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Obama Arrives in Ireland for Six-Day Trip to Europe

By Mark Landler

• May 23, 2011

MONEYGALL, Ireland — President Obama may not be related to everybody in this postage-stamp Irish hamlet of 300, which claims him as its native son. But on Monday, Mr. Obama appeared determined to hug, kiss, shake hands or raise a glass with every last one of them.

“He held my hand, he drew me close and he kissed me on the cheek,” said an ecstatic Anne Maher, 50, who was wearing a red cap with the words “Obama Moneygall 2011” on it. “I’m not going to wash that cheek for a lifetime.”

In a jubilant visit that included a pint of Guinness at a local pub — the first lady, Michelle Obama, had a half-pint — a stop at a house once lived in by his great-great-great grandfather and quite possibly the most garrulous rope line he has ever worked, Mr. Obama made a familiar pilgrimage for an American president: going back to his Irish roots.

It was the emotional highlight of a 12-hour visit to Ireland by the president, as he kicks off a six-day tour of Europe that will also take him to Britain, France and Poland — and immerse him in thorny issues like the military campaign in Libya and upheaval elsewhere in the Arab world.

Mr. Obama’s itinerary is already under threat from an ash cloud spewed by an erupting volcano in Iceland. To get ahead of the cloud, the White House said the president would fly to London late Monday rather than stay overnight in Dublin.

With fierce winds and sudden downpours, Mr. Obama did not escape the weather. But he did get a breather from geopolitics, delivering a speech at Trinity College in Dublin that celebrated the bond between the Irish and Americans, one unblemished by rifts over peace negotiations or counterterrorism policy.

“I’m Barack Obama, from the Moneygall Obamas,” he said to a fired-up crowd of 25,000. “And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

After poking fun at the questions back home about where he was born, Mr. Obama told the story of his great-great-great grandfather, Fulmouth Kearney, a shoemaker’s son from Moneygall, who sailed for New York at the age of 19.

In going to Ireland’s bucolic hinterland, Mr. Obama was retracing the steps of Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton. But he learned of his Irish connection only in 2007, when a curious churchman looked up his mother’s family records. Those old papers were shown to Mr. Obama on Monday.

For flesh-and-blood evidence, he was introduced to Henry Healy, a gangly man with pronounced ears said to be an eighth cousin of Mr. Obama’s. Mr. Healy has become something of a local celebrity, earning the nickname Henry VIII. He waited for his moment with crowds, four deep, stretching a quarter of a mile up Moneygall’s main street, which was lined with Irish and American flags.

Ireland had just finished taking down the Union Jacks that greeted Queen Elizabeth during her visit last week. Mr. Obama cited that as evidence of the progress Ireland and Britain had made in putting the violence of the past behind them.

“The economy needs a lift, the people need a lift, and this brings a big lift,” said John Kennedy, a county official named after the president who visited Ireland in 1963, the year he was born.

Nearby, John Donovan, 44, waited to welcome Mr. Obama to his well-kept, pebbledash house, where Mr. Kearney once lived. “I’m so nervous I can’t talk,” said Mr. Donovan, who listed his occupations — in “descending order” — as shopkeeper, funeral director and farmer.

Moneygall’s link with Mr. Obama has transformed it into an instant tourist destination. Or, as Susan Wallace, a lifelong resident said optimistically, “The name might change to Money-all.”

At Ollie Hayes’s Bar, the president’s heaviest task was waiting to let the foam on his pint subside before drinking it. “You tell me when it’s properly settled,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Hayes, after he drew the pint. “I don’t want to mess this up.” Plunking money on the bar, he added, “I just want you to know the president pays.”

Standing in the pub’s low-ceiling room, surrounded by distant relatives and those who claimed they were, Mr. Obama said: “There are millions of Americans who trace their ancestry back to this beautiful island. Part of what makes it so special is because the Irish influence on American culture is so powerful in the arts, in politics, in commerce.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. and Mrs. Obama were welcomed by President Mary McAleese, a lawyer and a native of Northern Ireland, who watched as Mr. Obama helped plant an Irish upright oak tree in a garden behind the presidential residence in Dublin (a sequoia planted by Kennedy swayed nearby).

In a private meeting, a senior White House official said, Mrs. McAleese told Mr. Obama that her son, then living in the United States, woke her by phone early one morning in 2004 to tell her he was canvassing for a young politician that he believed would one day be elected president.

“Did he tell you it was a Gaelic name?” Mr. Obama replied.

Meeting Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Mr. Obama voiced solidarity with Ireland as it struggles with the economic fallout caused by a collapsing real estate market and insolvent banks. “For the United States, Ireland carries a blood link,” the president said.

For his part, Mr. Kenny presented Mr. Obama with an Irish hurling stick — a sort of flattened field-hockey stick, which the president joked he could use on unruly members of Congress — as well as a three-volume set of children’s stories by a 1920s Irish author on the myths and legends of Hawaii, for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.

Thanking him, Mr. Obama said, “It just confirms that if you need somebody to do some good writing, hire an Irishman.”

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Rediscovering Obama’s Irish Roots

By Chris Colin

During the eighteenth century, a wigmaker in Ireland could expect to have a prosperous career. Wigs were popular among the aristocracy, and useful in a pre-shampoo era. But the eighteen-hundreds brought a cold reappraisal of artificial hair. 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. 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. 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. They had children and resettled, eventually, in Indiana, where Kearney worked as a farmer. Their youngest daughter had children of her own, and those children had children, and those children had children. One of the little Irish babies was Barack Obama.

The Irish roots of America’s first African-American President have a way of registering perpetually as a news flash. But it was back in 2007 that the world, and Obama himself, first learned about great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth. That year, a genealogist from Ancestry.com pieced together the family story with the help of a rector in Ireland who had access to church records from the nineteenth century. 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.

Henry Healy was watching the news with his mother one evening in 2007 when the newscaster mentioned a familiar-sounding name. Healy was twenty-two, and had lived all his life on Moneygall’s central thoroughfare. 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. 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. In Henry, a tall man with glassy blue eyes and ears bordering on the prominent, they found a spokesman for the Healy line.

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. Ronald Reagan learned that his great-grandfather hailed from Ballyporeen. Bill Clinton learned that he might have family from County Fermanagh. Richard Nixon and the Bushes claimed Irish heritage. John F. 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.”

A cross-Atlantic courtship began between Obama and Moneygall. In early 2009, Healy and Stephen Neal, the rector who found the old records, corresponded with the president of the Irish American Democrats. 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. Embassy paid a visit. Finally, the new ambassador gave Healy the message that would spark the longest period of insomnia he had ever known: Barack and Michelle Obama were coming to Moneygall.

If you live in a city or a good-sized town, or really any place that people visit of their own volition, you must strain, much as Moneygallers strained, to comprehend the effects of what happened next to their generally overlooked village. A donation of thirty-five thousand litres of paint was secured, from Dulux, to touch up every house; the company also provided a color coördinator’s services. Every pothole was repaired, planters were hung in windows, and a ticket system was devised to accommodate all those who wished to join the reception on Main Street. No conceivable “O’Bama” souvenir went unrealized: placemats, teapots, hats, key chains, “Yes We Can” T-shirts written in Gaelic, “What’s the craic Barack?” coffee mugs. Brack, a kind of fruit loaf, became “Barack’s brack.” Soon the Secret Service began the painstaking process of insuring that the most excited people in Ireland did nothing foolish.

On May 23, 2011, Healy sat at Ollie Hayes Bar, Moneygall’s main pub (the other one sits on the other side of the road), watching live footage of Marine One landing nearby. He was a wreck. The son of a farmer, he worked in accounts at a local plumbing company. Now his local bar had been equipped with fourteen phone lines, and soon he’d be part of the inner circle hanging around with the President of the United States. “Someone offered me a brandy, but I didn’t want the President’s first impression of an Irishman to be one who smelled like alcohol,” Healy told me, this past fall. “I had a pint of water.”

The Obamas' first stop was to a low, drab-looking house toward the south end of Main Street. It was the ancestral home—the place that Falmouth had left, a century and a half earlier, for America. The President could’ve just nodded appreciatively, one Moneygaller told me. But he wanted to check it out. Healy and Hayes were with him, and reported later that he seemed genuinely moved there in the living room. He stomped on the floorboards where his people had walked, pored over an artist’s impression of how the house had once looked, and then relayed what he had learned to the First Lady when she walked in.

Then they went to the pub. In photos, ruddy locals beam over the couple’s shoulders, unable to contain their palpable joy. Healy is seen seldom more than a foot or two from the first family, and not looking remotely nervous. Ollie Hayes, Healy’s uncle and neighbor, stands nearby. By all accounts, the atmosphere verged on euphoric. “You’re keeping all the best stuff here,” Obama declared at one point, talking about how Guinness tastes better in Ireland than abroad. The quote, sounding like a broader endorsement, was later memorialized on a sign outside the pub. “We are going to talk about this day forevermore as the day that Moneygall made history,” Hayes said. Healy told a journalist that it was “the greatest day this village has ever had, ever will have.”

