Presidential state car (Ireland)
car currently used to transport the president of Ireland
The Presidential State Car is the official state car of the President of Ireland. It is a 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith landaulette. It is used on state occasions and ceremonial events, but not for routine transportation.
Origins
Douglas Hyde, the first president of Ireland was provided with a state car, but his near fatal stroke early into his term of office meant that he rarely travelled in public. When he retired in 1945 the Irish state decided that, his successor, Seán T. O'Kelly, needed a special state vehicle for formal occasions. However what type of vehicle it should be caused an immediate row between the President-elect Seán T. O'Kelly and the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera. O'Kelly wanted to have a state horse-drawn carriage whereas de Valera wished to have a car.
Initially O'Kelly got his wish and he was transported to the 1945 Irish presidential inauguration in the landau of the late Queen Alexandra the Queen Mother, which had been hired specially from a Dublin livery company. The landau was accompanied by the Irish presidential Mounted Escort, the Blue Hussars.
Contrary to expectations, the use of the landau proved a major success.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Presidential state car (Ireland)” as car currently used to transport the president of Ireland. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7241470. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1947 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Presidential state car (Ireland)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.