Barach O'Bamagh? Yep, he's Irish says a commenter on this site. Course this may be some a that blarney stuff:
Senator Barack Obama has Irish roots on his father's side, according to research from the Doolin Genealogy and Knitwear Centre, Co Clare.
The senator's paternal great-great-great-grandfather, Patrick O'Bamagh, left Galway during the disastrous but largely forgotten turnip famine of 1803 and sailed to the west coast of Africa, where he soon found employment in the compulsory human resources trade.
When this trade went into sharp decline a few years later, Mr O'Bamagh took a camel train across the Sahara desert, where it is believed that he became a Muslim, establishing a long family tradition of converting on the hoof.
Arriving in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, Mr O'Bamagh secured a job as a turnip guard with the Portuguese garrison.
The Obamas were known to be stubbornly unhappy during the colonial "Happy Valley" period, but no member of the family took part in the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, although intelligence indicates that they were strangely ambivalent about all violence north of Nairobi.
In his memoirs, Senator Obama also recalls that his father was shocked to see white people in Kenya after independence.
"For some reason he thought that when Britain pulled out, everyone would just change colour overnight," the senator wrote. "Lord or Allah knows where he got that dumb idea from."
Senator Obama's paternal Irish lineage was discovered immediately after last week's Iowa caucus, complementing the discovery of his maternal Irish lineage immediately after he announced his bid for the presidency.
"It is often said that we are the blacks of Europe," observed a spokesman for the Doolin Genealogy and Knitwear Centre. "I am confident that we can say this to a powerful African-American without sounding self-obsessed, self-pitying, patronising, condescending or stupid."
Monday, January 14, 2008 at 10:04PM | NOEL CUNNINGHAM
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