The Obamas left the pub to find all of Moneygall waiting outside, along with a few thousand visitors. The plan was for the first family to say a few hellos and then get in a limo. But, as locals tell it now, something came over them, and they walked the entire length of the village, shaking every hand. Lengthwise, it’s said to have been the longest Presidential handshake session in modern history. And then they left. The Obamas left, the Secret Service left, the media left. Everybody left except the Moneygallers themselves.

Preparations ahead of Obama’s visit to Moneygall. *PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIEN BEHAL / PA WIRE / AP *{: .credit}

The first thing you notice about Moneygall is that you’ve accidentally driven through it. In the northeast, you quickly find yourself in Irish countryside: ash trees, low stone walls, thick-walled homes hunkered down against the chill. On a recent morning, the local radio station aired a segment on the proper installation of flue liners.

But zip out of Moneygall from the southwest and you arrive at the gleaming, glassy Barack Obama Plaza, rising in thrilling disharmony from the cows and hills and green. The multimillion-dollar complex opened on the outskirts of town three years after the visit. Only technically is the futuristic-looking structure just a rest stop. Inside, diners can find proper Irish meals, in addition to fast food, and a spacious dining room with actual silverware. Upstairs, there’s a suite of meeting rooms, should anyone need to conduct a meeting. Down the hall, an extensive visitors center showcases all things Obama-plus-Moneygall. There’s an exhibit on other famous locals, a bust of Obama, a giant photo of Healy shaking the President’s hand.

Having been put on the map by Obama’s visit, Moneygall intended to remain there. The plaza is the most elaborate of the village’s monuments to its historic significance; for a while, there was talk of building a hundred-and-fifty-room Barack Obama Hotel. The Obama Café opened on Main Street, and the village’s official Web site began promoting an Obama-themed bike ride around the region. Visitors can attend the annual Obama Country Fest; stroll through the nearby cemetery, where the President’s ancestors are buried; or snap selfies outside the church they likely attended. And, of course, they can pop into Ollie Hayes Bar, itself a mini museum of Obama photos, memorabilia, and another bust of the President. The sign out front has been modified to incorporate a blown-up photo of Obama drinking Guinness.

On a brisk Wednesday evening this fall, three middle-aged men sat on stools in the pub watching a cooking show, while Hayes, who is fifty, and the fourth generation of landlords, scrolled idly through his phone. In the half-decade since the Obamas’ visit, Hayes and Healy were amazed to find that their relationship with the first family did not simply fade away. Healy got to bring his mother to the White House, and has made two trips to Washington, D.C., with Hayes, the first on an invitation from Obama. The second time, not wanting to trouble the President, they attempted to attend his Second Inauguration as members of the public. Soon after arriving in the States, however, they received an e-mail from the White House, and were invited to the Inaugural Ball, the Inauguration itself, and another private function. “Cousin Henry!” Michelle exclaimed when she saw him, and everyone hugged everyone.

Healy and Hayes estimate they’ve met with Obama ten times. Their days of getting nervous before each encounter are over. During one visit, tooling around Washington with the President in his limo, Healy and Hayes realized with mortification that they’d been talking at length about septic-tank regulation in Ireland. Obama, for his part, seemed fascinated. Recalling this and other evidence of Obama’s character, Hayes turned solemn. “A sound man,” he said.

The Obama connection still draws out-of-towners to the bar. “We’ve all become tour guides,” Hayes said. “It’s brought everyone together. Just one of the ways everything changed that day.”

But hope and change can snag. Mary Murray, who runs Moneygall’s sole bed-and-breakfast, told me that not all the transformations have been positive. Economically, the village struggles like never before, she said, pointing to the Obama Café, a short walk down Main Street. Fourteen American flags hang outside, and the front door is flanked by potted plants inscribed with “Welcome” and “Obama,” but most prominent is the sign in the window: “For Sale or Lease.” The antiques shop has also closed; the hardware store has closed. The art gallery moved to a bigger town. Mary Bergin, who runs Moneygall’s convenience store and post office, told me, “When I first opened, there were five shops on the street. It was busy all day. I’m the last one left, and I’m barely hanging on.” Down the road, the old Kearney home is no longer open to tours, a pursuit that didn’t bring much income. The owners began renting it out to peat farmers from Lithuania. One morning, I camped out on a stretch of Main Street sidewalk for an hour. The only human I saw was the mail carrier. I would have wondered where everyone was, but, of course, I knew.

When I got to the Barack Obama Plaza, it was packed, as it was every time I visited: travellers, a visiting school group, a meeting of school teachers in one of the community rooms. Outside the gift shop, I spotted Henry Healy, looking friendly in a power tie. He still lives in town, though no longer with his mother, and he still tweets regularly about Obama, and U.S. politics in general. (“Anything to be said for four more beers? #ElectionDay,” he tweeted, on November 8th.) When his plumbing-company job vaporized shortly after the President’s visit, he was besieged with offers. Now he is the operations manager at the rest stop. When a child got sick near the Papa John’s, I watched him approach with statesmanlike purpose.

The response to the plaza has been divided. Certainly it has created jobs and raised the local profile. But it has also siphoned business away from Main Street, amplifying a problem that began when the nearest motorway was rerouted to bypass the village. With so many necessities available under a single gleaming roof, visitors to the old shops have all but vanished. Bergin called the plaza “the last nail in the coffin for us.” Maybe there could be no better tribute to the President than an unresolved squabble in his name.

In the dining area, families were eating late lunches, kids were climbing under tables, and a boy in a Black Sabbath jacket was stealing glances at an older girl. It looked like a town square. With only a little reaching, it was possible to imagine a future President paying a visit to the place decades, even centuries, from now. “My ancestors worked right there at the Papa John’s,” he or she might say, or, “You’re keeping all the best stuff here.”

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By Sally McGrane

By David Remnick

By Susan B. Glasser

By John Cassidy

Trip to Ireland

President and Mrs. Obama travel to Ireland where they meet with the President, Prime Minister, and one of President Obama's distant cousins, Henry Healy.

Media Gallery

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama arrive in Moneygall, Ireland, May 23, 2011. (P052311PS-0830)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet Henry Healy, the President’s distant cousin, after arriving in Moneygall, Ireland, May 23, 2011. The President and First Lady were also welcomed by Counselor Danny Owens, Chair Offaly County, and Counselor John Kennedy, Chair Tipperary County (center). (P052311PS-0841)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama leave the stage with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his wife, Fionnuala Kenny, during an Irish celebration at College Green in Dublin, Ireland, May 23, 2011. (P052311PS-1713)

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama talk with Irish President Mary McAleese and Dr. Martin McAleese during a courtesy call in the Drawing Room at the President’s Residence in Dublin, Ireland, May 23, 2011. (P052311PS-0118)

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Obama visits Ireland, his ancestral homeland

May 23, 2011 / 5:07 AM EDT / CBS/AP

DUBLIN - President Obama opened a four-country, six-day European tour when Air Force One touched down in Ireland on Monday, where his largely ceremonial visit will highlight America's deep ties with the Irish.

Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle Obama made their way down the plane's steps through the driving wind and rain to be greeted by Irish officials on Dublin airport's tarmac.

The couple quickly climbed aboard the Marine One presidential helicopter for the onward journey to Irish President Mary McAleese's official residence in Dublin, where the Irish leader was to formally welcome Mr. and Mrs. Obama to the Emerald Isle.

The centerpiece of Mr. Obama's 24-hour stop on the Emerald Isle will be a visit to Moneygall, the tiny village where the president's maternal great-great-great-grandfather was born. Residents in the town of 350 eagerly anticipated Obama's arrival and the chance to raise a pint with the American president who shares their roots.

"O'Bama" and his Irish roots

CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante reports that, while the president is obviously not a full-blooded Irishman, he is, like four other American presidents, Irish enough to make a stop in the ancestral homeland of tens of millions of Irish-American voters.

His great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, left Moneygall for America in 1850, and the village - freshly painted, prettied up and stocked with souvenirs - was charged in anticipation of his arrival. He was to meet some distant relatives and drop by the local tavern.

The White House said the trip was to "celebrate the relationship between our two countries and the contributions Irish-Americans make to our deep and broad ties."

Mr. Obama will meet also meet with Irish leaders and deliver a speech in the center of Dublin that is expected to celebrate Irish culture.

From Ireland, Mr. Obama will travel to England, France and Poland.

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Barack Obama in Ireland - Monday 23 May 2011

9.30am: Ireland's burgeoning reputation for booking big-name acts continues to grow. Last week the country welcomed the Queen , who wowed supporters with her ability to wear green, make small talk and resist the lure of Guinness.

This week the country has arguably gone one better, attracting US President Barack Obama, who will meet President Mary McAleese and Taoiseach Enda Kenny. Obama will arrive in Dublin for his 24-hour trip, which will include a 45 minute visit to Moneygall, County Offaly, said to be home to some of his ancestors.

