The other photo was much more prominent.

It hung like a portrait of a heroic granduncle who was shot down over Arnhem.

My mother often commented that all four of her sons resembled this man, which was a little confusing because, in so far as all we knew, we were not related.

In any case, the resemblance was a myth, just as the man in the photo seemed to me to be.

It was, of course, JFK.

Such expressions of idealistic and religious devotion were not uncommon in rural Ireland in the late decades of the 20th century, and a key characteristic of that fealty was how little it was prosecuted.

There was no critique or evaluation, just fidelity to an institution or, in the case of my mother and JFK, an ideal, the promise of a better tomorrow.

I never thought it strange as a child that I could literally sketch JFK’s high cheekbones and corrugated-iron hair from memory. Maybe it was a West of Ireland thing, but people rarely hung family photographs in the 1980s, not until much later.

It’s probably just as well as we all looked a little malnourished and wild.

Framing a Kennedy was a much more elegant thing to do, and though the mystery of the Sacred Heart was never properly explained to me, I was in no doubt as to the significance, magnificence, even, of JFK.

By my mother’s telling, he was Ireland’s most handsome son, the first Catholic president of the US.

He married Jackie Bouvier, was a devoted and loving husband, and the type of father that would shame all other fathers, such was his filial fortitude.

A civil rights champion who vehemently opposed the war in Vietnam, he was struck down in his prime, but only after my mother and her best friend best friend Erna hung out of a Shop Street window and saw him in the flesh when they were 16.

Not only did they see him, but he saw them, waved and flashed a smile so bright the two teens nearly fell from their perch.

My mother still recalls how remarkably yellow he looked. Having never met an American before, I assumed it to be a suntan.

Seeing Jack Kennedy in her hometown, reaching out and touching people like a sixties Jesus, confirmed something to her that many still believe to this day: He was an unimpeachable icon.

Unbeknownst to my mother, by the time Kennedy reached Galway, he was jaundiced by liver disease, likely induced by his heavy drinking. That explains the yellowish hue. Nor could she have been aware of JFK’s Washington reputation as a womaniser and a cad.

Sixteen years old, living in Galway and not privy to CIA memos, she could never have known that, in May 1961, JFK authorised sending 1,000 Special Forces troops and military advisers to join the 16,000 already in Saigon, deployed to assist the pro Western government of South Vietnam.

Not war-mongering, but not exactly ‘kumbaya’ either.

My mother could be forgiven for not knowing any of these things then, but even when, in the decades since, these less-favourable truths came to light, she simply didn’t care.

JFK was and remains a transcendent force in her life. A totem of good in a world perpetually on the brink of bad.

His death, and the death of his brother Bobby, still rank as two of the most traumatic moments of her admittedly sheltered youth. My mum lost her only sister Marcia this week. 

Recalling that most innocent moment of promise and hope they shared as young women some 60 years ago only served to remind me of the myth of the Kennedys, and their cursed Camelot.

The truth of Kennedy’s many contradictions and my mother’s selective indifference to them has long mirrored that of Ireland and America.

For all its faults as a country, we forgave it a lot because of what the country aspired to become — a land of opportunity, one where the pursuit of happiness was fundamental to its identity, and we — the Irish — were central to the journey.

Despite successive Guinness-drinking presidents, the relationship has never been more strained. 

The irony that Joe Biden — the most Irish president since Kennedy — is the man overseeing what feels like the last days of a crumbling relationship, is rich.

When he came to Mayo last April the whole charade seemed as tired as the man himself.

The moral dereliction of his unwavering support for Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly not the cause of the current decline, but just another symptom.

The coveted green card was once the definition of winning life’s lottery. Now, it’s a booby prize.

Kennedy, like the America he briefly governed, was far from perfect. But as an emerging nation in need of a big brother, Ireland needed the US, and though we rarely understood its methods, we blindly chose to believe its motives to be pure. The dream may well be finally over.

Never meet your heroes, they say. Maybe the next time we do, we’ll have our eyes wide open.