US President Barack Obama has visited Moneygall in the Republic of Ireland as he begins a week-long tour of Europe.

The tiny village in County Offaly was the home of one of his ancestors who emigrated to America in 1850.

Locals greeted Mr Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with cries of "Welcome home!" as they entered the village.

After the brief visit, Mr Obama returned to Dublin to deliver an open-air speech to thousands of cheering people on a sun-strewn College Green.

"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," said the US president, before saying in stilted Gaelic that he was happy to be in Ireland.

The Obamas landed in Dublin earlier on Monday amid tight security, following the US raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan three weeks ago.

Crowds lined the streets in Moneygall - which has just 300 residents - to welcome the Obamas to the village that was home to the president's great-great-great grandfather, a shoemaker.

The couple visited the ancestral home of the Kearney family, shook hands with well-wishers lining Moneygall's flag-bedecked main street and enjoyed supping on a pint of Guinness - or a half, in the first lady's case - in Ollie Hayes' pub, one of the village's two drinking establishments.

There had been a minor delay to the schedule when the bomb-proof presidential Cadillac - nicknamed "the Beast" - became stuck on a ramp on the way out of the US embassy in Dublin, forcing the US first couple to switch vehicles.

Moneygall, County Offaly

The main street in Moneygall decorated with Irish and US flags on 21 May 2011, ahead of President Barack Obama's visit

    * Village of 300 residents, 140km (90 miles) south-west of Dublin
    * Moneygall has two pubs, but no bank, cash machine or petrol station
    * President Obama's great-great-great-grandfather on his mother's side was a shoemaker in Moneygall
    * His son, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated to New York in 1850 at the age of 19 at the height of Ireland's Great Famine
    * President Obama was given a guided tour of the old Kearney family home and met extended family members

And here's 'yer man' attacking a glass of sump oil...should he be drinking on duty?

http://www.joe.ie/uploads/story/12449/obamaguinness.jpg

And here's 'yer man' attacking a glass of sump oil...should he be drinking on duty?

http://www.joe.ie/uploads/story/12449/obamaguinness.jpg
...doing something Queen Elizabeth II never did on her trip to Dublin last week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oIRfwSD6dk

Prince Philip was tempted!

...doing something Queen Elizabeth II never did on her trip to Dublin last week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oIRfwSD6dk

Prince Philip was tempted!



I'm not a beer drinker but I would have had at least a sip. I think that was rude. When someone presents something like that to you, the least you should do is taste it! She didn't even thank him.



Cat

I'm not a beer drinker but I would have had at least a sip. I think that was rude. When someone presents something like that to you, the least you should do is taste it! She didn't even thank him.



Cat
If her mum (the Queen Mother) was still around she would have drank it.

If her mum (the Queen Mother) was still around she would have drank it.


Pfft, yeah.  From all I've heard, the Queen Mum was a lush, God rest her soul. :D

And here's 'yer man' attacking a glass of sump oil...should he be drinking on duty?

http://www.joe.ie/uploads/story/12449/obamaguinness.jpg


O'bama indeed!!!  ;D

And here's 'yer man' attacking a glass of sump oil...should he be drinking on duty?

http://www.joe.ie/uploads/story/12449/obamaguinness.jpg


Is he still a Muslim?
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/14/notworthy.gif

should he be drinking on duty?


If through some freak accident involving my parents, a time machine, and a teleporter, I were to find myself the President of the United States, I'd be having Guinness for breakfast just to cope.


"http://www.joe.ie/uploads/story/12449/obamaguinness.jpg"


I mean, it's only Guinness, we're talking barely 4% ABV.  Plenty of flavor, but that's less alcohol than Budweiser.


And here's 'yer man' attacking a glass of sump oil...


Speaking of sump oil, if the man wants a stout, he should try an Old Viscosity.  10.5% ABV.  As the label on the bottle says, "Not your Dad's 30-weight."

