The President, Mrs McAleese, had them eating out of her hand during her tour of Texas last week - from where she and her husband, Martin, returned with matching stetsons, courtesy of the Houston International Festival. At one lunch, she was asked what message she had for the overwhelmingly male leaders of the world. To roars of delight, she replied simply: "Get ready to stand aside". She confessed to an almost childlike delight during her tour of NASA. Guided by the second Irishman in space, now NASA associate director, Brian Duffy, she met Dan Barry, an astronaut in training for the next Shuttle launch, whose grandparents left Tipperary in the early 1900s. To her amusement, the crew were dressed head-to-toe in bright orange space-suits for a flight to be launched on July 12th.
Barry (47), of South Hadley, Massachusetts, got degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton and then Cornell, followed by a medical degree from the University of Miami. But it wasn't enough to land a place in the one job he had wanted so badly since he became transfixed by space travel as a boy. He applied to join NASA every year from 1978, but it was 14 years before they took him on. "Don't ever tell your kids your dreams can't come true," he says.