The village has been decked out with US flags ahead of Obama's arrival – make him feel at home, etc – and he will reportedly meet some of his distant relatives during his stay. First Lady Michelle Obama has made the trip too, and tonight the pair will return to Dublin, where Obama will deliver his set-piece speech in front of a crowd of 25,000 people in College Green.

Tomorrow, Obama's six-day European jaunt continues with visits to England, France and Poland, but today all the talk is of his presence in the Emerald Isle. Will he support Ireland's drive to improve the terms of the IMF/European Central Bank multi-billion euro bail out? Will he get on with his long lost relatives? Will he drink a pint of Guinness?

Find answers to those questions/some of those questions here.

9.32am: Air Force One is down. Obama is in Ireland. Let the fun begin...

9.37am: Obama's plane is stationary on the Dublin tarmac, the steps being wheeled towards the open door. It's raining and blowing a gale – which should add to the authenticity of the president's visit. Just waiting for the man himself to disembark now.

9.42am: He's out! Holding hands with Michelle as they walk down the steps. Michelle's hair is being blown about all over the place.

The president is in a dark blue suit, with blue tie and what appears to be a pink shirt. Michelle is in a light dress with dark suit jacket. They meet Ireland's Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore at the bottom of the steps, before trotting across the tarmac to a waiting helicopter. They will shortly be heading for central Dublin to meet Mary McAleese and Enda Kenny.

9.47am: Our Ireland correspondent, Henry McDonald, will be tracking the US president's movements today. Henry writes that the Irish government has wisely "advised members of the public who want to see President Obama in the flesh not to bring any weapons to Dublin's College Green this evening".

Umbrellas (presumably and especially ones from Cold War Bulgaria) flags, banners, sharp objects and bags or backpacks are all banned from a secured area between Dame Street and the gates of Trinity College from 2pm on today. The advice to carry "no weapons" appears this morning in a government advertisement published in today's Irish papers. Meanwhile among those celebrities who will make appearances on various platforms around the President are sports stars like Brian O'Driscoll, fresh from Leinster's Heineken Cup triumph in Cardiff at the weekend; actors including Gabriel Byrne and Daniel Day Lewis and a host of pop and traditional music stars including the infamous X-Factor twosome Jedward. Meantime welcome to the Irish weather Mr President! Irish state weather organisation Met Eireann reports it will be wet, windy and stormy today.

9.54am: Last week Andrew Marr , this week Jedward . Did Obama wrong someone in a previous life?

Still he's meeting Brian O'Driscoll as well , so every cloud.

Speaking of clouds, Obama's helicopter is just coming in to land at Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the President of Ireland, under a big load of them.

10.03am: "But what's being said on Twitter?" I hear you cry:

10.09am: Henry writes from Dublin that "they are already queing close to Christchuch Cathedral for a chance to get into the cordon around College Green and hear Obama speak later".

His first port of call this morning will be a visit to President Mary McAleese at her home in Dublin's Phoenix Park. After that meeting he will hold talks with Irish Premier Enda Kenny at Farmleigh House, the Irish government guesthouse where the Queen and Prince Phillip stayed last week. During his discussions with the taoiseach the Irish government will seek to persuade the president to back Ireland's drive to improve the terms of the International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank multibillion euro bailout for the Republic's economy. While Kenny will ask Obama for outright backing, the taoiseach will explain why Dublin wants a lower interest rate in its payback plan to the global financial institutions. From Dublin Obama will take the presidential Marine One helicopter to Moneygall in County Offaly – the tiny village from where his Irish ancestors hail. The 300 villagers who live there have been issued with special access tickets for the 45-minute visit. His helicopter will land on a local gaelic sports pitch which is just across the county "border" in Tipperary. Following a visit to Moneygall he travels back to Dublin for his set-piece speech in front of a crowd of 25,000 people in College Green.

10.21am: Obama is the sixth serving US President to visit the Irish Republic, Henry tells me.

Among other luminaries who have planted their feet on the "oul sod" has been JFK, Tricky Dick Nixon, Ronnie Reagan and George W Bush. An enthusiastic Obama has just shaken hands with President McAleese and told the welcoming party: "We are thrilled to be here." Surveying the sky above the President has said, optimistically, "the sun is coming out, I can feel it". Meanwhile up at Dublin Castle the high winds have led to masonry falling off the building.

10.35am: Time.com has more on Obama's link to Moneygall (great-great-great-grandfather on his mother's side):

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.

The website also has a rather charming gallery of members of Obama's family tree .

10.41am: Obama has just planted a tree in Phoenix Park, to rapturous applause. "What a great job!" exclaims Mary McAleese. (It wasn't that great a job).

Anyway Obama is now speaking to some Irish schoolchildren. "Everybody say cheese," he says, as the group turn for a photo. "That's what we say in America."

Henry writes that as the president shovelled the soil on to his tree, the children – including a pupil from Ireland's traveller community – sounded 'The Peace Bell'. "The peace bell was founded in 2008 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland," Henry says.

10.55am: Below the line freedomisprofit writes : "Don't tell me, we are now supposed to believe Obama is from Ireland!" (I think we were supposed to believe that a while ago, actually ).

"Talk about shameless electioneering playing to the white vote back home," they add.

liveschwarz replies :

Yes, there's a bit of shameless electioneering going on. So what? Obama wants to pick up the Irish-American vote (not as potent as it once was, but still there) and put to bed those pesky rumors that he is a Muslim. Before British people start mud-slinging or throwing around the Paddy jokes, please remember that a few weeks ago you shut down your country for a wedding.

11.06am: Meanwhile, Roy Greenslade has linked to this video from the Corrigan Brothers on his blog :

Sample verse:

"2011 in the month of May, In Moneygall town, a historic day To his great, great, great grandfather's home The president's back among his own."

11.14am: Obama has arrived at Farmleigh, the state guesthouse where the Queen and Prince Phillip stayed last week. He'll hold talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, once they're through the obligatory photo shoot.

Henry writes:

Although the Irish papers report that Enda Kenny will try to express Ireland's view that interest payments on the IMF/European Central Bank bail out loan to the Republic should be lowered, it is probable the US president won't be able to offer much practical help. He has no real clout over the IMF/ECB decision making. On other practical matters Obama might be able to offer hope to thousands of illegal Irish immigrants in the United States who are looking for legal status.

11.20am: Henry writes from Dublin that it was "all beams and smiles" as Enda Kenny and his wife greeted the Obamas on the steps of Farmleigh House.

And no wonder from Kenny's viewpoint as this visit marks a momentous week in the first few months of his new government. After more than a year of horrendous global publicity due to the fiscal crisis and the recession the Republic has been enjoying seven days of positive publicity starting with the Queen and on to Obama's arrival. In between Leinster won the European Heineken Cup. Even the death of Dr Garret Fitzgerald - the one dark event in the last week - has at least reminded the Irish people that their country had produced statesmen respected both at home and abroad. There is definitely a "feel good factor" around Dublin today but whether it lasts is another question.

11.38am: Our man Jon Henley is over in Ireland, bidding to reach Moneygall:

Rarely seen security like this. Exits 22 and 23 - the Moneygall junction - of the M7, the main motorway from Dublin to Limerick, have been coned off and are completely closed. Garda police in fluorescent jackets are stationed on every bridge and on the corner of every field. It's blowing a genuine gale - the car is rocking as I type this in a layby off junction 24, which is open, amazingly. The rain appears to have stopped for the time being. You can see Moneygall (briefly) from the motorway; 15 minutes ago it looked deserted bar the ubiquitous yellow fluorescent jackets. Apparently the 298 residents had to undergo house searches over the weekend and all those staying overnight in the village were issued with special passes. Am now going to try to get as close as I can on the back roads...

11.51am: More on Jon Henley's valiant efforts to reach Moneygall – they've ended in a pub a couple of miles away.

I've just been turned back at a Garda road block between Toomevara and Moneygall, about 3km from the village. Remarkably patient police officer ("I haven't been home for a week, in between this and the Queen. And it's raining again.") advised me politely to turn right back round again, go back to Toomevara and watch the whole thing in the pub on the TV. "You won't get any closer that this," he said. But even he's not sure when Obama is due here - some say 1.30, apparently, others not till 3pm. So I'm off to the Tipperary Inn ("Great value - come on Inn").

11.59am: Here's a look at the Irish papers today, courtesy of @davidmacAP on Twitter.

12.15pm: My colleague Lisa O'Carroll wrote on her Ireland business blog this morning that even if Obama doesn't endorse Kenny's bid to improve the terms of Ireland's IMF/EU bailout deal, "his visit will help the country's profit and loss account in the shape of tourist dollars".

With his eye on the Irish vote (35m claim Irish heritage in the US), Obama will surely oblige the evening bulletins across the US by doing what the Queen didn't do and sup a pint of Guinness. That photo alone will go a long way to help restore Ireland's image as a tourist destination (although the exchange rate won't make it any cheaper for those carrying dollars). If the coverage of Queen's visit last week is anything to go by, Obamamania will go worldwide. Analysis of the media coverage by Ireland's tourist board showed the Queens's visit to Ireland has featured in 11,629 articles across the globe. Press coverage by country UK: 4,868 USA: 3,819 Germany: 1,010 Spain: 835 Canada: 514 France: 376 Italy: 389 Total Articles 11,629

12.37pm: Northern Ireland's peace process provides a "ripple of hope" to people locked in other conflicts across the world, President Obama said following his meeting with Enda Kenny.

