David Creedon’s haunting photographs of abandoned Irish emigrants’ homes — collected in the book “Ghosts of the Faithful Departed” (released in the U.S. this week by Dufour Editions) — are all the more ghostly for their lively colors and poignant period props.
The houses to which this photographer’s sensitive eye was drawn (over a period of two years) sleep in various stages of decay, with books, tools and religious icons scattered liberally across their abandoned surfaces. The agents of all this quiet chaos — the homes’ former inhabitants — are conspicuously absent, but their lives can sometimes be pieced together, their belongings used as clues.
Over the phone, Creedon told me how a project born of serendipity (he stumbled on one remarkable abandoned home by accident, then quickly discovered many more) became an internationally exhibited endeavor, and talked about the significance of emigration to the Irish collective conscience. The following slide show offers a preview of Creedon’s work (with captions in his own words).
How long did this project take you, from start to finish?
I started in about April 2005, and I spent two years working on it. When I had the first few images done, someone saw them and offered to exhibit them. We opened in Chicago in October 2006, and I think there hasn’t been a month gone by since then that they haven’t been exhibited somewhere in the world.
How much research do you do about each individual house?
It’s very, very difficult to find individuals who are still living who know anything about the people who used to live [in these houses]. Some of these houses are really very isolated, and it was only by going through papers and letters that were lying around that I was able to get a profile of the people who once lived there.
There was a house in west Cork that I photographed; it’s the one that’s on the cover. The house was extremely dark, but when I went in, there were these vibrant colors in every different room. The calendar said 1978. There was a book of the American Constitution lying around, and there was also [a book about John F. Kennedy]. When I went upstairs, the American flag was hanging at a 45-degree angle on the landing, and it reminded me of that famous old photograph of the soldiers putting up the flag at Iwo Jima.
When I went into the next room, there was an old shipping trunk [with labels identifying its owner as a woman called Mary Sullivan]. Doing research, I discovered that Mary Sullivan had traveled to New York in 1940 on a White Star liner out of Queenstown. When she arrived at Ellis Island, she had $15. But when you opened up the case, inside there were ladies’ nylon stockings still in their original packaging — and there was also a bank book. Mary Sullivan had saved $8,000 while in New York. $8,000 is a lot of money still today — but in 1949, it must have been absolutely amazing. Inside that case, there were letters from home, and there were receipts from the local church where she would have given donations, and hanging behind the door was a dress that still had the purchase labels of the shop where she bought it. I think she came home to die, actually, to be honest with you.
Have there been efforts to revitalize any of these houses?
Well, that’s a question in itself. In Ireland, in the 1950s, there was mass emigration. Just to give you an idea, 80 percent of people born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 emigrated in the 1950s. That’s a huge amount. And by the middle of the 1950s, the population had fallen to 2.8 million, which was the lowest that was ever recorded. Even if you were to go back 100 years prior to that, to the 1850s, the population stood at 9 million. So this was a huge drop.
In Ireland in the 1950s, there was very high unemployment. [In certain regions,] a small rural farm couldn’t support a family of five. Most of the children would emigrate; there might be one who’d stay behind, and that person would look after the farm, but in later years would end up looking after his parents. But because they had no money, the person who stayed behind couldn’t afford to buy or build his own house, so he couldn’t get married (no woman would ever want a second woman under the roof). So there was a huge population increase in bachelor farmers, and when they started dying off, in probably the ’80s or ’90s, the title of their property went to, let’s say, a brother or sister in England or in America — who, at this point, could also be dead. That’s really how the properties became empty. And they just got forgotten about, you know?
So they’ll stay like this indefinitely?
They’ll just fall down the way they are now. And that’ll be it. Nobody will go in and take over the houses, because they don’t own them. They wouldn’t have title on them. Somebody somewhere owns those houses, you know. But who they are, or where they are, I don’t know.
Would you say that emigration is somehow key to the Irish cultural identity?
Ireland has always been a country that emigrated. Between about 1990 and 2005 there was [very little] emigration; people were coming in, because there were jobs. And then you had the banking crisis — so we’re back emigrating again. But in reality, Ireland has always been an emigrant society — since the [mid-19th century], if not before. We’ve gone to Australia, America, England — the Irish are all over the world, really. I think it’s always been part of our psyche, that emigration is an option for us. I know a lot of kids now who are at college, and all they’re talking about is emigrating when they get their degree.
