The president's hearty Irish swig of Guinness, on a visit to his ancestral village of Moneygall, cemented his status as a native son-though it may have set the country's image back 20 years. Tom Sykes reports from Ireland.
Despite howling gales that threatened to ground the presidential chopper and the return of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, President Obama made it to his ancestral hometown of Moneygall in Ireland on Monday.
Related story on The Daily Beast: Should We Hit Gaddafi Next?
And what did he do when he got there?
Why, like any good Irishman, he went to the pub for a Guinness, of course. And in the three minutes it took for his pint to "settle," and the five further seconds it took for him to take a big hearty Irish swig of "porter" at 3 in the afternoon, the national image of Ireland underwent a 20-year regression, to an...
Despite howling gales that threatened to ground the presidential chopper and the return of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, President Obama made it to his ancestral hometown of Moneygall in Ireland on Monday.
Related story on The Daily Beast: Should We Hit Gaddafi Next?
And what did he do when he got there?
Why, like any good Irishman, he went to the pub for a Guinness, of course. And in the three minutes it took for his pint to "settle," and the five further seconds it took for him to take a big hearty Irish swig of "porter" at 3 in the afternoon, the national image of Ireland underwent a 20-year regression, to an...
- 5/23/2011
- by Tom Sykes
- The Daily Beast
The Irish village of Moneygall is preparing to welcome an American president whose ancestor was a native son. Obama's planned May visit has excited locals-and prompted more racial awareness, writes Tom Sykes.
The great, but generally unvocalized, astonishment of the people of Moneygall is not so much that one of their descendants is president of the United States, but that one of their descendants is black. You see, a lad going off to America and doing well for himself ... well, all the folks in the pub drinking their pints of Guinness can get their heads around that story; sure, wasn't JFK the most famous Irishman of all?
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But a black man? From Moneygall? What?
Moneygall, a very, very small village on the edge of a very, very large Irish bog, is the hometown of Barack Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Kearney,...
The great, but generally unvocalized, astonishment of the people of Moneygall is not so much that one of their descendants is president of the United States, but that one of their descendants is black. You see, a lad going off to America and doing well for himself ... well, all the folks in the pub drinking their pints of Guinness can get their heads around that story; sure, wasn't JFK the most famous Irishman of all?
Related story on The Daily Beast: It's the Economy, Stupid
But a black man? From Moneygall? What?
Moneygall, a very, very small village on the edge of a very, very large Irish bog, is the hometown of Barack Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Kearney,...
- 4/15/2011
- by Tom Sykes
- The Daily Beast
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