Henry McDonald has more:

The President stressed "how inspired we have been by the progress that has been made in Northern Ireland. Because it speaks to the possibilities of peace and people in long standing struggles being able to re-imagine their relationships". In a meeting with Taoiseach Enda Kenny this morning, President Obama referred to the historic nature of the Queen's visit to the Republic last week. He said: "To see Her Majesty the Queen of England come here, to see the mutual warmth and healing that took place as a consequence of that visit, to know that the former Taoiseach Fitzgerald was able to witness the Queen coming - that sends a signal not just in England, not just here in Ireland but around the world. It send what Bobby Kennedy once said was a 'ripple of hope' that may manifest itself in a whole range of ways." The President also mentioned successive US administrations efforts to secure peace in the north of Ireland. "So to all those working tirelessly to bring about peace in Northern Ireland, to those who have been willing to take those risks we are grateful to them. We are proud of the part America played in getting both sides to talk and provide a space for that conversation to take place. We want you to know that we are there for you as that moves forward. " On the Republic's role on the world stage he said Ireland "punched above its weight" in terms of its military forces' role in UN peacekeeping and in particular at present peace-training projects the Irish Defence Forces were carrying out in Afghanistan.

1.03pm: While Obama is in Ireland, at least 89 people have been killed in Missouri , when a Tornado left 30% of the city of Joplin in ruins.

The White House has sent this update on how the president is staying abreast of the situation back in the US:

"The President received multiple updates on the tornado damage throughout the course of the flight. He instructed his staff to keep him updated and to stay closely coordinated with state and local officials going forward."

1.21pm: The White House has just sent out a full transcript of Obama's remarks following his meeting with Enda Kenny.

Believe it or not, the US president mentioned Irish Americans quite early on – specifically his fifth sentence. Snippet:

Barack Obama. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP The friendship and the bond between the United States and Ireland could not be stronger. Obviously it is not just a matter of strategic interest, it's not just a matter of foreign policy; for the United States, Ireland carries a blood link with us. And for the millions of Irish Americans, this continues to symbolize the homeland and the extraordinary traditions of an extraordinary people.

Obama went on to say the US is "rooting for Ireland's success" in the country's bid to stabilise its economy. "We'll do everything that we can to be helpful on the path to recovery," he said.

The president went on to praise Ireland's peacekeeping work in Afghanistan and how "inspired" the US has been by the progress made in Northern Ireland.

Kenny, in return, said he had given a gift of three volumes of children's stories – based on legends of Hawaii – to Obama for his daughters Malia and Sasha. Obama described it as "an extraordinary gift".

Kenny also presented Obama with a hurling stick, which I'm sure the US president will get lots of use out of back home.

1.34pm: Below the line JewellyBird offers this counterpoint to some of the cynicism over Obama's Ireland jaunt:

I'm extremely pleased that the Irish Americans still value their connection with this country. When they no longer do, that will be a bad day for us, a huge loss. In any event, the cynicism is baffling. What on earth is wrong with Mr Obama visiting Ireland? What's wrong with a tiny village having a great festival on the basis that the most powerful man in the world has ancestors there? There are tons of Irish families who are aware of forebearers who went to America during the famine (including my own), an event which cemented the relationship between Irish and Americans, pretty much created the Irish community. I think it's a relevant, interesting and wonderful thing that a person who can trace his ancestory back to those terrible times can now come back and be celebrated.

1.55pm: My colleague Lisa O'Carroll reports that the so-called "beast" – Obama's huge armour-clad Cadillac limousine , which has been flown over for the visit – isn't invincible after all.

In a moment of melodrama, the beast got stuck on the way out of the American Embassy – causing a temporary hitch to plans to go to Moneygall. RTE reporter Katriona Perry said the low-slung vehicle appeared to get stuck on the security ramp at the embassy. The car was unable to move, with the President and Michelle Obama stuck for five or six minutes. About 15 uniformed and plain clothes police rushed to their aid and a minibus was quickly scrambled to block photographers' views. Perry, who climbed a tree to report, has just told Joe Duffy's talkshow, that a second beast came up from the underground carpark to rescue the president and his wife who are now believed to be on his way to Moneygall.

2.08pm: Henry McDonald, the Guardian's Ireland correspondent, has been mixing with the crowds waiting to see the president, and reports that "thousands are queueing patiently in the streets of central Dublin for a chance to see Obama in the flesh".

They will have to pass through security cordons controlled by sharply dressed Americans in sunglasses who are standing at airport style check out centres. The majority of those filing up towards the tented security area were children, young people and families including a group of secondary school pupils from St.MacDarat's school in Dublin who admitted they had bunked off their lessons today to see the President. American tourists currently on holiday are also taking the opportunity to see their leader address the crowds on the first day of his European tour. Outside Dublin City Hall Nancy Hayes from Texas said it was a "neat coincidence" that she was in Ireland at the same time. "It looks like everyone is really happy here, the people in Dublin are very excited that they will see him," she said. Security remains tight despite the festive atmosphere in the streets, with thousands of gardai deployed around a sealed off area from the south bank of the river Liffey up to the gates of Trinity College and beyond to Christchurch Cathedral.

2.23pm: Now then:

2.45pm: The Obamas are now on board their helicopter en route to Moneygall, birthplace of Obama's great-great-great-grandad. We'll have more when they arrive.

3.03pm: Obama has now landed close to Moneygall, where the weather looks blustery but sunny. The streets of the village are lined with revellers eager for a glimpse of the US president.

Barack and Michelle Obama are now speeding towards the village, population around 300. People have apparently had to apply for tickets to glimpse the US president today.

3.12pm: Obama has arrived! He and Michelle have just met a man purported to be Obama's eighth cousin, Henry Healy, who was hugged by both president and first lady.

The sun's out, and now the Obamas are wowing the assembled masses. Handshakes all round. They're going down well, taking their time and stopping to chat to residents.

3.19pm: Obama has just lifted a baby from the crowd and posed her for a photograph. The crowd goes wild. It's taking Barack and Michelle an age to say hello to everyone. He's going to be well ready for that pint.

3.34pm: When the Obamas arrived it was raining and overcast. It then became sunny for a short while, then back to overcast and is now absolutely pouring down.

No worries for the US president and first lady, however, as he has just entered his ancestral home – the home of great-great-great-grandad Falmouth Kearney. Before long they're back out again, popping into the local shop. (No word on what they're buying).

3.49pm: Obama is now in Hayes pub in Moneygall, chatting to locals/local dignitaries who've been shipped in.

I'm now handing over to Simon Jeffery .

4pm: The big development, or Moneygall shot if you prefer: Obama has drunk from a pint of Guinness in Hayes pub. Unfortunately the TV feed cut out before we could see if he finished it or if - indeed - he afterwards popped out for a cigarette.

After taking a few intensely-photographed gulps Obama popped some coins down on the bar, telling the pub "The president always pays his bar tab. That's how we do things". He then said the following words about his experiences of the Irish stout:

The first time I had a Guinness was in Shannon airport. We were flying to Afghanistan, it was the middle of the night ... it tastes better here than it does in the States. What I realised was, is that you guys are – you're keeping all the best stuff here

So great publicity for Guinness, not perhaps so great for Irish bar owners in the US and - in case you were wondering - Michelle had a half.

4.25pm: "News of what has been happening in Moneygall is filtering though to Dublin," says a BBC reporter on the ground in College Green, Dublin. To recap: Obama drank a Guinness (here's a Twitpic ) in the village where his Irish ancestor Falmouth Kearney left for the US and is now on a walkabout with his wife, shaking hands with the locals.

4.45pm: "US President Barack Obama has departed Moneygall and will next appear at the public rally at College Green in Dublin City Centre," according to @AARoadwatch – the Twitter account of "Ireland's leading traffic and travel provider", which has today cornered the market in Obama-related road closure news. Closures now returning to Dublin included Merrion Square, Pembroke Street, Lombard Street and Pearse Street, it tweets.

5pm: So far the US television news networks have not been providing breathless coverage of Obama's visit, the awful tornado in Missouri taking up more airtime, naturally.

And for comedy value, for some reason hapless Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty is about to announce to no one's surprise that he is a Republican presidential candidate. Excellent timing Tim.

This is Richard Adams in Washington, taking over live blogging duties from Simon and Adam. Fir seirbhís as we Irish say*.