“Ghosts of the Faithful Departed” by David Creedon is published by The Collins Press. It is available in North America from Dufour Editions.
View the slide show
DUBLIN, Ireland — A former commander of the outlawed Irish Republican Army has created a political earthquake in Ireland by entering the campaign for president of the Irish Republic — with an outside chance of success.
Martin McGuinness, currently deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive, will contest the Oct. 27 election as a candidate for Sinn Fein, the only political party which operates on both sides of the border.
McGuinness has never denied his membership in the IRA, which was responsible for the death of 644 civilians during its three decade-long campaign of violence. He said Thursday he had never knowingly killed anyone but acknowledged taking part in gunfights in the early days of the Troubles, when the IRA took up arms against the British Army.
In recent years, the 61-year-old Derry man has become better known as an architect of the Irish peace process, which resulted in the disbandment of the IRA in 2008.
He is gambling that his high profile and engaging personality will attract a significant percentage of the vote in the Republic, where the left-wing Sinn Fein party is the fourth-largest in the Dublin parliament. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party work well together in the power-sharing executive in Parliament.
The former street-fighter and his protagonist, firebrand Democratic Unionist Party leader Reverend Ian Paisley, were pictured laughing together so often when joint first ministers from 2007-2008 that they were nicknamed “the Chuckle Brothers.”
Paisley has since been replaced by Peter Robinson, with whom McGuinness also enjoys a good relationship.
Conventional political parties in the republic have on the other hand refused to contemplate coalition with the former IRA apologists, who commanded only 10 percent of the vote in the last general election.
McGuinness’s entry into the fray Sunday is widely seen as an audacious bid by Sinn Fein to raise its electoral profile in the republic and to gain retrospective legitimacy for the IRA’s campaign.
However the ploy could backfire as the gloves come off and the two candidates from the current governing coalition, Gay Mitchell of Fine Gael and Michael D. Higgins of Labor, start aggressively interrogating his past and highlighting IRA atrocities during the time he was an active member.
Former Justice Minister Michael McDowell said the election of former IRA leader would be a travesty “because the president embodies what we believe about ourselves.”
The Irish president has few executive functions but is titular head of the republic’s armed forces, whose legitimacy the IRA long rejected.
Campaigning Tuesday at the national plowing championships (a major annual agricultural show) in County Kildare, McGuinness said, “Both the British Army and the RUC (police) murdered people in my city before the IRA fired a shot, and I was part of a young generation that decided to stand against them in the Bogside, in Free Derry, and I make no apologies for that.”
If his commitment to peace was in doubt, “I don’t think I would have been invited to the Oval Office on three occasions to meet with three American presidents, or to Johannesburg to meet with Nelson Mandela, or to Brussels to meet with the president of the European Union.”
He said that if he succeeds the outgoing president, Mary Aleese, who is barred from running again after serving two seven-year terms, he would take only the minimum wage of 1462 euros (about $2000) a month, and donate the remainder of the presidential salary of 325,000 euros back to the state.
This promise will resonate with working-class voters angry at cutbacks in social services due to the excesses of politicians, bankers and developers that have left Ireland in financial crisis.
In an Irish national radio poll last Tuesday, in which 22,000 listeners took part via text message, McGuinness came first of seven candidates with 28 per cent, slightly ahead of an independent hopeful, Senator David Norris, and far ahead of the other candidates.
Norris, an openly gay civil-rights activist and noted Joycean scholar, has returned to the campaign after stepping down last month over a controversy concerning his former partner.
Key supporters left his team when it was revealed Norris interceded with the High Court in Israel fourteen years ago to request leniency for his former partner, Ezra Yizhak Nawi, who had been convicted of the sexual abuse of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy.
Buoyed by opinion polls showing that he remained popular with voters, Norris announced Sept. 15 that he would again seek the required backing of 20 members of the Irish parliament or four county councils for nomination.
A decision last Tuesday by leading opposition party Fianna Fail to bar its members from supporting independent candidates appeared to mean that Norris had little chance of getting the necessary endorsement. Still, he is fighting hard, and may actually get the required 20 endorsements.
