U.S. Envoy to Ireland Feels Right at Home in Ancestors’ Land

Before leaving Washington for her new job as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Margaret Heckler remembered her late mother once asking her, “What have you done for Ireland today, Peggy?”

“I’ve finally got a reply to my mother,” she said then, “and I’m calling to her across the grave: ‘Mother, I’m going home to Ireland and I’m bringing America with me.’ ”

Margaret Heckler, the daughter of Irish parents, rose to Cabinet rank in the Reagan Administration, but her 11 months as ambassador in Dublin have been a journey into the past.

She is discovering cousins and letting nuances of Irish speech creep into her American accent.

She was reluctant at first to take the job, offered in an aura of controversy. She felt she was being moved out as President Reagan’s secretary for health and human services because of her liberal Republican views.

Happily Accepted Post

But after talking to Reagan, Heckler said, she happily accepted.

To the Irish, it was the classic story of the poor Irish emigrants whose child made good in America and came back in style. Swarms of relatives showed up at Shannon Airport, transforming a formal diplomatic event into a warm, emotional homecoming.

Ireland, she said in an interview, does odd things to her identity.

In the United States she always felt profoundly Irish. Here she feels much more American. At home, she pronounced her maiden name “O’SHAH-nessy.” Now she gives it the proper Irish treatment-- ‘O’SHOCK-nessy.”

“For the first month, as I drove through the streets of Dublin, I was continuously aware of my parents, that this is their country,” she said. “I so wished they could have been with me, especially my father, because he would have been a very good adviser on this new situation. And he would have enjoyed it so much, and my mother as well. They’re very much in my mind.”

Emigrated from Limerick

Her parents emigrated from the Limerick area to Flushing in the New York City borough of Queens. Margaret Marie O’Shaughnessy was born there in 1931.

When she was 9 the family returned to Ireland and she spent a year in the western Irish countryside of County Leitrim. Then the family went back to the United States.

She became a lawyer, married John Heckler, had three children, and in 1966 was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, holding her seat for 16 years. The Hecklers divorced in 1985 and their three children are grown. Margaret Heckler lives alone in Dublin.

Aside from her ambassadorial duties, she has found time to discover her Irish relatives. They telephone her office or write, and usually receive a dinner invitation.

One night she was expecting Michael Noonan, an Irish Cabinet minister, for dinner. But the Noonan who turned up was not that Noonan. He was an opposition politician--and a cousin.

‘A Long-Tailed Clan’

“We’re a long-tailed clan,” she said. “The O’Shaughnessys, the Sheehys, the McKeowns--they’re large.”

One of her contributions to Dublin’s social whirl has been the Ballygowan spritzer--wine with sparkling Irish mineral water. “It serves my calorie-cutting needs as well as my alcohol-reduction needs.”

Although an anti-Reagan streak runs through the Dublin press and intelligentsia, especially after the Libyan bombing raid, she finds the average Irishman instinctively sympathetic to things American.

“People here want to share Ireland with me, each in their own special way,” Heckler said. “There’s always that special dimension of caring.”

Not so the exclusive Portmarnock Golf Club. She is the first U.S. Ambassador not to be invited to join the all-male preserve. Local feminists are urging her to protest, but she says they will have to fight their own battles.

The great pleasure she is looking forward to, she said, is planting a tree in her parents’ memory at the ambassador’s residence.

“It’s in some way an opportunity for me to bring my parents into my present life and it really means a lot to me.”