A happy green one to you too. On St Patrick’s Day, as the entire world (seemingly) and its partner shamelessly claims to be Irish, has it never struck you as somewhat peculiar that no one, anywhere, ever, has attempted to dig up some Irish connection with the US’s 45th and 47th president, even as he approaches the halfway point of his second and (maybe!) last term?
Strange or what?
Particularly as this is the first and only US president to own property in Ireland and who provides employment to the people of Doonbeg, Co Clare, bless them all.
Odd, isn’t it?
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Okay, Trump is a German name and he is of Teutonic origin, from the village of Kallstadt in southwest Germany, but Barack Obama was born in Hawaii with a Kenyan father and we still managed to find a 19th-century ancestor of his in Tipperary.
We even managed to claim Muhammad Ali, whose great-grandfather Abe Grady was from Ennis, not to mention Bill Clinton, through his mother, to the Cassidys of Fermanagh and of course Joe Biden, who is as Irish as buttermilk.
Yes, those latter US presidents, like Obama, were Democrats, but let us not forget Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, with Tipp roots, and Richard Nixon who visited his ancestors’ grave at Timahoe, Co Kildare, in 1970.
Peculiarly, we don’t hear much about that any more.
Among Trump’s ancestors was the original Henry John Heinz, founder of Heinz “57 Varieties”, of which the late Irish man Tony O’Reilly was chairman at one stage. A bit tenuous?
Let’s look at Trump’s mother, then. A Scot, Mary Anne MacLeod was born on the Scots Gaelic-speaking island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the youngest of 10 children. How very “Irish”.
Like two-thirds of her son’s wives, she was an immigrant to the US, who began her life there as a domestic servant in New York. Very Irish!
And who brought “Gaelic” to that part of western Scotland? The Irish, from the fifth century on.
Okay, that was a long time ago. But time has never proved an obstacle to us claiming prominent people as Irish before, ever.
Why the reluctance now? Why no rush to claim Trump as Irish?
It’s a mystery to me.
Ancestry, from Old French ancesserie for `ancestors, forefathers.’
