GC4J261 Is Feidir Linn - Yes We Can (Traditional Cache) in Leinster, Ireland created by Peig

This cache has been archived.

Inishanier: Hi,

There has been no response from the cache owner so I'm Archiving this cache.

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Graham

Inishanier - Volunteer Reviewer for Geocaching.com (Ireland)

GC4J261 ▼

A cache by Peig Message this owner

Hidden : 8/5/2013

Difficulty:

Terrain:

Size: Size: small (small)

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Geocache Description:

Moneygall, County Offaly.

Moneygall, blink-and-you-miss-it birthplace of the great-great-great-grandfather of the 44th president of the United States which was briefly the centre of the world on the 23 of May 2011.

It was from here that a 19-year-old shoemaker called Falmouth Kearney set out for one of the so-called coffin ships that left Ireland for the new world during the Great Famine. He landed in New York on 20th March 1850.

Falmouth was following his father Joseph, who had abandoned Ireland almost exactly a year earlier; his mother Phoebe, brother William and sister Mary came a year later. Two years after he settled in the US, Falmouth married Charlotte Holloway. In 1860 they were living in Deerfield, Ohio; the 1870 census has them in Tipton County, Indiana.

Charlotte Kearney died in 1877, followed by her husband a little over a year later. They left three sons, and five daughters. One of those girls, Mary Anne, had a grandson called Stanley Armour Dunham. His daughter gave birth in August 1961 to a boy called Barack Hussein Obama.

The connection was uncovered in 2007, when Obama was a rising Democratic star, and the village's 298 inhabitants had been preparing for this moment since he was elected president.

On the 23rd of May at 3pm when Marine One landed on a sodden sports field to the cheers and much waving of Irish and American flags, the president and first lady shook hands, embraced, cooed over babies. They plunged briefly into the modest two-storey ancestral home, owned now by John Donovan, and then into the shop.

Hastily produced souvenirs on sale in the village included Barack Obama teapots, fridge magnets, cigarette lighters and T-shirts proclaiming What's the Craic, Barack, and Obama Is Feidir Linn (Gaelic for Obama, Yes We Can).

The village was and is pristine, thanks in no small part to the generosity of Dulux, which gave 3,500 litres of paint to smarten up every house — at least one painted in the Stars and Stripes. Potholes had been filled in, pavements patched up, floral displays hung from lamposts and flags hoisted the length of Main Street.

Then it was into Ollie Hayes's pub, recently equipped with a particularly fine bust of the president, to meet assorted distant relatives to the strains of an Irish fiddle, and down the obligatory pint – a few sips anyway – of Guinness. After a sip and a "Slainte", and the popular observation that the black stuff tastes "so much better here" than it does anywhere else, Obama slapped a note down on the bar and declared: "I just want you guys to know, the president pays his tab".

The Obamas, after a genuinely joyful 90 minutes in Moneygall that people here will remember for a long, long time, flew back to Dublin for a public party on College Green. "My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall O'Bamas," the president said. "I've come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way."

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Perrcl Penjyl Gbjref - ebhaq gur onpx

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)