On the evening of March 13 1965, a man whose face was soon to become one of most famous in the world walked unrecognised into Hanratty's Hotel in Limerick.

Che Guevara, for it was he, had been forced to spend a night in Ireland when his plane made an unscheduled stopover at Shannon airport after developing mechanical trouble. He had been flying with Cuban government officials and friends from Prague to Havana.

Though a writer in Ireland's (now defunct) Sunday Tribune described the surprise visit by the Latin American revolutionary as "one of the great missed scoops of Irish journalism" one reporter was on hand to interview Guevara. That was Arthur Quinlan, the self-styled "Shannon airport correspondent" who died, aged 92, just before Christmas. And his story duly appeared on the front page of the Limerick Leader.

Some 33 years after that historic meeting with Guevara, Quinlan wrote about the experience, explaining that he had been warned in advance that Guevara would avoid an interview by saying he didn't speak English.

So Quinlan drew on his knowledge of Guevara's Irish ancestry to coax him into talking. At the airport hotel Quinlan told him: "Anybody whose maternal grandparents were Lynches either speaks Gaelic or English. Which is it to be?"

Guevara, according to Quinlan, "returned my smile and suggested that we walk out by the lagoon behind the hotel."

But the "missed scoop" claim has some relevance because Quinlan admitted: "I did not learn very much from him for he would not speak on politics or where he had been."

Later, it emerged that Guevara was returning from a covert mission to the then Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). He had led an unsuccessful intervention in the country's civil war (see his Wikipedia entry).

Instead, Guevara talked of his Irish background. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1928, the first child of Ernesto Guevara Lynch whose own mother, Ana Isabel Lynch, was the daughter of Irish immigrants from Co Galway who left around the time of the Irish famine.

And that was it. Interview over. Guevara and his friends travelled into the city of Limerick, accepting Quinlan's advice to go to Hanratty's hotel. "He was three sheets to the wind when he got back to the airport," said Quinlan. He "was also festooned in shamrock, as it was coming up for St Patrick's Day… so you can take it that he enjoyed himself in Limerick."

Two years later, Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia. International fame followed as the dead revolutionary was accorded legendary status, with his iconic stylised image being transformed into an emblem of rebellion.

And Quinlan? Well, he proved to be something of a journalistic legend by interviewing a host of celebrities during the years when Shannon, the last runway in Europe, was a major transatlantic fuel stop.

Many years after Guevara's death, he even managed to score a Cuban double by interviewing Fidel Castro. "His guards weren't going to let me near him until I mentioned that I had interviewed Dr Guevara," said Quinlan. His persistent references to Che as "doctor" did the trick. And he ended up showing Castro how to make Irish coffee.

In a freelance career spanning 50 years, Quinlan worked for several papers, notably the Irish Times, and made regular broadcasts for RTÉ. He also edited the Limerick Weekly Echo for several years.

He interviewed every US president from Harry Truman to George Bush Senior and many Soviet leaders, including Andrei Gromyko. Among his royal interviewees were Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, King Zog of Albania, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Monaco's Prince Rainier with his wife, Grace Kelly.

His interview with George Bush was a classic. He managed to get a few words with him at 4am when the president visited the duty free shop. Bush's brief statement on the Middle East situation, which Quinlan transmitted to global news agencies, amazed US journalists.

Why, they wondered, had Bush given such an interview to a mere Irish "stringer"? Quinlan was in his 80s before he finally retired. And Shannon itself has been in a sort of retirement for a long time.

The last big story to emanate from the airport occurred in 1994 when Russia's president, Boris Yeltsin, stopped off in order to greet Ireland's prime minister, Albert Reynolds.

To Reynolds's great embarrassment, Yeltsin never left the plane. Yeltsin said he was asleep and was never woken. Some people suggested he was too drunk. His daughter said he had had a heart attack.

The result was that Reynolds was left standing on the tarmac at Shannon. Why didn't he call on Quinlan?

Sources: Saoirse32/Irish Times/Wikipedia/Society for Irish Latin American Studies/Irish Examiner/Wikipedia