This week’s documentary on Newstalk has a highly topical focus as independent producer Mary Phelan takes us on a journey tracing Barack Obama’s Irish roots. From the Irish midlands to the American mid-west, the programme follows the path taken by the Kearney family over a fifty year period from the late 1700 through to 1850 when the last of the family left Ireland for a new life in America. Fulmouth Kearney, born in Moneygall in 1830, was Barack Obama’s maternal great, great, great grandfather. He went to southern Ohio, where other Kearneys had settled on what was then the American frontier.
Listen to the full documentary here
Starting out in Moneygall, producer Mary Phelan hears from several locals who have now become almost household names as a result of the Obama connection. She visits Templeharry Church, where prior to its ecent makeover in the lead-up to the Obama visit the bats held sway, in the company of Church of Ireland rector Stephen Neill. He was the one who received a phone call from the American genealogy company Ancestry.com back in 2007 asking him to check parish records for a Kearney family. “Obama was already on my radar at the time” he says. “I had read one of his books and was very impressed. So the idea that his family could have connections with my parish was mind-blowing. The hair literally stood up on the back of my neck as I looked at those records, and discovered those names. It certainly has been a life-changing experience.”
Another person whose life has been changed by the discovery of the Obama-Moneygall connection is Henry Healy. Barack Obama’s 8th cousin, Henry lives in the village, of which he is a strong champion. He has also, somewhat inadvertently, become the village spokesperson on the subject. “The Obama link has been great for Moneygall. We haven’t been talking recession here over the past three years. We’ve been talking Obama and America.” Stephen Neill agrees: “The discovery has given people something to smile about, at a time when there really was very little to smile about in Ireland” he says. It also lead to both Healy and Rev. Neill being invited to Obama’s inauguration celebrations in 2008, something both thoroughly enjoyed and never will forget. “It’ll be something to tell my grandchildren about, my 15 minutes of fame” laughs Henry Healy.
The programme then travels to the US to meet the American side of the family. These include 94 year old Ralph Dunham, Barack Obama’s grand-uncle. Ralph clearly remembers his grandmother, Mary Anne Kearney, a daughter of Fulmouth Kearney who, like two of her sisters, married a Dunham. “She had red hair and blue eyes, and she spoke with an Irish brogue” Ralph Dunham recalls. He also talks about Anne Dunham, Obama’s mother, both as a child and as a young woman, as well as Obama himself – who was called Barry until he was about 20 – growing up.
From there the programme sets out to rural Ohio, where the Kearney family settled. Some still live there, like Roger Kearney, President Obama’s third cousin, four times removed. Roger’s interest in family history was crucial in piecing together this huge – and somewhat unlikely – story together. It was Roger who discovered the Kearney graves – some fifteen of them – in nearby Compton Cemetery. This discovery, complete with inscriptions referring to Moneygall, Kings County, Ireland as the original Kearney’s place of birth, was central to tracing Barack Obama’s ancestors back to Moneygall and Ireland.
Barack O’Bama – The Road From Moneygall is made with the support of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s Sound & Vision scheme and is produced for Newstalk by Sound Woman Productions.
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