McGuinness has been temporarily replaced as deputy first minister in Northern Ireland by party colleague and education.
In an exemplary instance of getting the story just plain wrong, Fox News Monday reported on the possibility of a U.S.-funded bailout for Ireland, which supposedly President Barack Obama will discuss with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. As Media Matters pointed out, these claims are baseless.
No U.S. bailouts are on the table at all. The Irish P.M. does hope to make Obama an ally in Ireland’s push for more favorable terms in an EU/IMF-funded bailout, which we assume — or at least hope — Fox knows to be a different thing from a U.S.-funded bailout.
Continue Reading
Close
The cynical may dismiss it as just another campaign stop, but I found myself unexpectedly moved by President Obama’s visit to Dublin — the overwhelming adulation from the Irish as well as the president’s warm speech, claiming his own Irish heritage and praising the bonds between the two countries.
He introduced himself as “Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” He joked about wishing he’d known of his Irish ancestry as a young politician in Irish Chicago, where he wound up bringing up the rear at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, just in front of the garbage brigade. He praised the role of Irish American soldiers in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. And he spoke personally, and movingly, about his grandfather’s grandfather Falmouth Kearny, who left tiny Moneygall during “The Great Hunger” — the more common Irish term for the Famine of 1847-48 — not only praising his courage but acknowledging how “heartbreaking” it must have been to leave Ireland. For the Irish who, generations later, still see themselves as exiles, it was a knowing nod to the only partly voluntary nature of their emigration.
I can’t find studies breaking out the Irish vote in 2008, but Obama was perceived as struggling to win the support of Irish during that election. They were said to favor Hillary Clinton, and I remember Obama spending St. Patrick’s Day 2008 in Scranton, Penn., where the Irish crowd made it clear it backed Clinton, and Obama struggled gamely to win them over. It wasn’t long after his unfortunate comment about working-class Pennsylvania voters clinging to their guns and religion, which probably didn’t go over big in working-class Irish Catholic precincts of Pennsylvania.
Just a couple of months ago, I was saddened by the reaction of Irish-Americans who learned from Ancestry.com that they were related to Obama, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day this year. “I really don’t like to claim a relationship to Obama,” Roma Joy Palmer, 66, of Mulvane, Kan., told the Associated Press. “He is not my favorite President. I don’t have anything against him personally, but I don’t think we have the same agenda.” Another relative, 83-year-old Dorma Lee Reese of Tucson, expressed similar feelings. “I’m not a Democrat, so I can’t say I clapped,” she said.
So it was nice to see the president welcomed so warmly by the Irish in Ireland. Obama also referenced the “unlikely friendship” between Ireland’s “Great Liberator” Daniel O’Connell, and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave. It’s one of history’s great stories: Douglass loved his visits to Ireland, where he wrote that he felt “not like a color, but like a man”; O’Connell, a staunch supporter of the American abolition movement, was honored by New York’s African-American Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1833, calling him “the friend of oppressed Africans and their descendants, and the unadulterated rights of man.”
But that inspiring friendship had one disappointing dimension that the president didn’t mention. When Douglass and other abolitionists tried to use O’Connell’s popularity with Irish Americans to win them to the anti-slavery cause — especially as Irish Catholics seemed to be lining up with the pro-slavery Democratic Party — they failed. In 1841, 70,000 Irish men and women, including O’Connell, signed an “Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America,” beseeching Irish Americans to “CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS,” but the message didn’t sell. That failed coalition is central to “whiteness studies” scholarship — it’s a pivot point for Noel Ignatiev’s shrill “How the Irish Became White,” and it figured prominently, and one-sidedly, in David Roedeger’s “The Wages of Whiteness” and Nell Irvin Painter’s otherwise astute “A History of White People” – showing how the Irish chose whiteness over justice. It’s actually much more interesting, with lessons about black-Irish tensions that persist to this day.
