Soon after that, the acting ambassador travelled to the village, the Irish Prime Minister phoned Healy, and the public-affairs director of the U.S. In early 2009, Healy and Stephen Neal, the rector who found the old records, corresponded with the president of the Irish American Democrats. Kennedy, America’s first Irish-Catholic President, once told the citizens of Limerick, “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.”Ī cross-Atlantic courtship began between Obama and Moneygall. Richard Nixon and the Bushes claimed Irish heritage. Bill Clinton learned that he might have family from County Fermanagh. Ronald Reagan learned that his great-grandfather hailed from Ballyporeen. Obama was not the first American politician to discover a lurking Irishness in the past half-century, finding one’s Celtic roots has been something of a Presidential tic. In Henry, a tall man with glassy blue eyes and ears bordering on the prominent, they found a spokesman for the Healy line. As word spread that Obama had a skinny, white eighth cousin-several, in fact-in a rural Irish village with a population of three hundred, reporters poured in. He recalls glancing at his mother and saying, “Did he just say ‘Kearney’?” The Kearneys had married into the Healy family in the eighteenth century Henry had been interested in family trees since his father’s death, thirteen years earlier.

Healy was twenty-two, and had lived all his life on Moneygall’s central thoroughfare. Henry Healy was watching the news with his mother one evening in 2007 when the newscaster mentioned a familiar-sounding name. For the young senator from Illinois, this newfound heritage became occasional campaign-trail fodder it was a hoot, and didn’t hurt with Irish-American voters. That year, a genealogist from pieced together the family story with the help of a rector in Ireland who had access to church records from the nineteenth century. But it was back in 2007 that the world, and Obama himself, first learned about great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth. The Irish roots of America’s first African-American President have a way of registering perpetually as a news flash.

One of the little Irish babies was Barack Obama. Their youngest daughter had children of her own, and those children had children, and those children had children. They had children and resettled, eventually, in Indiana, where Kearney worked as a farmer. There, he boarded a New York-bound coffin ship, so named for the high mortality rate among passengers. From New York, Kearney, an intense-looking man with a pressed-down mat of dark hair, made his way to Ohio, and married an Ohio woman named Charlotte Holloway. When, in 1850, the Kearney family learned that a relative in America had bequeathed them a parcel of land, Falmouth Kearney, then nineteen years old, set out from his twelve-and-a-half-foot-wide house for Liverpool. In the tiny village of Moneygall, on the border of Offaly and Tipperary, the Kearney family turned to shoemaking. By the arrival of the Great Famine, they’d joined millions of fellow-citizens who were hungry for a restart. But the eighteen-hundreds brought a cold reappraisal of artificial hair. Wigs were popular among the aristocracy, and useful in a pre-shampoo era. During the eighteenth century, a wigmaker in Ireland could expect to have a prosperous career.

Obama then perish