During the eighteenth century, a wigmaker in Ireland could expect to have a prosperous career. Wigs were popular among the aristocracy, and useful in a pre-shampoo era. But the eighteen-hundreds brought a cold reappraisal of artificial hair. In the tiny village of Moneygall, on the border of Offaly and Tipperary, the Kearney family turned to shoemaking. By the arrival of the Great Famine, they’d joined millions of fellow-citizens who were hungry for a restart. When, in 1850, the Kearney family learned that a relative in America had bequeathed them a parcel of land, Falmouth Kearney, then nineteen years old, set out from his twelve-and-a-half-foot-wide house for Liverpool. There, he boarded a New York-bound coffin ship, so named for the high mortality rate among passengers. From New York, Kearney, an intense-looking man with a pressed-down mat of dark hair, made his way to Ohio, and married an Ohio woman named Charlotte Holloway. They had children and resettled, eventually, in Indiana, where Kearney worked as a farmer. Their youngest daughter had children of her own, and those children had children, and those children had children. One of the little Irish babies was Barack Obama.

The Irish roots of America’s first African-American President have a way of registering perpetually as a news flash. But it was back in 2007 that the world, and Obama himself, first learned about great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth. That year, a genealogist from Ancestry.com pieced together the family story with the help of a rector in Ireland who had access to church records from the nineteenth century. For the young senator from Illinois, this newfound heritage became occasional campaign-trail fodder; it was a hoot, and didn’t hurt with Irish-American voters.

Henry Healy was watching the news with his mother one evening in 2007 when the newscaster mentioned a familiar-sounding name. Healy was twenty-two, and had lived all his life on Moneygall’s central thoroughfare. He recalls glancing at his mother and saying, “Did he just say ‘Kearney’?” The Kearneys had married into the Healy family in the eighteenth century; Henry had been interested in family trees since his father’s death, thirteen years earlier. As word spread that Obama had a skinny, white eighth cousin—several, in fact—in a rural Irish village with a population of three hundred, reporters poured in. In Henry, a tall man with glassy blue eyes and ears bordering on the prominent, they found a spokesman for the Healy line.

Obama was not the first American politician to discover a lurking Irishness; in the past half-century, finding one’s Celtic roots has been something of a Presidential tic. Ronald Reagan learned that his great-grandfather hailed from Ballyporeen. Bill Clinton learned that he might have family from County Fermanagh. Richard Nixon and the Bushes claimed Irish heritage. John F. Kennedy, America’s first Irish-Catholic President, once told the citizens of Limerick, “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.”

A cross-Atlantic courtship began between Obama and Moneygall. In early 2009, Healy and Stephen Neal, the rector who found the old records, corresponded with the president of the Irish American Democrats. Soon after that, the acting ambassador travelled to the village, the Irish Prime Minister phoned Healy, and the public-affairs director of the U.S. Embassy paid a visit. Finally, the new ambassador gave Healy the message that would spark the longest period of insomnia he had ever known: Barack and Michelle Obama were coming to Moneygall.

If you live in a city or a good-sized town, or really any place that people visit of their own volition, you must strain, much as Moneygallers strained, to comprehend the effects of what happened next to their generally overlooked village. A donation of thirty-five thousand litres of paint was secured, from Dulux, to touch up every house; the company also provided a color coördinator’s services. Every pothole was repaired, planters were hung in windows, and a ticket system was devised to accommodate all those who wished to join the reception on Main Street. No conceivable “O’Bama” souvenir went unrealized: placemats, teapots, hats, key chains, “Yes We Can” T-shirts written in Gaelic, “What’s the craic Barack?” coffee mugs. Brack, a kind of fruit loaf, became “Barack’s brack.” Soon the Secret Service began the painstaking process of insuring that the most excited people in Ireland did nothing foolish.

On May 23, 2011, Healy sat at Ollie Hayes Bar, Moneygall’s main pub (the other one sits on the other side of the road), watching live footage of Marine One landing nearby. He was a wreck. The son of a farmer, he worked in accounts at a local plumbing company. Now his local bar had been equipped with fourteen phone lines, and soon he’d be part of the inner circle hanging around with the President of the United States. “Someone offered me a brandy, but I didn’t want the President’s first impression of an Irishman to be one who smelled like alcohol,” Healy told me, this past fall. “I had a pint of water.”

The Obamas' first stop was to a low, drab-looking house toward the south end of Main Street. It was the ancestral home—the place that Falmouth had left, a century and a half earlier, for America. The President could’ve just nodded appreciatively, one Moneygaller told me. But he wanted to check it out. Healy and Hayes were with him, and reported later that he seemed genuinely moved there in the living room. He stomped on the floorboards where his people had walked, pored over an artist’s impression of how the house had once looked, and then relayed what he had learned to the First Lady when she walked in.

Then they went to the pub. In photos, ruddy locals beam over the couple’s shoulders, unable to contain their palpable joy. Healy is seen seldom more than a foot or two from the first family, and not looking remotely nervous. Ollie Hayes, Healy’s uncle and neighbor, stands nearby. By all accounts, the atmosphere verged on euphoric. “You’re keeping all the best stuff here,” Obama declared at one point, talking about how Guinness tastes better in Ireland than abroad. The quote, sounding like a broader endorsement, was later memorialized on a sign outside the pub. “We are going to talk about this day forevermore as the day that Moneygall made history,” Hayes said. Healy told a journalist that it was “the greatest day this village has ever had, ever will have.”

The Obamas left the pub to find all of Moneygall waiting outside, along with a few thousand visitors. The plan was for the first family to say a few hellos and then get in a limo. But, as locals tell it now, something came over them, and they walked the entire length of the village, shaking every hand. Lengthwise, it’s said to have been the longest Presidential handshake session in modern history. And then they left. The Obamas left, the Secret Service left, the media left. Everybody left except the Moneygallers themselves.

Preparations ahead of Obama’s visit to Moneygall. *PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIEN BEHAL / PA WIRE / AP * PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIEN BEHAL / PA WIRE / AP

The first thing you notice about Moneygall is that you’ve accidentally driven through it. In the northeast, you quickly find yourself in Irish countryside: ash trees, low stone walls, thick-walled homes hunkered down against the chill. On a recent morning, the local radio station aired a segment on the proper installation of flue liners.

But zip out of Moneygall from the southwest and you arrive at the gleaming, glassy Barack Obama Plaza, rising in thrilling disharmony from the cows and hills and green. The multimillion-dollar complex opened on the outskirts of town three years after the visit. Only technically is the futuristic-looking structure just a rest stop. Inside, diners can find proper Irish meals, in addition to fast food, and a spacious dining room with actual silverware. Upstairs, there’s a suite of meeting rooms, should anyone need to conduct a meeting. Down the hall, an extensive visitors center showcases all things Obama-plus-Moneygall. There’s an exhibit on other famous locals, a bust of Obama, a giant photo of Healy shaking the President’s hand.