Under violent attack by Nativists, Irish Catholics struggled fiercely for acceptance; they were unlikely to join the abolitionist movement, the radical frontier of the anti-slavery effort. Another problem was, some prominent abolitionists and anti-slavery activists were also virulently Nativist and particularly anti-Irish Catholic. Almost the entire storied Beecher clan preached a fiery Nativism, from Lyman Beecher (father of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriett Beecher Stowe), whose days of anti-Catholic sermons and crusading formed the cultural backdrop to the 1834 torching of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., through Henry Ward Beecher, who denounced the Irish as “the most admirable race that ever abominated the earth” and the “destroyers” of many nations. Abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy, murdered by an Illinois mob inflamed by his anti-slavery newspaper, crusaded against Catholicism at least as stridently as against slavery. Boston’s Theodore Parker, a passionate defender of abolitionist John Brown’s radicalism, despised the Irish just as passionately, referring to them as “an ignorant, idle, turbulent, and vicious population” and as “wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle,” who threatened American democracy. As historian Peter Kolchin notes: “Some abolitionists managed to combine a passionate belief in the goodness and intellectual potential of black people with an equally passionate conviction of the unworthiness of the Irish.”
Seeing so many of their enemies among O’Connell’s abolitionist friends, Irish Catholics rejected the Liberator’s appeal. O’Connell kept crusading, though he acknowledged that “there are amongst the abolitionists many wicked and calumniating enemies of Catholicity and the Irish.” He even suggested the need for “an Irish Address in reverse”: an “Address to the Abolitionists” that would ask them to “cooperate in the spread of Christian charity with the Irishmen and Catholics in America, and obtain their assistance.” Needless to say, no such cooperation ever materialized, and for rejecting O’Connell’s appeal to join the abolitionists, the Irish went down in history — well, at least in whiteness studies tomes — as backward racists. The fact is, colliding at the bottom of industrializing American society in the mid 1800s, the Irish and African-Americans had different enemies, and different friends. The poorly understood legacy of being pitted against one another persists to this day. It flashed periodically during the 2008 primary; we can only hope we don’t see it again in 2012.
That’s why it was so nice to see Obama’s eloquence about his Irish heritage, and the way his “family” in Ireland embraced him. MSNBC and CNN cut over from covering the awful storms in Joplin, Mo., to present Obama’s speech in full; Fox did so only briefly, which was sad because the Fox audience (my Irish relatives among them) might have been moved by Obama’s Irish welcome. But Fox did cover the president’s visit by pushing an absolutely false story that the U.S. planned to bail out Ireland. Roger Ailes, ever Richard Nixon’s media man, wouldn’t feature a story that might shake up his aging white audience, or as it’s also called, the GOP base.
President Barack Obama said Monday that the U.S. and Ireland share a “blood link” that extends beyond strategic interests or foreign policy into the hearts of the millions of Irish Americans who still see a homeland here.
And though Obama didn’t mention it in brief comments alongside the Irish prime minister shortly after arriving in Dublin, that blood link extends to the president himself. Obama was to set out later in the day for Moneygall, the tiny village in County Offaly that is the improbable ancestral homeland of Obama’s great-great-great grandfather on his Kansas-born mother’s side.
“This continues to symbolize the homeland and the extraordinary traditions of an extraordinary people,” Obama said after meeting with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny on the first stop of a six-day, four-country Europe tour.
“The friendship and the bonds between the United States and Ireland could not be stronger,” Obama said. “Obviously, it is not just a matter of strategic interest. It’s not just a matter of foreign policy. For the United States, Ireland carries a blood link with it.”
The president, who has struggled very publicly in recent days with his own role trying to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, also said during his visit with Kenny “how inspired we have been by the progress that’s been made in Northern Ireland. It speaks to the possibilities of peace, and people in longstanding struggles being able to reimagine their relationships.”
Obama spoke of the queen’s recent visit of reconciliation and said it “sends a signal not just in England, not just here in Ireland, but around the world. It sends what Bobby Kennedy once called a ‘ripple of hope’ that may manifest itself in a whole range of ways.”
Kenny said the Irish people had been awaiting the president’s visit and his pilgrimage to Moneygall. “Their excitement is palpable,” he said.
As the story goes, Falmouth Kearney, a shoemaker, left Moneygall for the United States in 1850 at the height of Ireland’s Great Famine. Obama’s roots in the town were discovered during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Residents in the village of about 350 some 80 miles southwest of Dublin have been eagerly anticipating Obama’s arrival, applying fresh coats of paint to their homes, patching up the sidewalks and hurriedly building a coffee shop called — what else? — Obama Cafe.
