Famous shillelagh owners in history

The internet is full of lists of famous shillelagh owners. Most of the items on those lists are based on a misreading of how the stick works as a cultural object. The shillelagh is mostly a gift, not a possession; the famous “owners” are mostly recipients of state visits, not collectors. And the genuine biographical stick anecdotes — the ones that actually involve the named figure carrying or using a shillelagh in their everyday life — are rare enough that most of the famous-list entries dissolve under examination.

This is the careful version. Where a claim is well-attested, it is presented with the source. Where a claim is widely repeated but not adequately sourced, it is marked [VERIFY] with notes on what would resolve the question.

The shillelagh as gift, not possession

The frame to keep in mind throughout: in the Irish twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the shillelagh has been a diplomatic and ceremonial gift to a degree that few other folk objects of a comparable scale have. Visiting heads of state, military officers, civic dignitaries, ecclesiastical visitors, and naturalising citizens have all, at various times, been presented with a shillelagh on the occasion. The act of giving is the cultural performance. The recipient generally accepts it, says some appropriate words, has a photograph taken, and the stick goes either onto a wall in the recipient’s office or — more often — into the recipient’s institutional or presidential museum collection, never to be carried again.

This means that “famous shillelagh owners” is, in most cases, a list of people to whom Ireland or an Irish-American organisation has given a shillelagh. It is not, in most cases, a list of people who carry one. The distinction matters, because the popular framing makes it sound as though the named figures had some personal attachment to the stick, when in fact they have a piece of state-gift kit sitting on a shelf in a museum.

John F. Kennedy

The most-cited example is President John F. Kennedy, who is widely said to have received a shillelagh during his June 1963 visit to Ireland and to have kept it on his desk in the Oval Office afterwards.

The first half of this is well-attested. The 1963 visit is one of the most thoroughly-documented presidential trips of the twentieth century, and gifts of various Irish craft items, including at least one stick, appear on the gift inventories preserved at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library [VERIFY: the specific term “shillelagh” rather than “walking stick” or “blackthorn stick” in the original gift inventory needs confirmation against archival records]. A photographic record of the trip shows Kennedy receiving sticks from civic delegations on at least two stops [VERIFY photo references].

The second half — the “Oval Office desk” detail — is murkier. The Kennedy assassination in November 1963 was less than five months after the Ireland visit; the personal desk arrangements during that brief period, and the disposition of presidential gifts in the post-assassination archive, are not as clearly documented as the visit itself. The “Kennedy’s shillelagh sat on his desk” claim is widely repeated in popular accounts, but a specific archival photograph of the stick on the Oval Office desk has not, to our knowledge, surfaced [VERIFY].

What can be said firmly: Kennedy received at least one stick on the Irish visit; the stick (or sticks) entered the JFK Library’s archive of his official gifts; and the resulting cultural memory has accumulated detail that is harder to substantiate than the core fact.

The line of US presidents after Kennedy

Every American president to visit Ireland since Kennedy has, on the public record, received some form of presentation stick. The pattern is so consistent that it functions more as a piece of state-visit choreography than as a series of individual gifts.

• Ronald Reagan, on his June 1984 visit, received a shillelagh-type presentation piece [VERIFY exact form against the visit’s gift inventory]. His Irish ancestry, which he made central to the visit’s framing, made the gift particularly resonant.
• Bill Clinton, on multiple Irish visits in the 1990s, received presentation sticks on at least three occasions [VERIFY count]. The 1995 and 1998 visits in particular involved formal civic presentations.
• George W. Bush received a stick on his 2004 visit [VERIFY].
• Barack Obama, on his May 2011 visit to Ireland — including the much-publicised stop at Moneygall, the home village of his ancestor Falmouth Kearney — received a shillelagh as part of the ceremonial gifts [VERIFY exact piece and giver].
• Donald Trump, on his June 2019 visit, received [VERIFY presentation gifts].
• Joe Biden, on his April 2023 visit — closely linked to his Irish family heritage — received presentation sticks on multiple stops [VERIFY count and pieces].

