senator, won a fellowship to study at Trinity in 1963. At 25, the life-changing year put him at a distinct advantage over his American peers.
“It broadened a base for me that made me more intellectually mature than my contemporaries were back in the US because of the opportunity to have this intensified legal opportunity before my time,” he said.
Cochran is a member of the powerful Senate appropriations committee that directs federal spending, which puts the respected conservative Republican in the midst of the continuing budgetary battles in Washington.
In 1996 the senator was one of the top two candidates to replace Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole as Senate majority leader but he lost out to the junior Mississippi senator, Trent Lott.
Remembering Ireland
In his office in the Dirksen Senate Building on Capitol Hill, Cochran remembers
the cold Irish weather. He lived in lodgings off Booterstown Avenue in south Dublin in a house owned by a spinster, the only child of a former Bank of Ireland manager. He took the bus into Trinity every day. "It was colder than I thought it would be. It felt colder because it just seeps into your soul. I hadn't been exposed to prolonged, constant low temperatures," he said.
Cochran applied to Trinity after seeing how two friends had excelled after studying abroad.
He won a fellowship through the Rotary Foundation and could attend any college with an affiliation with rotary clubs.
As part of the fellowship, he had to make countless speeches around the country. He gave a talk entitled Mississippi: Civil War to Civil Rights . Cochran would later play a significant role in the state's history, becoming the first Republican senator from Mississippi since the US Civil War.
The civil rights movement in Mississippi was developing ahead of a similar movement in Northern Ireland. “It was in the process of transition,” said the senator of the changes taking place at home while he was in Trinity, “and it was interesting to see how change was occurring and how it could be changed without another civil war or widespread bloodshed”.
Joyce and Yeats
While studying in Dublin he read works by James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. The Irish he met mostly asked him whether he knew the author Eudora Welty, who was from Jackson, or Elvis. He said that he had seen Welty in a grocery store in his hometown of Jackson and that he didn't know Elvis.
Cochran, who has returned to Ireland a few times since the 1960s, understands the ties between Ireland and the US, and why they are celebrated at this time of year on Capitol Hill.
“In cities in America where there was a large Irish population there was a sense of identity with Ireland and with what became the Republic of Ireland,” he said.
“It is awfully hard to explain it to people who haven’t lived in Ireland.”
Cochran admits that as a student, over and above the changes in Irish political life in the mid-1960s, he was often “more interested in where the next party was going to be”.