If the man's got a budget (seriously, $13 for a 12.7 oz bottle?) and wants an even bigger stout, there's Older Viscosity.  Aged in bourbon barrels, and at 12.5% ABV, it's not your Grandpa's 75-90W diff oil :)

Back on topic, whoever he is, whatever party's banner he flies, if the man's running what's left of the free world - no matter how well or poorly he's doing it - he's earned a beer.  Let him drink in peace.

As for the Crown?  The Queen did as good a job as she could have of letting bygones be bygones.  It coulda been worse.  Her Majesty could have ordered a "black and tan", and all hell woulda broke loose :)

I mean, it's only Guinness, we're talking barely 4% ABV.  Plenty of flavor, but that's less alcohol than Budweiser.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/files/2009/03/2625348212_54810f0216.jpg

Despite the best efforts of the Icelandic ash cloud, he's here...and part of his itenerary is to address our Parliament on Wednesday...












...which should be thrilling for him...so he may need another slug of the black stuff afterwards to get over it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HplZ_taHXLM

This was the editorial in today's Rutland Herald:


Ties that bind


Published: May 24, 2011

If Americans find it odd or surprising or incongruous for President Barack Obama to raise a pint of Guinness to celebrate his Irish heritage, it is a sign that our attitudes about race and ethnicity remain odd and surprising, as well.

Obama was in Ireland on Monday as he began a four-nation European tour during which he will address, among other things, Europe’s continuing economic strains. He launched his trip with a stop in Moneygall, the tiny Irish village from which his great-great-great-grandfather emigrated to America in 1850.

That we think of Obama as black rather than white, as a Kenyan Obama rather than an Irish Dunham, reveals to us the weirdness of our racial past, when a tiny drop of African blood was enough to justify enslavement. The pathological variations on the historical biases growing out of our nation’s African heritage extend to our first African-American president, who is equally a European-American president, whose white mother raised him with the consciousness that America is neither a white nation, a black nation nor a brown nation, but part of a world of many shades.

It is likely that the resistance in some quarters to the idea that Obama is a native-born American grows out of the sense that only a white American of European heritage can be viewed as legitimately American. Yet Obama grew up in a state where whites are a distinct minority. Residents of Hawaii live in a world made up of people with roots in Japan, the Philippines, China, Samoa, Vietnam, Portugal and Hawaii itself, along with the white peoples of the mainland United States.

Because American attitudes toward race give a preponderance of importance to African heritage, Obama grew up thinking of himself as African-American, even though his family history shared nothing with the history of enslavement, oppression and migration characterizing the history of most African-Americans. His youth in Hawaii and Indonesia taught him how to negotiate the complexities of a world of many colors and to search for the meaning of his African heritage.

With Obama in Ireland visiting a distant cousin and sharing the love with thousands of Irish, we are confronted with the silliness of our historic racial preoccupations.

Once you accept the idea that one race or coloration is more legitimate than others, then you have embarked on a perilous quest toward an ideal of purity that leads toward exclusivity and hatred. Once you accept that fewer and fewer families are actually exclusively white, then you can celebrate the many cross-cultural ties that bind us all together.

One Vermonter of our acquaintance grew up with the understanding that he was strictly of northern European heritage, but over the years his family has through marriage come to include Chinese, Japanese, Latino, African and Navajo connections. We can all lift a Guinness to toast the United Nations that the United States has become.

For Obama coming to terms with his heritage was part of his life’s work, and he has written eloquently on the topic.

His mother helped him develop the intellectual gifts that would allow him to think with clarity and empathy about his history and the history of his nation.

He doesn’t have the ordinary Irish-American experience behind him or the ordinary experience of the African-American, who had to contend over the generations with a history of violence, oppression and emigration away from Jim Crow. Rather, it is his singular history that makes him stand out both within the United States and wherever he goes — from his ancestral village in Ireland, to Cairo, to Ghana, to the capitals of Europe, to Chicago, to Washington.

Ultimately, we are all singular. Who among us isn’t an interesting mix of something? It is a history that ought to breed tolerance rather than exclusivity, openness rather isolation. Obama’s visit to Ireland reminds us of the ways we are all bound together.



Cat