Time.com
By GENEVIEVE CARBERY / MONEYGALL – Sun May 22, 1:25 am ET
As the residents of Moneygall ready themselves to play host to Barack Obama on May 23, many hope the visit will bring the Irish village exactly what the President's great-great-great-grandfather sought when he left there 150 years ago: prosperity.
It takes less than a minute to drive through Obama's ancestral hometown, a sleepy and typical rural village whose main attractions are a single pub, a corner shop, a post office and a football field. But days before the President's arrival, the quiet that usually blankets the village is broken by the stroke of paintbrushes, the flapping of Stars and Stripes, the squeak of practicing fiddlers, and the whirr of the advance security team's sleek cars. At Ollie Hayes' bar, the nerve-center of the visit, local drinkers watch with fascination as international camera crews come and go and men in black suits discuss final details.
There is tension and excitement among villagers aware that the eyes of the world will soon be on their tightknit community of 300. "When Obama announced on St. Patrick's Day that he was coming here, he didn't just say he was coming to Ireland or Europe but that he was coming to Moneygall," says bar owner Hayes proudly. Although the links between the leader of the free world and the blink-and-you'll-miss-it village had come to light years ago, when Obama was a candidate in 2007, residents like Ollie Hayes' nephew Billy Hayes still can't believe that the "most important man in the world" is about to visit.
Back then, local Anglican rector Canon Stephen Neill was central in finding the proof of Obama's ancestry in parish records. "A shiver went down my spine when I saw what was in front of me," he says. A U.S. researcher from genealogy website Ancestry.com had linked Obama's mother to County Offaly and had emailed Canon Neill asking him to search parish records. The rector discovered that the Kearney family were cobblers who helped the poor during the Irish potato famine, which lasted from 1845-1852. In 1850, Falmouth Kearney - aged just 19 - made the difficult journey across the Atlantic to lay claim to land. Looking for a better life in the U.S., he left behind a country devastated by a famine that left a million people dead and forced another million to emigrate. Kearney married and became a farmer in Indiana, raising seven children - including daughter Mary Anne, the great-grandmother of Obama's mother Stanley Dunham. Many former U.S. presidents have laid claim to Irish roots, including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Regan. But Obama's Irish connections make him unique as the "first African-American-Irish president" Canon Neill says.
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=40965.0