White House aides say the president shares their excitement and may even raise a pint at a local pub and connect with a few distant relatives.
First, though, after traveling overnight from Washington aboard Air Force One, the president and first lady Michelle Obama met Ireland’s President Mary McAleese at her official residence, and Obama participated in a tree planting ceremony. He tossed shovels of dirt at the base of a young oak as children rang a peace bell marking the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday accord, the historic agreement that put Northern Ireland on the road to peace. Nearby stood trees planted in past visits by then-presidents Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, and one planted just last week by the queen of England during her visit here.
Obama then headed into his meeting with Kenny, and he was to visit with U.S. embassy staff before his travel to Moneygall, where excited residents waited to cheer their connection to the U.S. president.
“It’s certainly quite likely that in a town of that size that is so deeply rooted in that part of Ireland that there are people who share those ties,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.
Obama was to wrap up his trip here with an open-air speech at College Green, the same spot in the center of Dublin where President Bill Clinton drew a massive crowd for a speech during his 1995 trip to Ireland.
Obama’s remarks will be part of a larger rally that includes musical performances and appearances by popular Irish actors and athletes. In keeping with the festive mood, Obama aides said the president’s speech would not be political, instead focusing on the deep ties that bind the U.S. and Ireland.
“It’s also a chance to talk about the enormous affinity, frankly, that the American people have for Ireland that’s rooted in part in the huge population of Irish-Americans here,” Rhodes told reporters before the president left Washington.
Obama arrived just days after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II visited the Emerald Isle, the first trip to Ireland by a British monarch in about 100 years.
The back-to-back visits have given the Irish a much-needed reason to celebrate as they struggle to climb out of the financial hole created by the collapse of the country’s banks and housing market.
Gripped by debt, Ireland was forced to take a bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund in November that could total $100 billion. The rescue package came with stringent conditions that will lead the Irish to slash 25,000 jobs from the state payroll, leaving many in this country of 4.5 million with deep uncertainty about their financial future.
Heather Conley, a Europe expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said she hopes Obama’s visit includes “a moment of reflection to see the personal impact and toll” the economic crisis has levied on Ireland and other countries in the region.
After spending the night in Dublin, Obama heads to London for a two-day state visit at the invitation of the queen. He’ll then travel to Deauville, France, to meet with the heads of leading industrial nations, before ending his Europe trip with a visit to Poland, a strategically important Central European ally.
An overarching theme of Obama’s trip — his eighth to Europe since taking office — will be to reassure the region that it still has a central role in U.S. foreign policy, even though Obama has put a premium on boosting U.S. relations with Asia and emerging markets elsewhere in the world.
The president is expected to emphasize the need for the U.S. and Europe to be in lockstep against the backdrop of sweeping unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, not only in the NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya, but also as financial backers for countries in the region, like Tunisia and Egypt, that are pressing forward with democratic transitions.
Associated Press writers Nancy Benac and Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this report.
Authorities defused a bomb Tuesday hours before Queen Elizabeth II was to begin the first visit by a British monarch to the south of Ireland in a century, a trip designed to celebrate the healing of ancient wounds and the triumph of peacemaking in neighboring Northern Ireland.
Police said they found a small, viable bomb hidden in the luggage compartment of a bus in Maynooth, a university town 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Dublin, early Tuesday. A second hoax device was discovered near Dublin’s light-rail line in the western district of Inchicore. Irish Army experts dismantled the bomb, while detectives took away the fake bomb to check for fingerprint or DNA traces of the hoaxer.
No group claimed responsibility for either threat. But several small IRA splinter groups concentrated along the Irish border continue to plot gun and bomb attacks in the British territory of Northern Ireland next door in hopes of undermining the success of its 1998 peace accord, particularly its stable Catholic-Protestant government.
Irish and British officials were keen to stress that the queen’s four-day visit to Dublin, Kildare, Tipperary and Cork would proceed as planned — accompanied by the biggest security operation in the Republic of Ireland’s history.
“This is the start of an entirely new beginning for Ireland and Britain,” said Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. “I really do hope that the welcome she gets will be genuine and memorable for her and her party.”
More than 8,000 police, two-thirds of the entire country’s police force, have already shut down key roads in central Dublin and erected pedestrian barricades for several miles (kilometers). About 1,000 Irish troops are on standby in reserve.