5.15pm: Some colour from Obama's walkabout in Moneygall :

"You look a little like my grandfather," Obama said to one man. "We may be related to him as well. I'll have to check it out when I get back." Posing for pictures with his wife and several locals, he joked, "We got to get a good picture with everybody. Michelle squeeze in here….We got a family tree here and everything." At the bar, he ordered a pint of Guinness, then waited for the head to settle. "You tell me when it's properly settled, I don't want to mess this up," he said. "I've been told it makes a difference who the person behind the bar is, that people are very particular who is pouring the Guinness, am I right about that?" A chorus of "yeahs" from the crowd affirmed the point. He told of his discovery of Guinness during a refueling stopover at Shannon, Ireland, en route to Afghanistan. "It was the middle of the night, and I tried one of these and I realized it tastes so much better here than in the United States," he said. "You're keeping all the best stuff here."

5.28pm: Many thousands – tens of thousands according to CNN – are waiting at College Green in Áth Cliath. And it seems like the sun has come out, a miracle indeed.

5.45pm: And now America's First Family is on stage in Dublin.

"Today the 44th president comes home!" says Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, who is using the event for a rousing speech on the theme of the "Irish family" living in America:

We, your Irish family, are right here, to welcome you to follow your president home!

Kenny is now talking about Ireland's heritage, which can't be stored in banks – which is handy given Ireland's recent financial and fiscal woes.

Obama is looking happy, standing behind Kenny and with a hand on Michelle Obama's shoulder.

5.54pm: "The 44th president is different. He doesn't just speak of the American dream – he is the American dream!" says Enda Kenny, to huge applause.

Now Obama's speaking.

5.55pm: "Hello Dublin, hello Ireland. My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obama's. I've come home to find the apostrophe that we've lost along the way," says Obama, enjoying himself.

A wag shouts from the crowd: "I've got it here!". "Is that where it is?" says Obama, off the cuff.

5.57pm: Obama tries out a quick snip of Gaelic. "His Irish isn't as good as the Queen's," says my colleague Lisa O'Carroll. Fighting talk.

5.59pm: After joking that people become very interested in where you are born when you run for president, Obama says he wishes he'd known about his Irish roots when he was first running for office in Chicago, a heavily Irish city: "I told them it was a Gaelic name, but they didn't believe me."

He then recounts how he finally got to march in a St Patrick's Day parade in Chicago and had to go right at the back of the parade, just before the street cleaning crew. How things have changed.

6.06pm: Fox News is not showing Obama's speech in Dublin, prefering to show more "extreme weather centre" news. But given the disaster in Joplin, Missouri, that's not surprising.

CNN and MSNBC stick with Obama.

"There's always been a little green behind the red, white and blue," says Obama, who is turning in one of the big set-piece speeches he excels in.

6.09pm: Obama mentions the relationship between the great Irish liberator Daniel O'Connell and the former slave and anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass.

6.15pm: Lisa O'Carroll has a scoop: because of the threat of the ash cloud , Obama may not be staying overnight in Dublin. That suggests he may go straight to the UK instead tonight – and if so, there will be some frantic moves going on behind the scenes.

The schedule has Obama staying in Ireland and then flying to the UK tomorrow morning, but the Icelandic eruption could threaten flights between the two countries , although at the moment it's all clear. More on this as it emerges.

Obama is still speaking, and the crowd is loving it, based on what I'm seeing on TV.

Obama concludes his speech with: " Is féidir linn ," being his 2008 campaign slogan "Yes we can" in Irish.

Lisa O'Carroll, our resident piece of Gaeltacht, observes: "Again, his pronunciation not as good as Betty's, tripped up slightly on the feidir , pronounced Fay-Jer (as in jerk)."

6.22pm: RTE, the Irish state broadcaster, is said to be reporting that Air Force One is likely to leave Dublin at 7.30pm tonight for London. If so, that's a big change of schedule forced by the threat of Iceland's volcanic ash cloud.

If it gets any worse, there is a possibility that the schedule for the rest of the trip could get changed.

6.39pm: The US cable news networks are confirming that Obama is leaving Ireland early tonight because of the ash cloud – he'll be going straight to London. But the word at the moment is that the rest of the trip remains unchanged.

7pm: McClatchy are reporting on the abrupt end to Obama's Ireland visit :

President Barack Obama will cut short a visit to Ireland and leave Monday evening as a plume of ash from a volcano in Iceland heads toward the British Isles, threatening to strand him on the ground. Obama's entourage,including Air Force One and a chartered plane carrying the White House press corps, had been scheduled to fly from Dublin, Ireland, to London on Tuesday morning. But the plume of ash from the Grimsvotn volcano in Iceland was expected to cover Ireland, Scotland and parts of northern Britain by 6am Tuesday, according to reports in London. British authorities said late Monday that airspace would be closed at 7am Tuesday, local time, over Northern Ireland and Scotland. News reports in London said airlines already were grounding flights.

This is the second time an Obama visit to Europe has been affected by Icelandic volcano ash. Last year Obama had to abort a trip to Poland for the funeral of its president. Could we see a repeat this year?

7.10pm: ABC's Jake Tapper recollects that this is in fact the third time that Obama's travel plans have been affected:

Last November, President Obama had to cut short his visit to a different nation where he was having something of a homecoming: Indonesia, where he spent four years as a child. In April 2010, President Obama had to cancel a visit to Poland for the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, killed in a plane crash with his wife and dozens of other Polish leaders. Those latter two incidents were the fault of Eyjafjallajokull. That pesky volcano also caused General Stanley McChrystal and his aides to spend more time with a Rolling Stone reporter than they had originally planned, with a whole other set of repercussions.

7.19pm: Some video of Obama's motorcade getting stuck on the hump outside the American embassy in Dublin earlier today. Listen for the nasty scraping sound after about 10 seconds. That's the sump gone. Or the muffler.

The crowd reaction is charming: "Nice bit of driving," shouts one local wag. "Need a push?" says another.

7.29pm: The full text of Obama's remarks in Dublin:

The President: Hello, Dublin, hello, Ireland! My name is Barack Obama – of the Moneygall Obamas. And I've come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

Audience member: I've got it here!

The President: Is that where it is? [Laughter.]

Some wise Irish man or woman once said that broken Irish is better than clever English. So here goes: Tá áthas orm bheith in Éirinn – I am happy to be in Ireland! I'm happy to be with so many á cairde.

I want to thank my extraordinary hosts. First of all, Taoiseach Kenny, his lovely wife Fionnuala, President McAleese and her husband, Martin, for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you, Lord Mayor Gerry Breen and the Gardai for allowing me to crash this celebration.

Let me also express my condolences on the recent passing of former Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald, someone who believed in the power of education, someone who believed in the potential of youth, most of all, someone who believed in the potential of peace and who lived to see that peace realized.

And most of all, thank you to the citizens of Dublin and the people of Ireland for the warm and generous hospitality you've shown me and Michelle. It certainly feels like 100,000 welcomes. We feel very much at home. I feel even more at home after that pint that I had. [Laughter.] Feel even warmer.

In return let me offer the hearty greetings of tens of millions of Irish Americans who proudly trace their heritage to this small island.

Now, I knew that I had some roots across the Atlantic, but until recently I could not unequivocally claim that I was one of those Irish Americans. But now if you believe the Corrigan Brothers, there's no one more Irish than me. So I want to thank the genealogists who traced my family tree.

It turns out that people take a lot of interest in you when you're running for President. [Laughter.] They look into your past. They check out your place of birth. Things like that. Now, I do wish somebody had provided me all this evidence earlier because it would have come in handy back when I was first running in my hometown of Chicago, because Chicago is the Irish capital of the Midwest. A city where it was once said you could stand on 79th Street and hear the brogue of every county in Ireland.

So naturally a politician like me craved a slot in the St. Patrick's Day parade. The problem was not many people knew me or could even pronounce my name. I told them it was a Gaelic name. They didn't believe me.

So one year a few volunteers and I did make it into the parade, but we were literally the last marchers. After two hours, finally it was our turn. And while we rode the route and we smiled and we waved, the city workers were right behind us cleaning up the garbage. It was a little depressing. But I'll bet those parade organizers are watching TV today and feeling kind of bad because this is a pretty good parade right here.

Now, of course, an American doesn't really require Irish blood to understand that ours is a proud, enduring, centuries-old relationship; that we are bound by history and friendship and shared values. And that's why I've come here today, as an American President, to reaffirm those bonds of affection.

Earlier today Michelle and I visited Moneygall where we saw my ancestral home and dropped by the local pub. And we received a very warm welcome from all the people there, including my long-lost eighth cousin, Henry. Henry now is affectionately known as Henry VIII. And it was remarkable to see the small town where a young shoemaker named Falmouth Kearney, my great-great-great grandfather, my grandfather's grandfather, lived his early life. And I was the shown the records from the parish recording his birth. And we saw the home where he lived.

And he left during the Great Hunger, as so many Irish did, to seek a new life in the New World. He traveled by ship to New York, where he entered himself into the records as a laborer. He married an American girl from Ohio. They settled in the Midwest. They started a family.

It's a familiar story because it's one lived and cherished by Americans of all backgrounds. It's integral to our national identity. It's who we are, a nation of immigrants from all around the world.

But standing there in Moneygall, I couldn't help but think how heartbreaking it must have been for that great-great-great grandfather of mine, and so many others, to part. To watch Donegal coasts and Dingle cliffs recede. To leave behind all they knew in hopes that something better lay over the horizon.

