Jane Sanders Interview - The Irish Times [View all]

‘We didn’t win the election, but we won the hearts of young people,’ says the Vermont senator’s wife, who visits Ireland next week

Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 06:00


Excerpt:

I’m here to meet Jane O’Meara Sanders, the senator’s wife and political adviser, at the headquarters of the Sanders Institute, a nonprofit set up to promote progressive ideas and policies that grew out of his 2016 campaign.

Softly spoken but quietly passionate, Jane Sanders is off to Limerick next week to speak at I.NY, a new festival celebrating the relationship between Ireland and New York.

Like millions of Americans, she grew up in an Irish-American household. The youngest of five children, Sanders was born in Brooklyn, growing up just 10 blocks from the man who was to become her future husband, although they were not to meet until years later. Her paternal grandfather emigrated to the United States from Tipperary, and three of her great-grandparents came from Ireland. “It’s funny. None of my parents’ generation had been to Ireland,” she says. “My generation went to check it out and fell in love with it.”

But it was only when she travelled to the old sod for the first time, in 1985, that she appreciated her heritage. “Visiting Ireland reminded me of when I first arrived in Vermont. I thought, This is home.” She and Bernie had been visiting his brother, Larry, still a Green Party activist in England, and took the ferry to Ireland. “As soon as my feet hit the ground I said, ‘Yes, this is it.”

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/jane-sanders-bernie-would-have-beaten-trump-1.3237204