Simon Tierney

speaker

132 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 18 Jul

Simon Tierney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Pat Kenny Show · From JFK to Trump: The politics of airport names · 18 Jul 2026 podcast

Last week, Pat, the Treasury Secretary, he rushed back from the NATO summit in Turkey for a particular reason, and that was to officially rename a bridge in Jefferson County, Tennessee, as the President Donald J. Trump Bridge.

Here is Scott Besant.

Yes, Pat.

So there's 13 airports currently named after U.S.

presidents.

Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, you mentioned in D.C.,

to less familiar ones perhaps, such as the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Of course, Bill was the governor of that before he became president of Arkansas.

Now, the first was JFK in 1963.

It was just two weeks after his assassination that New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, he submitted a bill

to change the name from Idlewild International Airport, as it had been known, to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

And that, of course, was with the consent of Jackie, his widow.

Here's how the dedication on Christmas Eve of 1963 was reported.

Yeah, they turned it around extremely quickly.

Yeah, so the Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne has, of course, advocated, Pat, recently for the renaming of Dublin Airport in honour of Sean Lamass.

That's been well covered.

But previously, there were calls for Cork Airport to be named after Michael Collins, but to no success.

The only example of an airport in the Republic, at least, being named after a person was when NOC first opened back in the mid-80s.

And it was actually initially known as Horan International Airport after Monsignor James Horan, of course, who had campaigned so vigorously to have it built.

But on the island of Ireland, the only airport bearing a person's name is George Best International Airport in Belfast.

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