'Divine Intervention' brought Pope safely to Maynooth

‘DIVINE intervention’ is how Athboy native pilot Sean Oakes describes the safe arrival of Pope John Paul II in Maynooth on the last day of his visit to Ireland in 1979. The Athboy man was the senior helicopter pilot flying the pope around Ireland that year, and a thick fog almost prevented the papal party getting to the County Kildare venue.
The helicopter company which was scheduled to carry the pontiff to Maynooth that morning wasn’t going to chance it. Irish Helicopters, which was also involved in transporting the pope and the hierarchy around the country during the visit, was asked to get the pope to Maynooth.
Sean Oakes and Fergus O’Connor were the pilots who had been delivering Pope John Paul to the various centres around Ireland, and they were asked if they would fly him down.
“We were at the airport from about 4.30am on 1st October as the pope was due to be picked up at the Papal Nunciature in Cabra about 7am,” Sean explained. “I asked the Air Corps to do a test flight to Maynooth, but they came back to us, having declined to get airborne, and said it wasn’t on either. Every other way of getting the pope to Maynooth was looked at, road and rail, and it was decided that they weren’t feasible either.”
So Sean decided “I’ll try it”. He flew to the Navan Road, and collected the Holy Father and his party. “We followed the Navan Road down to the bridge at Clonsilla, and then followed the railway line to Maynooth. We had done the flight a few days before, so I knew the railway led very close to the college grounds. We were about an hour late.”
He believes it definitely was divine intervention which got them there. “The pope put his escape from assassination down to divine intervention, but he had it on his side here, too, I firmly believe. And, funny, I felt completely safe on the way, I wasn’t in anyway concerned.”
Sean, son of the late Larry and Noeline Oakes from St Joseph’s Villas, Athboy, now lives in Cork with his family, where he was stationed in 1979. He had trained as a pilot in Shannon in 1967 and lived in Dublin for three years until 1976. He and Dublin man Fergus O’Connor flew the pope for most of the three days of his visit here, collecting him daily at the Papal Nuncio’s residence
on the Navan Road in Dublin. Providing the pope’s personal security at the time was Hughie Reynolds, a garda who had played football for Louth.
Sean recalls as one of the most amazing memories the crowd waiting in the Phoenix Park for John Paul II. “I had never seen a crowd like it. We flew in, initially low over them, and Cardinal O Fiaich told the pope there were one million people there. You could hear the disbelief in the pope’s voice as he repeated ‘one million’. Then I remember the flashing of cameras as we landed.”
One of Sean’s particular memories of the Phoenix Park occasion was trying to get the pope back on the helicopter after the Mass.
“He was a very active man. We had managed to get him onto the helicopter, which had two large doors each side, both of which were open. Next thing, he saw the crowd on the other side of the helicopter,
and he was gone again, over to meet them.”
One of the greatest acts of faith Sean witnessed during the visit was as they flew over Cloghan in Westmeath en route to Clonmacnoise, on the second day. “Someone had obviously drawn a line on the
map and discovered we’d be flying quite close to the high hill at Cloghan. The cloud was very low that day, so to avoid going up into it, we kept one side of Cloghan hill, to the south. There were about 100 people on the side of the hill, and ‘Cead Mile Failte, Pope
John Paul’ had been marked out in whitewashed stones on the side of it. I drew Cardinal O Fiaich’s attention to it, and he drew the pope’s attention to it. We circled it for a short time.”
Sean believes it was a great act of faith because they could have flown any way past the hill, and could have been half a mile in the other direction, not seeing that side of the hill at all.
The crowd at Ballybrit racecourse in Galway spoke for itself, he says. “We were privileged to be in the pope’s presence all the time, not having to queue or
get involved in crushes. It was unbelievable.”
As they were flying all the time, the two pilots had little chance to meet the pope personally, but Fr John McGee, now Bishop McGee, arranged for them to meet him as he left Bishop Eamon Casey’s residence after dinner in Salthill.
“We were aware that there were hundreds of people outside the walls, but we couldn’t really see them. You could hear them. The pope was coming to meet us, and they all started cheering ‘We want the Pope’. He waved at them to come in and we were swamped in seconds, My God, you could nearly hear them bringing the wall with them. That was our brief meeting with the pope.”
It was only after the tension of the three days was over and Sean looked back on the experience that he was able to savour it. “When the eyes of the world are on you, you don’t want anything to go wrong. You know the feeling when you press the start button and nothing happens. Luckily, every time I pressed it, it started,” he says.
It was definitely the highlight of his career, he says, and the greatest moment of it all was seeing those people at Cloghan with their welcome for the pope.

 

(First published, Meath Chronicle 9th April 2005)