When people like Falmouth boarded those ships, they often did so with no family, no friends, no money, nothing to sustain their journey but faith: faith in the Almighty; faith in the idea of America; faith that it was a place where you could be prosperous, you could be free, you could think and talk and worship as you pleased, a place where you could make it if you tried.

And as they worked and struggled and sacrificed and sometimes experienced great discrimination, to build that better life for the next generation, they passed on that faith to their children and to their children's children – an inheritance that their great-great-great grandchildren like me still carry with them. We call it the America Dream. It's the dream that Falmouth Kearney was attracted to when he went to America. It's the dream that drew my own father to America from a small village in Africa. It's a dream that we've carried forward, sometimes through stormy waters, sometimes at great cost, for more than two centuries. And for my own sake, I'm grateful they made those journeys because if they hadn't you'd be listening to somebody else speak right now.

And for America's sake, we're grateful so many others from this land took that chance, as well. After all, never has a nation so small inspired so much in another.

Irish signatures are on our founding documents. Irish blood was spilled on our battlefields. Irish sweat built our great cities. Our spirit is eternally refreshed by Irish story and Irish song; our public life by the humor and heart and dedication of servants with names like Kennedy and Reagan, O'Neill and Moynihan. So you could say there's always been a little green behind the red, white and blue.

When the father of our country, George Washington, needed an army, it was the fierce fighting of your sons that caused the British official to lament, "We have lost America through the Irish." And as George Washington said himself, "When our friendless standards were first unfurled, who were the strangers who first mustered around our staff? And when it reeled in the light, who more brilliantly sustained it than Erin's generous sons?"

When we strove to blot out the stain of slavery and advance the rights of man, we found common cause with your struggles against oppression. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and our great abolitionist, forged an unlikely friendship right here in Dublin with your great liberator, Daniel O'Connell. His time here, Frederick Douglass said, defined him not as a color but as a man. And it strengthened the non-violent campaign he would return home to wage.

Recently, some of their descendents met here in Dublin to commemorate and continue that friendship between Douglass and O'Connell.

When Abraham Lincoln struggled to preserve our young union, more than 100,000 Irish and Irish Americans joined the cause, with units like the Irish Brigade charging into battle – green flags with gold harp waving alongside our star-spangled banner.

When depression gripped America, Ireland sent tens of thousands of packages of shamrocks to cheer up its countrymen, saying, "May the message of Erin shamrocks bring joy to those away."

And when an Iron Curtain fell across this continent and our way of life was challenged, it was our first Irish President, our first Catholic President, John F Kennedy, who made us believe 50 years ago this week that mankind could do something big and bold and ambitious as walk on the moon. He made us dream again.

That is the story of America and Ireland. That's the tale of our brawn and our blood, side by side, in making and remaking a nation, pulling it westward, pulling it skyward, moving it forward again and again and again. And that is our task again today.

I think we all realize that both of our nations have faced great trials in recent years, including recessions so severe that many of our people are still trying to fight their way out. And naturally our concern turns to our families, our friends and our neighbors. And some in this enormous audience are thinking about their own prospects and their own futures. Those of us who are parents wonder what it will mean for our children and young people like so many who are here today. Will you see the same progress we've seen since we were your age? Will you inherit futures as big and as bright as the ones that we inherited? Will your dreams remain alive in our time?

This nation has faced those questions before: When your land couldn't feed those who tilled it; when the boats leaving these shores held some of your brightest minds; when brother fought against brother. Yours is a history frequently marked by the greatest of trials and the deepest of sorrow. But yours is also a history of proud and defiant endurance. Of a nation that kept alive the flame of knowledge in dark ages; that overcame occupation and outlived fallow fields; that triumphed over its Troubles – of a resilient people who beat all the odds.

And, Ireland, as trying as these times are, I know our future is still as big and as bright as our children expect it to be. I know that because I know it is precisely in times like these – in times of great challenge, in times of great change – when we remember who we truly are. We're people, the Irish and Americans, who never stop imagining a brighter future, even in bitter times. We're people who make that future happen through hard work, and through sacrifice, through investing in those things that matter most, like family and community.

We remember, in the words made famous by one of your greatest poets that "in dreams begins responsibility."

This is a nation that met that responsibility by choosing, like your ancestors did, to keep alight the flame of knowledge and invest in a world-class education for your young people. And today, Ireland's youth, and those who've come back to build a new Ireland, are now among the best-educated, most entrepreneurial in the world. And I see those young people here today. And I know that Ireland will succeed.

This is a nation that met its responsibilities by choosing to apply the lessons of your own past to assume a heavier burden of responsibility on the world stage. And today, a people who once knew the pain of an empty stomach now feed those who hunger abroad. Ireland is working hand in hand with the United States to make sure that hungry mouths are fed around the world – because we remember those times. We know what crippling poverty can be like, and we want to make sure we're helping others.

You're a people who modernized and can now stand up for those who can't yet stand up for themselves. And this is a nation that met its responsibilities – and inspired the entire world – by choosing to see past the scars of violence and mistrust to forge a lasting peace on this island.

When President Clinton said on this very spot 15 years ago, waging peace is risky, I think those who were involved understood the risks they were taking. But you, the Irish people, persevered. And you cast your votes and you made your voices heard for that peace. And you responded heroically when it was challenged. And you did it because, as President McAleese has written, "For all the apparent intractability of our problems, the irrepressible human impulse to love kept nagging and nudging us towards reconciliation."

Whenever peace is challenged, you will have to sustain that irrepressible impulse. And America will stand by you – always. America will stand by you always in your pursuit of peace.

And, Ireland, you need to understand that you've already so surpassed the world's highest hopes that what was notable about the Northern Ireland elections two weeks ago was that they came and went without much attention. It's not because the world has forgotten. It's because this once unlikely dream has become that most extraordinary thing of things: It has become real. A dream has turned to reality because of the work of this nation.

In dreams begin responsibility. And embracing that responsibility, working toward it, overcoming the cynics and the naysayers and those who say "you can't", that's what makes dreams real. That's what Falmouth Kearney did when he got on that boat, and that's what so many generations of Irish men and women have done here in this spectacular country. That is something we can point to and show our children, Irish and American alike. That is something we can teach them as they grow up together in a new century, side by side, as it has been since our beginnings.

This little country, that inspires the biggest things, your best days are still ahead. Our greatest triumphs - in America and Ireland alike - are still to come.

And, Ireland, if anyone ever says otherwise, if anybody ever tells you that your problems are too big, or your challenges are too great, that we can't do something, that we shouldn't even try, think about all that we've done together. Remember that whatever hardships the winter may bring, springtime is always just around the corner. And if they keep on arguing with you, just respond with a simple creed: Is féidir linn. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Is féidir linn. For all you've contributed to the character of the United States of America and the spirit of the world, thank you. And may God bless the eternal friendship between our two great nations.

Thank you, Dublin. Thank you, Ireland.

7.35pm: According to the organisers in Dublin, the crowd at College Green to hear Obama topped 25,000.

What happens next? Obama is off to dinner at the residence of the US ambassador to Ireland, Dan Rooney, for a dinner. And then it appears, off to London on Air Force One.

Several American journalists appear to be puzzled at the excitement generated by Jedward at the event on College Green, and it's explained to them that they are the Irish answer to Justin Bieber.

8pm: The Irish Times appears delighted with Obama's visit and his speech today :

To rousing cheers he introduced himself as: "Barack Obama, of the Moneygall O'Bamas. I am here to find the apostrophe that we lost along the way". Tá áthas orm a bheith in Éirinn. He also paid tribute to former taoiseach Dr Garret Fitzgerald, who died last week and discussed the economic crisis. "Thank you to the citizens of Dublin and Ireland for the warm and generous hospitality you have shown me and Michelle. It certainly feels like 100,000 welcomes. We feel very much at home. I feel even more at home after that pint I had. I feel even warmer," said Mr Obama. "In return, let me offer the hearty greetings of tens of millions of Americans who proudly trace their heritage to this small island.

8.18pm: RTE is now claiming that 100,000 people may have been in and around College Green for Obama's speech today.

The Belfast Telegraph sees hints of JFK's visit :

US President Barack Obama defied his strict security schedule to extend his electrifying Irish ancestral homecoming. In scenes evoking the 1963 visit of John F Kennedy, Mr Obama sparked a frenzy by breaking away from his entourage to embrace many of the hundreds who lined Moneygall's single street.

