GALWAY, Ireland

Billy Cameron, a colorful local pol here, never expected to set off an international incident. “It’s ruined my life over here for awhile,” he says cheerfully of his Yank foes.

Things got ugly after Cameron, a Labour Party member of the Galway City Council, proposed putting up a memorial to honor that famous son of Hibernia, Che Guevara, or “our Che,” as Cameron fondly refers to the Argentinian Marxist revolutionary.

Che made only a brief stop in Ireland in the ’60s, visiting a pub in the West Clare seaside town of Kilkee one night after his flight from Moscow to Cuba stopped for refueling at Shannon airport and then got stuck in fog.

But Cameron has been pushing the idea that “Dr. Che Guevara Lynch,” as his Irish supporters dubbed him, counts as a Galwegian because he’s descended from the Lynches and Blakes, two of the 14 original tribes of Galway, well-to-do merchant families who once ruled the city. “Patrick Lynch immigrated to Argentina in the mid-1700s and settled in Buenos Aires,” Cameron notes. “Che is part of the Irish diaspora, I would say.”