Ireland has borrowed a specially bomb-resistant, bulletproof Range Rover from Northern Irish authorities for the queen to use during her trip. They also received two massive mobile water cannons from the Northern Ireland police to use against any rioters.
For those opposed to the visit, police are making it extremely difficult even to protest within sight of any of the queen’s engagements. Onlookers are being given few vantage points to see the queen unless they have been included in carefully vetted guest lists. Roads surrounding events are being closed even to pedestrians.
But Irish leaders said extreme security measures were necessary to ensure the success of an event that has been 15 years in the making.
“I think it is an extraordinary moment in Irish history,” said Irish President Mary McAleese, who was hosting the queen’s first event Tuesday at her official residence in Dublin’s vast Phoenix Park.
McAleese, who will host many of the events set up for the queen and her husband Prince Philip, said Britain and Ireland were both “determined to make the future a much, much better place.”
The queen arrives a full century after her grandfather George V visited an Ireland that was still part of the British Empire. Relations between Ireland and its former colonial master have been tense most of that time.
The two countries spent decades in frosty opposition following Ireland’s guerrilla war of independence from Britain and the creation in 1922 of the Irish Free State.
Ireland stayed neutral in World War II and offered condolences to Germany over Adolf Hitler’s death; broke all symbolic ties with Britain by declaring itself a republic in 1949; and offered sympathy and safe haven when the modern Irish Republican Army in 1970 began shooting and bombing in the British territory of Northern Ireland.
But after Britain and Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, and as the bloodshed in Northern Ireland spilled over into the Catholic south, the governments in London and Dublin gradually found common cause.
Their cooperation provided the essential bedrock for the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. IRA disarmament and a stable Catholic-Protestant government in Belfast eventually followed.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who will arrive Wednesday in Dublin, said the success of Northern Ireland peacemaking was allowing “the natural friendship, comradeship, shared experiences and warmth that we have for each other (to) really come out.” He said the queen’s tour of Ireland would “be a huge step forward for that process.”
While the Irish remain proud of their independence, many concede that they share much popular culture with their nearest neighbor. Today’s Ireland is home to 4.5 million residents who watch British television and newspapers daily, and shop in the British chain stores that dominate the commercial hearts of every Irish city.
Many follow English and Scottish soccer with passion, traveling in their tens of thousands each weekend by plane and ferry. The English, in turn, have made the Emerald Isle a favored tourist destination.
Ireland’s fearful struggle to prevent national bankruptcy — the Irish have spent three years raising taxes and cutting spending, and six months ago received a potential euro67.5 billion ($95 billion) credit line from international lenders — has found its greatest champion in Britain.
Cameron’s government offered a particularly low-interest loan, declared that Ireland’s revival was a strategic British interest, and has pressed other EU members to cut the Irish more slack for managing their staggering debts.
These cultural and economic ties have created what is expected to be a generally warm atmosphere for the queen despite the threat of violence from the IRA splinter groups.
Police in both parts of Ireland say they are keeping dissident operatives under close surveillance. Several have been arrested in the days leading up to the visit.
The kitchen of an abandoned house in west Cork, from David Creedon's "Ghosts of the Faithful Departed."(Credit: David Creedon) 
Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness at a news conference in Dublin, Ireland September 18, 2011(Credit: REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton) 
U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama drink Guinness beer as they meet with local residents at Ollie Hayes pub in Moneygall, Ireland, the ancestral homeland of his great-great-great grandfather, Monday, May 23, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: AP) 
President Obama smiles as he shakes hands with a crowd of local residents in Moneygall. 
From left, President Barack Obama, President of Ireland Mary McAleese and her husband Martin McAleese, and first lady Michelle Obama stop to be photographed as President Barack Obama arrives at the Presidential Residence in Dublin, Ireland, Monday, May 23, 2011. President Barack Obama opens a six-day European tour with a quick dash through Ireland, where he will celebrate his own Irish roots and look to give a boost to a nation grappling with the fallout from its financial collapse.(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)(Credit: AP) 
A protester puts up a placard to protest at the visit by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland, Monday, May, 16, 2011. Queen Elizabeth II begins a four day visit to Ireland on Tuesday for the first time since Irish Independence. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)(Credit: AP) 