For the record, I had nothing to do with this headline :

Obama revels in the Erse amendment

8.30pm: The Associated Press reports that Obama passed the Guinness test, unlike some of his famous predecessors:

Downing a Guinness is a rite of passage for any visitor to Ireland, but too often the VIPs, including some US presidents, disappoint the Emerald Isle. Not President Barack Obama. He may be criticized for taking too long to make up his mind at times, but he didn't hesitate Monday when offered a pint of the dark brew. Obama downed it in four slurps and won cheers across Ireland for it. "The president actually killed his pint! He gets my vote," said Christy O'Sullivan, a government clerical worker who was taking a long lunch break to watch live TV coverage of Obama's visit to Moneygall, the tiny village where his maternal great-great-great grandfather lived and worked. "He's the first president I've actually seen drink the black stuff like he's not ashamed of something." Previous American presidents didn't fare as well as Obama. In 1984, Ronald Reagan rejected the Guinness and instead posed for photographers with a pint of Smithwicks, a locally brewed red ale. He didn't finish it. In 2006, George W. Bush, a recovering alcoholic who drinks non-alcoholic beer, wasn't asked to pose with a pint of Guinness at all. Many expected more from Bill Clinton, but ended up deeply disappointed. In 1995, Clinton stopped at a Dublin pub bearing his family's Irish name of Cassidy but barely sipped his stout. Aides said he didn't want to be photographed drinking anything alcoholic, but the resultant image was hardly an endorsement of the product. Clinton had abandoned his almost full half-pint.

9pm: With President Obama said to be en route to London, time to wrap up our live coverage. Thanks for reading.

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Visits to Ireland by U.S. presidents

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Obama heads to ireland in search of his roots.

• President Obama visits village in Ireland where great-great-great-grandfather hailed from
• Village has spruced itself up in preparation for the visit
• Visit sure to go down well with 40-million with Irish roots living in the U.S.

Moneygall, Ireland (CNN) -- "You discover a lot about yourself when you're running for president," Barack Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008. "It was brought to my attention last year that my great-great-great-grandfather on my mother's side hailed from a small village in County Offaly."

Two years into his presidency and Obama has decided to pay that small village a visit. If a village can get emotional, Moneygall -- with its 300 residents -- is in raptures. Children sporting "O'Bama" T-shirts skip along the high street waving American flags. Beaming villagers scramble up ladders to smarten up the fronts of their homes.

"Dulux provided all the paint for all the houses in the place, they sent down a lady to coordinate all the colors and she's done a pretty good job on it you know," says resident Timmy O'Conor, brandishing a paint brush. "If it passes the man himself now, that's the thing."

There's speculation the man himself may swing by the Ollie Hayes Inn for a pint of Guinness. Ollie Hayes says he's had the CIA come through some months back but there's still no certainty that it'll actually happen. If Barack Obama does stop by though, he'll find a large faux-bronze bust of himself gracing the bar and Hayes says he'll be ready and waiting with the Guinness. "Who knows," says Henry Healy who I meet in the pub, "we may all have to join him and raise a glass to his re-election campaign in 2012."

Healy is a distant relative of President Obama and was invited by the Irish-American Democrats and the American-Ireland Fund to go to Washington for his inauguration. "Our relationship goes back to 1761 when there was a marriage between Sarah Healy and Joseph Kearney. Joseph Kearney is the great-great-grandfather of Falmouth Kearney who emigrated from this village in 1850."

Relatives though are a dime a dozen in this part of the world. Healy's aunt, 75-year-old Sadie Williams, says she thinks she's Barack Obama's oldest living relative in Ireland. "It's very exciting for us all," she tells CNN. "We all had great excitement in the beginning when the word came through he was related to us."

Williams' grandson goes to school at Kilkenny College, about an hour from Moneygall. The college boasts alumni like author Jonathan Swift and philosopher George Berkeley, the namesake of what is now the University of California - Berkeley. Now it boasts 13 students who all claim some family connection with President Obama. "I was only aware of these two boys being my cousins," says the oldest of the 'Obama cousin' clan, 17-year-old Kate Condell. "We didn't realize we were interlinked before."

There's a huge star spangled banner draped across the classroom table and the deputy headmaster has laid out a number of Barack Obama biographies. But the children admit they haven't read them. Kate Condell is the only one who's even visited the United States. "Just Florida on a family holiday, but an invitation to the White House would be much appreciated!"

Perhaps not at Kilkenny College, but elsewhere in Ireland there is a palpable anxiety in the air. The dire state of the economy, the burden of day-to-day financial struggle, the uncertainty over whether Ireland can ever escape its debts -- these are issues which weigh heavy on a people known for their good cheer. "We all just want a rest from it, to talk about something else," one pub-owner tells CNN.

As many of his predecessors -- including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the Bushes -- have done before him, Obama is in search of his Irish roots, not least because it is sure to go down well with the 40-million Irish emigres with Irish roots living in the U.S.

This is after all the start of his 2012 re-election campaign. But to the Irish on the Emerald Isle it is a home-coming; a gesture of solidarity and kinsmanship in troubled times. And a chance for the villagers of Moneygall to throw a party that will likely last long after the president's gone.

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I went to Ireland's bizarre Barack Obama-themed service station, complete with a museum and statues that make it as otherworldly as it sounds

• Ireland has a highway service station dedicated former US President Barack Obama.
• The site is a nice place to rest on your journey and grab food and gas, but it's also a bizarre themed site that has branded mugs, Obama's name on trash cans, and a whole floor as a free museum.
• Located on Ireland's M7 highway, Barack Obama Plaza opened in 2014 in tribute to Obama's 2011 visit to the birthplace of his great-great-great-grandfather.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Since 2014, one of Ireland's main highways has had a bizarre service station dedicated to former US President Barack Obama.

The justification for its existence is that Obama visited Moneygall, a nearby village, back in 2011 after learning that his great-great-great-grandfather was from there.

But that doesn't make the Barack Obama Plaza any less strange.

I am Irish and have been many times. Like every other Irish person I've spoken to about it, I have something of a love-hate relationship with the site. It's a very nice rest stop on a boring highway that has a widely stocked store, nice places to eat, friendly staff, and comfortable seats.

But there's something deeply embarrassing about it, and I really hope that tourists, particularly American tourists, don't take it too seriously — and don't think that we do either.

The branding, artwork, and statues — as well as the museum that has things like Obama badges, a Guinness glass Obama may or may not have drunk out of, and histories of other American presidents that had Irish heritage — all make for a truly confusing rest stop experience.

This is what it's like to visit:

Along Ireland's M7 highway, which connects the cities of Limerick and Dublin, there's a strange place — a service station dedicated to former US President Barack Obama.

The Barack Obama Plaza, as it's called, is a gas station with multiple food outlets, a shop, and, bizarrely, a museum dedicated to Obama and the US-Ireland connection.

It's a heavily branded wonder that equal parts loved by Irish people as a pleasant and useful place to stop and a source of national embarrassment that this place exists.

Obama Plaza was built and named after Obama visited the nearby town of Moneygall in 2011 during his trip to Ireland. A genealogist had learned that Obama's great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, was from the town and had emigrated to the US in the 1800s.

Obama visited a pub in the town, where he and his wife, Michelle, famously had pints of Guinness and he said: "I feel even more at home after that pint that I had."

This is the outside of the pub today — with Obama's face now displayed proudly on its sign.

You start to see signs for the Barack Obama Plaza as you drive along the highway.

As well as signs for Moneygall, which present it as a tourist site and describe it as "President Obama's Ancestral Village" rather than an actual place that people live.

Drive a bit farther and you see it: Obama's name lit up, the gas station, the restaurants.

Walk in, and one of the first things you see is a life-size cutout of Barack and Michelle. I steeled myself to take a photo for this article, and then had to burst out laughing when an employee adjusting Christmas decorations made an (inaccurate) joke about me being American. I didn't correct him, because it was much less embarrassing than saying I was an Irish journalist.

You're also hit by screens for the upstairs visitor centre.

As well as the meeting room you can book. This seems like a very sensible addition, as it means people can hold meetings at roughly a middle point between many of Ireland's major cities.

But first I wanted to explore the downstairs more. There's a host of restaurants, including Irish burger chain Supermac's and a Papa John's pizza (and, when I was there, Christmas decorations).

I've spoken enthusiastically of Supermac's , the small Irish chain that won a major naming rights victory over McDonald's.

But just when the place starts to feel normal, the Obama branding rears its head again in places like the carpet.

I ordered a tea and it came in normal cup, but then they stuck an Obama sticker on top.

The branding makes its way to the most bizarre places. I'm sure the former president is honored to have his name on this trash can.

There's something bizarre about seeing Obama's name plastered on regular old service-station signs. They were advertising an upcoming "Christmas Wonderland" when I was there. Sadly I had to return to Business Insider's UK office before it kicked off.

It was nice to see that the plaza even sponsors a local sports team.

The strangest thing about the place is that it is used by regular people who want to grab a quick coffee or bite to eat during their commute. Very few people, and certainly almost no locals, would come here because of any connection to Obama.

The dining area is largely devoid of any reference to US presidents.

It's easy to go to the shop and view it as a regular store filled with regular Irish products.

Until you take a closer look at some of what's on sale.

There's also a whole host of Obama Plaza merch for sale in the café — as well as a mug that was the only reference to President Donald Trump that I noticed.

The place itself is certainly aware of its political connections — as well as how Obama is vastly more popular in Ireland than Trump. Just before the 2016 election result, it jokingly asked its Facebook followers what it should do about changing its name.

