by John Toomey
Tuesday 24th May
President Barack Obama began his day in Ireland with a visit to the tiny village of Moneygall. Moneygall is on the Offaly-Limerick border, 140km outside Dublin, and is where Obama’s great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, was raised until the age of 19 before emigrating to New York in 1850. Until recently, Moneygall was an unassuming country village, with a population of roughly 300 people. Then all of a sudden, last March, it came across all self-conscious. Speculation of President Obama’s visit to his ancestral home set the village to resurfacing its paths, planting flowers and painting houses. On Main Street, the President’s ancestral home, long since passed out of Kearney ownership, had its roof replaced with original thatch. It was like he’d never been away.
The Guinness brewery, never missing an opportunity to sew itself into the fabric of Ireland’s historic fabric, sent down a master brewer from St James’ Gate, with a master’s barrel of stout in tow, to Ollie Hayes’ pub on Main Street. When President Obama stopped in, Ollie Hayes’ stood behind the bar as proud and masterful in his office as the President was in his. The U.S. President then did the decent thing and sank a pint of Guinness, giving Ollie Hayes all the impetus he needed to proclaim that the day had been “without doubt one of the proudest days of my life.”
While in Moneygall, the U.S. President also spent time speaking with his eighth cousin, Henry Healy, who he later affectionately dubbed ‘Henry VIII’ during his speech in Dublin. From Moneygall, President Obama travelled back to Dublin and met privately with the Irish President, Mary McAleese, at Áras an Uachtaráin. After that he sat down with the Taosieach, Enda Kenny, at Farmleigh, and discussed various issues, among them the pressing issue of Ireland’s deficit.
The big event of the day was at College Green, Dublin, where a crowd of 60,000 people gathered to hear President Obama speak. The rest of the nation watched on TV or listened in on drive-time radio, as Taoiseach Enda Kenny introduced the U.S. President.
President Obama’s words beheld a typically fawning poeticism but also, somehow, affirmation. This is surely the U.S. President’s greatest gift. The prevailing sentiment of his words was hungrily consumed by a nation fed for the past three years on nothing but the nutritionless rhetoric of incompetence, defeatism and gloom. For the Irish, who this week lost to illness Garret Fitzgerald, a former Taoiseach and a political voice that evoked decency and intelligence in equal measure, President Obama’s visit has been a kind of tonic.
Sure, there has been a reserved cynicism in certain predictable corners of the media, where the visit of the U.S. President has been casually if politely dismissed as “a flying visit”. Also on the agenda of his critics is a perceived lack of substance to President Obama’s Presidency so far. Flimsy, directionless Foreign Policy is the aspect most often cited, but there has also been a sceptical backlash toward a platitudinous type of politics that President Obama is seen to engender.
But these have been subterranean rumblings for the most part. Anecdotally, among the citizens, the people, President Obama’s visit has been enthusiastically embraced. At certain points in yesterday’s speech at College Green, the response was rapturous.
For the Irish public, Barack Obama embodies qualities of character and a set of values that appeal to some innate part of our cultural identity: he’s a talker for one, eloquent and lucid; he is a man who has risen to prominence against the odds; he presents as honest but not perfect; and he’s moderate, a natural diplomat, and yet there’s a sense that he’s nobody’s fool either. Like many ‘great’ men, others tend to see in him the best of themselves.
Then there’s the small matter of President Obama having restored decorum and intelligence to what is surely the highest office on the planet. The Irish are fonder and more in awe of America than our inherent, cynical bravado allows us to openly acknowledge. But that confidence and secret pride in our long association with the idea of America, a country of immigrants and adventurers, was compromised by the George W. Bush years. For many of us on this side of the Atlantic, President George W. Bush came across as arrogant and unthinking. Perhaps he was unfairly treated by European media in this regard, and perhaps we too readily accepted the caricature, but his public addresses and his Foreign Policy never sat well with us. Bush never convinced us, or the international community, that he had a handle on the power he wielded as the President of the most powerful country in the world.
But Obama does. In a broad and inoffensive way, he reassures us. This is why so many flocked, on a working Monday in debt-ridden Dublin, on the IMF island of Ireland, until recently a sovereign republic of over seventy years, to hear him speak. We flocked to listen to him, to hear him tell us that “as trying as these times are, I know our future is still as big and as bright as our children expect it to be.”
The excitement in Moneygall was real. The response to his public speech in College Green was real. There’s nothing contrived about the Irish yearning for what President Obama offers. We wanted to get close to him, to watch the gait of a ‘great’ man and see if, in some small way, we might emulate it. We wanted to know if we can do it too. We wanted him to tell us, the Irish, just like he told the Americans, fist in the air, that, “Yes, we can!” And then he did. He gave it to us - as Gaeilge! (in Irish)
“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.”
Rapture!
Our politicians and our media haven’t been able to convince us that we’re going to be alright. We have desperately needed ‘An Obama’ and then all of a sudden we had the man himself. He stood above us, hushed us to attention with his careful oration, shmoozed us, winked at us, promised us that he knew something about us that we didn’t know ourselves. He said we could do it.
Three years ago, a superior and sneering Irish public might have laughed off the simplicity of President Obama’s famous slogan. But we’re not so sure of ourselves these days.
All we want to know now, this morning, as we wake up to find the glamour of a U.S. President behind us, is whether the Obama-Factor has somehow contributed to changing the trajectory of Ireland’s fortunes. There’s apprehension, of course, that the lift we experienced this last week will prove no more than a dead cat’s bounce. But there’s that intangible quality of affirmation that accompanies President Obama too. That’s what we’re holding onto.
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