Jackie Kennedy: said Irish people have a persecution complex and she hated our food. Photo: Getty Images

JACKIE Kennedy was disdainful of the Irish who she considered having a persecution complex and she hated our food.

She spoke out against the Irish Americans who surrounded her husband in the tapes of a seven-part conversation the former first lady had with the historian and former aide to her husband, Arthur Schlesinger soon after President Kennedy was assassinated.

Irish-American website irishcentral.com reported on Mrs Kennedys scorn for her husband’s community after the tapes were broadcast on national television in the US last night.

Speaking of those close to her husband she stated “there was the Irish Mafia... who now, some of them, at least from the Irish-- are just so bitter about everyone else.”

“There seems to be all these Irish-- they always seem to have a persecution thing about them,” she said.

Her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy didn’t escape her criticism as she was disdainful of his “Irish” style of political campaigning. "Jack never said ‘Hi Fella' or put his fat palm under your armpit, or any of that sort of business,” she noted.

Irish cuisine wasn’t to her tastes either as she considered remaking the menu so that the White House kitchen served French food rather than a traditional Irish dish, a major step-up in her opinion.

“French food is a plus instead of a minus-- that you don’t like, stay in a kitchen all day making Irish stew.” she noted.

Her late husband’s devout Catholicism also came in for criticism with her telling how every night he’d "come in and kneel on the edge of the bed --cross himself and say his prayers. -- it was just like a little childish mannerism.”

She also reveals the suspicious nature of her mother-in-law Rose Kennedy, a devout Catholic, and says that she always demanded to know if someone was Catholic.

Earlier in the week, it emerged in the media that the former First Lady considered civil right campaigner Martin Luther King a “phony” who regularly cheated on his wife and dubbed French president Charles de Gaulle an "egomaniac".