FOR years it was the dream of every self-respecting Irish student: after a year denouncing British oppression in the college bar, the only way to spend the summer was sipping Guinness surrounded by plastic leprechauns in a Boston pub.

Five years ago, thousands of students camped out overnight to get a visa to spend four months in the Irish-loving paradise of Bill Clinton and the Kennedys. Now George W. Bush is begging them to visit.

Days after the President was sworn in for his second term, his Ambassador to Ireland has embarked upon a charm offensive to persuade the youth of the Irish Republic that the US is “not what they just see in the headlines every day”.

Ireland’s youth is so out of love with America that the number of students applying for a summer visa scheme has halved within a year.

As he embarked on a tour of universities and colleges last week, James Kenny, the US Ambassador, said that recapturing Ireland’s youth was “hugely important for us” and admitted that a wave of anti-Americanism was stopping many students visiting the US.

Referring to a slump in applications for the J1 summer visa programme, from 6,500 in 2003 to 2,800 last year, Mr Kenny said: “We were pretty disappointed. What we hope to do is get the numbers back up to where they were previously to 2004. I hope that we can make it easier and more welcoming for people.”

Until recently, a summer in the US was a rite of passage for Irish students, with more than 150,000 taking advantage of the J1 scheme since it was established in 1966.

Under the scheme anybody at university in the Republic and Northern Ireland can spend up to four months living and working in the US. For years the number of visas was capped at several hundred but, in the 1990s, thousands travelled, including members of the Thrills, the pop band who wrote their debut album So Much for the City during a summer in San Diego.

Even those most in favour of the scheme said yesterday that it appeared to be in danger of collapsing, largely through anti-war sentiment but also because the Celtic Tiger economic boom had made it easier to find work at home.

Francis Kieran, president of the students’ union at Trinity College, Dublin, where the sale of Coca-Cola was banned recently and George Galloway, the antiwar MP, was a guest speaker, said: “There are definitely a lot of students here who would be opposed to American foreign policy and anti-Bush.”

Ben Archibald, president of the Students’ Union of Ireland, which passed a motion condemning the Iraq war, said that people had also been put off by new security measures introduced after September 11.

All applicants have to sit an interview at the US Embassy in Dublin and to provide two “inkless” digital fingerprints.

John Collins, 21, from Dublin, who is studying business studies at Trinity College, said that there was no way that he would consider going to the US. “It’s ridiculous that you have to go for an interview at the US Embassy,” he said. “We are students going to have fun for the summer; we are no threat to US national security.”

He said that he and five friends had decided to go to Canada this summer, where work visas can be obtained over the internet.

Orlagh Clynch, 19, from Tallaght, outside Dublin, who is studying nursing at Trinity College, said: “I don’t even think I’d go on a holiday to America.”

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