I never thought to be asking a question about Dundalk in the White House press room. But that happened this week, and I suspect it was the first and last time the National Security Adviser of the President of the United States will have to answer a question about Dundalk.
President Clinton is going to give an open-air address in the Co Louth town next Tuesday when he drops in there on his way from Dublin to Belfast on his third and last presidential trip to Ireland.
How Dundalk came to be on the itinerary of the Leader of the Free World intrigued and delighted me. I grew up there and recall as a boy listening to Eamon de Valera and Frank Aiken addressing enthusiastic crowds at election rallies in the Market Square in front of the handsome courthouse.
The late Roddy Connolly promised he would ride a white horse around Dundalk if he were elected a Labour TD for the "wee county". His headquarters was opposite the Munster and Leinster Bank in Clanbrassil Street where I then resided, and the high-decibel playing of the music hits of the 1940s probably won him more votes than his election speeches, of which I remember nothing.
Anyhow, Roddy won and we followed the white horse.
I would love to think Bill Clinton would ride a white horse around Dundalk, but of course he won't. The Secret Service would not like it, and it might remind people of the town's one-time image as an El Paso where IRA combatants came for rest and recreation or to plot the next killing.
Eamon Collins, the IRA man working for the customs service in Newry, told in his book, Killing Rage, about his frequent visits to Dundalk to be debriefed about targets he had picked and to help set them up for their killers.
"Rarely a weekend passed in Dundalk without some sort of party for republicans," he recalled. He also spent time there in the "unofficial hostel for IRA men on the run".
Dundalk in the 1940s also had its IRA connections. When a local man, Richard Goss, was executed in Portlaoise prison by firing squad for an armed attack on an Army patrol, there was mourning in the town.
When the funeral of a former IRA chief-of-staff, Sean McCaughey, who died on hunger-strike in Portlaoise, came through on its way north, there were huge crowds. About a dozen boarders from St Mary's College, where I went to school, who disobeyed a ban on viewing the cortege were expelled, but most were taken back.
So why is President Clinton making a historic stop in the Border town? Has it anything to do with the association of Dundalk with prominent figures in the "Real IRA" who are trying to wreck the Good Friday accord which the President helped to bring about? Will he figuratively go down on his knees like Pope John Paul II 21 years ago outside Drogheda, also in Co Louth, and beg the men of violence to give peace a chance?
Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser, who is more used to dealing with hot spots like Jerusalem, Kosovo and Iraq, sees Dundalk in less dramatic terms.
"The significance of Dundalk is that we want to go outside Dublin because it is the third time he [Clinton] will have been in Dublin. Last time he went to Limerick. This is a new venue on the Border with Northern Ireland which suffered severely during the conflict and which has been revitalising since the conflict," he said.
"I think that it symbolically expresses both what we can't go back to and what the future holds if they stay on course."
The President sees Dundalk as a "model of economic regeneration. This is a place which knows what violence has wrought and what peace can bring," Mr Berger said.
I bet those phrases turn up in the Dundalk speech as the President gazes over at the Cooley Mountains and Slieve Gullion. Then he will be off, probably flying by helicopter over the Gap of the North to his hotel in Belfast.
Dundalk will have played host to a US president for, I would think, the first and last time. I'm sorry I won't be there to see it, but the US has taken a long time trying to pick his successor.