It's Obamamania in an Irish hamlet

Ever since the American president announced on St. Patrick's Day he would visit his ancestral Irish home, the village of Moneygall has been suffering a case of Obamamania.

The roadside hamlet of two pubs, three shops and barely 350 residents has repainted every house, festooned every lamppost and seemingly re-branded every product in preparation for today's visit by President Barack Obama. Locals have stood in line for hours to receive one of 3,000 tickets that will let them meet Moneygall's most famous son.

"We've all been caught up in this dream. Nothing in the village seems real," said Henry Healy, 26, an accountant for a plumbing firm who discovered four years ago he was one of Obama's closest Irish relatives. "I've been rehearsing what I'm going to say to the president for months in my head. I can't really believe it's going to happen."

Preparing for president

As he spoke, a deliveryman arrived with another truckload of spiced Irish fruitbread called brack, re-branded "Barack's Brack" across Ireland and bearing a cartoon portrait of the president.

Healy, as an eighth cousin to Obama and the closest blood relative still living in Moneygall, received Ticket No. 0001. He lives next door to the American flag-festooned pub that Obama is expected to visit.

U.S. and Irish genealogists have detected several other distant Irish cousins of Obama in Ireland and England, including Dick Benn and Ton Donovan, whose families live just across the border in County Tipperary and have farmed the same land for 2 1/2 centuries.

They're all descendants of Falmouth Kearney, one of Obama's great-great-great-grandfathers on his Kansas mother's side. Kearney, a shoemaker, immigrated to the United States in 1850 at age 19, at the height of the Great Famine.

Every known Irish relative is expected to be standing on Moneygall's Main Street when Obama begins a six-day, four-nation trip across Europe.

Nationally, Ireland has barely had time to register Obama's imminent arrival. The country just hosted a tour by Queen Elizabeth II, the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland following its 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. Her triumphant four-day visit involved carefully choreographed acts of reconciliation.

No such drama awaits Obama. Ireland has always offered warm welcomes to U.S. presidents since John F. Kennedy became the first to visit in 1963.

Obama's biggest event Monday will be an open-air speech at the entrance to Trinity College in Dublin, the capital that spent much of the last week in a security lockdown for the queen.

Trip across Europe

Obama's quick stop in Ireland will begin a six-day trip across Europe that will include a state visit to the United Kingdom, talks about Libya and the Arab Spring with allies at a summit in France, and an effort to smooth over relations with Poland and Central Europe after his administration canceled plans to build a missile defense system there.

Tuesday, he and his wife Michelle travel to London to be greeted by Queen Elizabeth II and honored at a dinner at Buckingham Palace, where they will stay. Obama will also speak to Parliament on U.S. relations with Europe, becoming the first U.S. president to make such a speech in Westminster Hall.

On Thursday he is to fly to Deauville, France, for a meeting with the heads of the G-8 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom.

On Friday, he will go to Warsaw, Poland, where he will reassure leaders of that country and others in Central Europe that the United States remains committed to their defense.

With McClatchy Newspapers