In Time for St. Patrick’s Day, a Visit From Obama’s Irish Cousin

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Henry Healy, right, who is said to be an eighth cousin of President Obama’s, is in New York City to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and march in Saturday’s parade.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Mr. Healy shares a a Guinness with his cousin at a Washingtn pub in 2012.

With St. Patrick’s Day looming on Sunday and the big parade set to march down Fifth Avenue on Saturday, Henry Healy is just one of many Irish visitors in town for the festivities.

But he is the only Irishman or woman who can say this - his cousin is the president of the United States.

After a genealogical report identified him as a very distant cousin of President Obama’s, life changed for this Irish bookkeeper. He is said to be an eighth cousin of Mr. Obama’s, a fact that has earned him the nickname Henry VIII.

“I didn’t come up with the name â€" the president started using it,” Mr. Healy said almost apologetically in an interview Wednesday night in Manhattan between a string of pre-St. Patrick’s Day events at which he was appearing this week.

When news broke in 2007 that Mr. Obama had distant relatives in Moneygall, a tiny hamlet! of 350 people in County Offaly in central Ireland, it was Mr. Healy who was pushed forward in town as something of a spokesman - “I’d be known as the talkative one” â€" by family and friends.

He made it to Mr. Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 and began making connections and sending the president invitations to visit Moneygall. His lobbying methods included sending the White House the latest information on Mr. Obama’s Irish lineage and living relatives.

It worked. When Mr. Obama visited Ireland in May 2011, he said in a speech in Dublin that he came from “the Moneygall Obamas” and that he wanted to “find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.” He visited Moneygall, where Mr. Healy took him to the house where Falmouth Kearney lived. Mr. Kearney was the grandfather of Mr. Obama’s maternal grandfather who emigrated from Moneygall to Ohio in 1850 at age 19.

“When he walked into his ancestral home and pounded his foot on the wooden floor, you could see h really became emotional,” Mr. Healy said Wednesday night. Then at Mr. Healy’s regular pub, the owner, Ollie Hayes, pulled the president a pint of Guinness. Mr. Obama drained it and said, “You guys are keeping the best stuff here,” Mr. Healy recalled, echoing a familiar Irish claim that the Guinness always tastes better in Ireland.

Ten months later, Mr. Healy and Mr. Hayes met Mr. Obama in the White House for St. Patrick’s Day last year and piled into the presidential limousine to a local pub, where the president did not finish his pint.

“In fairness, he said he had work to do, and he didn’t want to go back under the influence,” said Mr. Healy, who, in fairness, agrees that Guinness tastes better in Ireland.

Mr. Healy is one of six children whose father, a farmer, died from cancer when Mr. Healy was 10. He lost his accounting job last year because of downsizing, and began studying briefly to become a teacher. But he accepted a job offer in June from Ireland Reaching Out, a nonprofit group that recruits volunteers in Ireland to gather genealogical information on people who have left the country and make it available for free to Irish descendants worldwide - like Mr. Obama - to foster tourism.

Mr. Healy, a poster boy for the benefits of exploring one’s genealogy, was a perfect fit for the job. He travels Ireland, raising awareness and signing up volunteers to do local research on bloodlines.

“I went from crunching numbers to traveling around and meeting people and hearing their stories,” he said. He has visited America five times in the past year, he said, often telling Irish-Americans, “You don’t need to be the president to get the kind of welcome Obama got.”

Mr. Healy still lives with his mother, a seamstress, in Moneygall and still frequents Ollie’s pub. But the Obama connection, he said, “has changed my life, and I’m extremely grateful.”

He is in the United States for two weeks to spread word bout his employer. He attended events with another Healy â€" Mayor Jerry Healy of Jersey City â€" and he plans on marching in Saturday’s parade with the Irish Business Organization of New York.

He said he planned on attending a St. Patrick’s event at the White House on Tuesday, and then it’s back to Ireland to continue his second term as Mr. Obama’s wing man.

“The day after he won re-election,” Mr. Healy said, “strangers were coming up to me shaking my hand and asking if I’d convey their congratulations to the president.”