The Irish in Obama

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President Obama’s Irish ancestry is genuine and far-reaching, and in Pioneers, The Frontier Family of Barack Obama, Irish writer and publisher Stephen MacDonogh presents the first full account of Obama’s links with Ireland. Cahir O'Doherty speaks to the author about the many unexpected discoveries he made about while writing the book.

Nothing about Barack Obama is ever obvious or typical, even when it comes to his ancestry.

Neither a product of African America (his father was a Kenyan professor) nor from a typically representative Irish Catholic background (his ancestors did not arrive here to escape economic hardship or the devastation of the Famine), instead he’s descended from a native Irish family who were Church of Ireland Protestants. That fact opens up a much different storyline, and a largely forgotten one, of the history of Irish Protestants in both American and Ireland.

Most present day Irish Americans and even the Irish themselves assume, MacDonogh claims with justification, that being Irish American and Irish Catholic are synonymous. Yet more than one million of the 5.5 million people who make up the Irish population are Protestants, so that assumption excludes 20% of the population.

It’s important to remember these facts, MacDonogh argues, because they highlight the important role Protestants played in the making of America. And Barack Obama’s rise, MacDonogh contends, provides us with a new opportunity to grapple with the full spectrum of what it means to be Irish in both Ireland and America.

“His black ancestry, his paternal ancestry, is extremely untypical of Americans,” MacDonogh tells the Irish Voice.

“African Americans usually grapple with the legacy of racism, discrimination, slavery and Jim Crow, that classic narrative. But Barack Obama has nothing to do with that. His father was a Kenyan who spent a short period of time in America. His maternal ancestry is much more archetypal though.

“He’s a mixture of Irish, English, German and a bit of Belgian. And what I’ve tried to do in the book is tell the story of the Irish thread of his maternal ancestry, and it surprised me that it turns out in many ways to be the story of the making of America.”

When he started on his new book MacDonogh thought it would be a typical Irish American story, but it turned out to be anything but.
“The story as I got it was that the emigration of the Kearney family (Obama’s Irish ancestors) began after the Famine. I thought they would be a part of the much larger and very moving narrative of the largely destitute Irish people who flooded the ports of America. That wasn’t the case at all.”

In fact the story of the Kearneys was part of a less well known Irish emigration story that generally does not get told -- the experience of the Protestant Irish who emigrated before and after the Famine.

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