But it wouldn't make sense to rename the place unless it was after another president with a connection to Ireland. That is, after all, the point of its (free) museum upstairs.

Before you go up, you can play with a claw machine, or get yourself a souvenir coin featuring Obama's — or John F. Kennedy's — face.

The museum is an odd place. It's home to *another* bronze statue of Obama.

And a "Hollywood star" for him on the floor.

The museum has some items that clearly came from government officials.

And other stuff that might be out of circulation now but are just preserved everyday objects.

It has dedicated areas for former US presidents who had Irish ancestors, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Kennedy.

It turns out that the list of US presidents with Irish ancestry is long and spans from the seventh US president, Andrew Jackson, all the way to Obama. It includes the likes of George W. Bush (who the display says is actually related to "two of the most notorious villains in Irish history.")

But it's not just the US — the museum highlights the Irish people who went all over the globe and their now famous ancestors, from revolutionary Che Guevara to Henry Ford.

Ireland has a unique global position as waves of emigration, including during the famine in the 1800s, mean that the Irish diaspora is now made up of around 80 million people, while the country's population is under five million.

The museum is filled with quotes from Obama's visit to the country, including the speech he gave in Dublin.

And some similar platitudes from Kennedy.

And there's history on the Irish famine, which is what drove so many Irish people to America.

It also features artworks of other US presidents like Kennedy.

More Obama art.

And artifacts that symbolize the US-Ireland relationship. This is a replica of the bowl that Ireland's then prime minister gave to Obama with shamrocks in it for St. Patrick's Day 2013 as part of a longstanding tradition. The museum didn't say where the original was.

And just in case you forget where you are, you can look out the window to see the road again.

There's also Obama memorabilia, donated by Americans. Here's a pin badge from Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

And the stairs shows a large image of a Moneygall woman preparing for Obama's visit with a comically big American flag, which I couldn't decide if I found embarrassing or endearing.

There's an Obama-era White House Christmas card.

And a guest book, which seemed to be signed mostly by Americans.

The Barack Obama Plaza is a place where photos of Obama, of the gas station, and general tourist information exist in a strange harmony.

Overall, despite my reservations, it's a pit stop I have to recommend.

Whether you want food, a break from driving, some free education about Ireland and America, or just want to be entertained, the Barack Obama Plaza is worth taking a break on your journey.

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Barack Obama: A Connection to Ireland

Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, holds a special place in the hearts of many around the world for his leadership and charisma. However, one aspect of his diverse heritage that particularly resonates in Ireland is his Irish ancestry. This connection is not merely a footnote in his family history but a celebrated aspect of his identity, underscored by his visit to the small Irish village of Moneygall, an event that highlighted the deep ties between Obama and the Emerald Isle.

Obama's Irish Roots

Barack Obama's Irish roots can be traced back to the tiny village of Moneygall in County Offaly, located in the heart of Ireland. His great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated from Moneygall to New York City at the age of 19 in 1850, eventually making his way to the Midwest, where the future president's family line continued. This lineage was unveiled through genealogical research, shedding light on a direct link between one of the most powerful leaders in the world and a modest Irish village.

The Visit to Moneygall

In May 2011, during his presidency, Obama visited Moneygall with his wife, Michelle, in a momentous occasion for the village and for Ireland as a whole. The visit was characterised by scenes of jubilation, with the Obamas warmly welcomed by locals and visiting the home of Obama's ancestor, as well as the local pub, where the president famously enjoyed a pint of Guinness. This visit was not only a personal pilgrimage for Obama but also served as a symbol of the strong historical and cultural bonds between Ireland and the United States.

Obama Plaza

The visit had a lasting impact on Moneygall, leading to the development of the Obama Plaza, an €8 million service station and commercial complex that opened in 2014. Situated near the village, the Plaza serves as a tangible testament to the connection between Obama and Moneygall. It includes a visitor center that commemorates the president's visit and explores his Irish ancestry, serving as both a local amenity and an attraction for those interested in the unique bond between the former president and this Irish community.

Barack Obama's Irish roots and his visit to Moneygall are more than just an intriguing aspect of his diverse family history; they are a reminder of the interconnectedness of our global community. The establishment of Obama Plaza as a lasting monument to this connection underscores the profound impact of Obama's lineage and presidency on Moneygall and Ireland. Through this heritage and visit, Obama's story resonates with themes of migration, identity, and the universal search for belonging, bridging the Atlantic to connect the histories of two nations.

Information on the origin of the Kearney Surname .

Please Note

There is often limited information available on a specific coat of arms and motto for an Irish surname. Sometimes there are many variations, sometimes none, we have compiled a representative, but by no means exhaustive, selection. Please visit our Coat of Arms and Motto page for more information.

DNA And Your Irish Roots

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Interesting Irish Connections

President Barack Obama And First Lady Michelle Obama Visit Ireland

The President and First Lady traveled to Ireland May 23, 2011, attending events around Dublin and also traveling to Moneygall, the President's ancestral home.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photograph with Irish President Mary McAleese and Dr. Martin McAleese, center, and Ambassador Daniel Rooney and Patricia Rooney, left, upon their arrival at the President’s residence in Dublin, Ireland, May 23, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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The Quirky Destination In Ireland Conan O'Brien Says Is A Must-Stop

A s he revealed on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert , Conan O'Brien has had a DNA test proving he's "100% Irish." It was only fitting that the former late-night talk show host and current travel mockumentary host should visit Ireland for his Max series, "Conan O'Brien Must Go." In the fourth and final episode of the first season, Conan says he will find his roots as he sets out across the country where his great-grandfather lived before immigrating to the U.S. in the 1800s. Within three and a half minutes, however, his road trip brings him to a place that's decidedly off the beaten path in terms of Irish tourist destinations. "If you're driving through Ireland," Conan says, "you have to stop in County Tipperary. Why you ask? To pay homage to the Barack Obama Plaza highway rest stop."

Barack Obama Plaza is a real place where statues of the 44th U.S. president and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama, stand "waving to drivers on the M7," as Conan puts it. The M7 is a motorway; you can find the plaza and statues at Junction 23 from Dublin to Limerick. On a previous episode of his TBS show, "Conan Without Borders," Conan traveled to Qatar with Michelle Obama. However, you wouldn't necessarily expect to find a permanent statue of her and Barack in the middle of Ireland. However, before becoming president, Obama had traced his roots on his mother's side to the same country as Conan.

Read more: Anthony Bourdain's Perfect Advice For Spotting The Best Local Places To Eat

Why There's A Barack Obama Plaza In Ireland

Though Obama's father hailed from Kenya, his mother was part Irish. In 2007, the year before he made history as the first African American presidential elect, Obama learned through Ancestry.com that his great-great-great grandfather had come from the village of Moneygall, Ireland. It's on the border between Tipperary and County Offal, just a minute by car from Barack Obama Plaza. Among other things, the news of his heritage inspired the viral Corrigan Brothers song, "There's No One As Irish As Barack Obama."

The Obamas visited Moneygall in 2011, and the nearby plaza and waving statues — the brainchild of Supermac's owners Pat and Una McDonagh — opened in 2014. A decade later, when Conan O'Brien visited and joked about him and Obama both being "famous Irish sons," it wasn't so far from the truth. As O'Brien notes in the episode, Obama (or, if you prefer, O'Bama) still has an eighth cousin who lives in Moneygall.

At Barack Obama Plaza, you can chow down on some Irish food, provided your definition of that is loose enough to include ... Papa John's Pizza? As it turns out, the plaza's name isn't the only thing Americanized here, as Papa John's is a U.S.-based chain that originated in a broom closet in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Its founder and former CEO once claimed that Obamacare would raise pizza prices, making it that much more ironic to see it peddling its wares in Ireland's Barack Obama Plaza.

Other Places Conan O'Brien Visited In Ireland

If you've got no intention of traveling all the way to Ireland to eat America's fourth most popular pizza chain, check out this  popular foodie-friendly Dublin neighborhood  instead. For his part, Conan samples some black pudding at Loughnane's Butcher in Loughrea, County Galway. As he satirizes a travel host's overexaggerated food reactions, each bite of black pudding at this shop (established in 1939) sends Conan into paroxysms of pleasure.

Merrion Square Park (pictured above) is the Dublin landmark where Conan finds "trace evidence of Bono's scat" as he hunts for the U2 singer like a wild animal, attempting to bait him with a Humanitarian Award. When you get bored of Bono hunting, you can head into a museum (or two) on the park's western edge. The National Gallery of Ireland and the Archaeology and Natural History branches of the National Museum of Ireland are all located here.

Wicklow is where Conan visits a lighthouse that is  also must-visit for Star Wars fans . There are two lighthouses at Wicklow Head; he goes inside the working "front" one. The old one, built in 1781, is periodically rentable as an accommodation via the Irish Landmark Trust . At the end of the episode, Conan visits the town square in Galbally, where his great-grandfather lived. For those who manage to see both it and Moneygall, you'll come away from your trip to Ireland with a richer understanding of its famous sons, Conan O'Brien and Barack Obama.

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