The point of this list is not the individual recipients but the stability of the practice. Visiting US presidents are, more or less reliably, given a shillelagh. The stick functions as a piece of state-visit material almost on the level of the inscribed silver bowl or the bound book. The recipient is rarely the actual holder for any meaningful period of time; the stick goes to the relevant presidential library or to the official-gift archive maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, which holds presidential gifts that exceed certain valuation thresholds.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish leprechaun

Outside the diplomatic context, the most famous “shillelagh owner” in popular American culture is the Notre Dame Fighting Irish leprechaun mascot, officially adopted by the university in 1965 and a registered Notre Dame trademark since. The leprechaun’s standard kit is a green cutaway suit, an Irish country hat, and — at the centre of the costume — a shillelagh which the mascot brandishes during games and crowd performances. The stick is performative, sized for theatrical effect rather than for functional use, and is replaced periodically as wear and damage require.

The Fighting Irish iconography itself is older than the mascot — the term has been associated with Notre Dame’s athletic teams since at least the 1920s — but the formal leprechaun-with-shillelagh as a registered mark dates from 1965. The shillelagh is part of a costume, not a personal object, and the cultural register is closer to mascot-wear than to genuine craft.

Daniel O’Connell and the Irish parliamentary tradition

Of the Irish historical figures associated with the shillelagh, Daniel O’Connell — the Liberator, leader of the Catholic emancipation campaign and the parliamentary rights movement of the early nineteenth century — appears in folk memory as a stick-carrier. The popular image is of O’Connell with his shillelagh in hand at mass meetings.

This is, at the level of literal biographical fact, harder to substantiate than the popular image suggests. O’Connell was a barrister, a parliamentarian, and a public orator whose “monster meetings” in the 1840s drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands; he was not, in any specific photograph or contemporary engraving that we have been able to locate, depicted carrying a shillelagh in the iconic sense [VERIFY against Royal Irish Academy and National Library of Ireland visual archives]. The association between O’Connell and the shillelagh appears to be a product of later folk-memory and political iconography rather than a documented biographical detail.

This is worth saying clearly because the O’Connell-with-a-shillelagh image circulates in some Irish-American historical popular accounts in a register that suggests certainty. It is, at best, plausible folk-memory. It is not equivalent to the documented Kennedy-and-Reagan gift records.

Other names that recur

A shorter list of names that appear regularly in “famous shillelagh owners” round-ups, with brief notes on what is known:

• General George S. Patton Jr is associated more reliably with a swagger stick than with a shillelagh; the conflation between the two objects is part of how this kind of list accumulates [VERIFY any genuine Patton-and-shillelagh source]. (See Swagger sticks.)
• Pope John Paul II, who visited Ireland in 1979, received Irish craft gifts including, by some accounts, a presentation stick [VERIFY against Vatican archives or the visit’s Irish gift inventory].
• Queen Elizabeth II, on her 2011 Irish state visit — the first British monarch’s visit since Irish independence — was reportedly presented with several Irish craft pieces, possibly including a stick [VERIFY against the state visit’s official gift records].
• Various British army regiments with Irish connections — including the Royal Irish Rangers and the Royal Irish Regiment — maintain ceremonial sticks of various forms, sometimes shillelaghs, in their officers’ messes [VERIFY current regimental practice].
• Ronald Coleman, Spencer Tracy, and various twentieth-century Hollywood actors of Irish-American background appear in studio publicity photographs holding shillelaghs as costume props for St Patrick’s Day press releases [VERIFY: studio publicity rather than personal ownership].

What this list is, and isn’t

The honest summary is that the famous shillelagh owner as a category is largely a popular-culture artefact rather than a documentable biographical fact. The diplomatic gift tradition is real and well-attested. The mascot use is documented. The personal-carrying claims, with very few exceptions, dissolve into folk memory under archival pressure.

This is not a criticism of the practice. The diplomatic shillelagh is a real and meaningful object, and its history as a gift is part of the cultural reach of Irish craft. The popular framing of those gifts as “personal ownership” is what stretches.

If you are writing or thinking about a famous-shillelagh-owner story and want to be careful, the test is straightforward: was the stick a state gift? If yes, the recipient is best described as such — a head of state given a stick on a visit, not an owner-and-carrier of one. If the claim is more personal — that the figure carried, used, or particularly valued the stick — the claim needs a primary source: a photograph, a contemporary letter, an inventory record. The primary sources are out there, in some cases, but the popular accounts rarely provide them. The verification work is worth doing.

This is the honest version, with [VERIFY] markers throughout. If you can fill in any of those verifications with primary-source citations — Kennedy Library photographic record, NARA gift inventories, regimental mess records, the JFK desk question — please write to the editor. The piece will be updated as confirmations come in.