The Irish Find What They’re Looking For

Published: May 21, 2011

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MONEYGALL, Ireland

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Istvan Banyai

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THE unsentimental president is about to get a sentimental education.

Not everyone in Ireland is sure that Barack Obama has roots here as well as in Africa. “I have me doubts,” said an immigration official at Dublin Airport.

But don’t have the gall to tell that to Moneygall, a farming town 86 miles southwest of Dublin that is besotted with the wonder of being the ancestral home of the 44th American president.

This blocklong village (population 298) in County Offaly has erupted in a paroxysm of partying and marketing. Not since Jay Gatsby has there been such a frenzy of self-invention.

The newspaper, The Offaly Independent, has for now changed its name to The Obama Independent. A group of female hoofers have rechristened themselves the Obama Stepdancers.

Amid the pebble dash cottages, the Obama Café is opening on Main Street and Barack Obama Plaza is rising on Lower Main Street. (The town is so small it’s up the Main Street and down the same street, as they say here.) They’re even building a special Barack Obama exit ramp from the highway.

Ollie Hayes’s pub, where the president is slated to sip Guinness — dubbed “the most famous pint in Irish history” by the extremely excited IrishCentral Web site — has a metal bust of Obama on the bar and cheesy paintings of him on the walls.

When Irish eyes are selling: The bakery hawks Obama brown bread “fit for a president.” Along with the usual Irish tchotchkes, like plaques reading “Alcohol doesn’t cause hangovers, waking up does,” shops have sprung up to sell Obama clocks, magnets, lighters and T-shirts reading “O’bama Is Feidir Linn” (Gaelic for “Yes We Can”) and “What’s the Craic Barack?” (craic means fun). Happy to share the credit for Obama’s heritage, they even put travel pamphlets for Kenya in the window of the T-shirt store.

“This was a spare room in this old man’s house two weeks ago until my auntie opened this shop,” said a cashier at one store, 16-year-old Aidan Fanning.

The president’s distant cousin, 26-year-old Henry Healy, a tall, thin bookkeeper for a plumbing business, happily wanders the streets of this Obama Potemkin village talking to Fox News and all other comers. He and the local canon, Stephen Neill, sprinkled with Obama fairy dust, have just been given jobs as TV pitchmen for Irish tourism.

When I asked Healy what he would say when he met the president, he assured me he wouldn’t try to borrow money. “The country might need it that badly,” he said, “but I don’t.”

Bill Clinton’s Cassidy relatives may have been conjured out of blarney when he did his roots-and-Guinness ritual tour in 1995. But the Irish are quite certain that Fulmouth (or Falmouth) Kearney, a shoemaker, was the great-grandfather of the president’s great-grandfather. Some Catholics here speculate that Kearney got the name Full Mouth because as a Protestant, he had more money to buy food in the famine years. Unless, of course, it was Foul Mouth. Kearney — from a Gaelic word meaning “victorious” — emigrated to Ohio in 1850 after the family got land there.

After a burst of late-blooming confidence and prosperity, the Irish have retreated to gloom and doom of late. When they became brilliant financiers overnight, we should have known something was wrong. The Celtic Tiger turned out to be a paper tiger, and the Irish economy collapsed in a real-estate Ponzi scheme.

Yet the Irish are a superstitious people, and back-to-back visits by a queen and a president seem a favorable augur.

Ollie Hayes, the pub owner, a slab of a man on a high from hanging with the Secret Service, sees a chance to restore the true Irish nature. “When we were the Celtic Tiger, we lost touch with our neighbors and ourselves,” he said. “We’re paying the price for it. We hope this is the beginning of something brilliant.”