Irish-American presidents and what county their ancestors were from

18 comments
  1. You’re so cool, playing poker with death as the joker,
    You’ve nerve, but you don’t reassure us.
    With those paranoid vistas of mad Sandanistas,
    Are you really defending Honduras?
    You’ll be wearing the green down at Ballyporeen,
    The town of the little potato.
    Put your arms around Garret and dangle your carrot,
    But you’ll never get me to join NATO .

  2. Nah, title is very much an exaggeration.

    There’s a big difference between “have an ancestor who was born in Ireland” and being “Irish-American”. Especially as most of the above are from Anglo-Irish or Scots-Irish roots i.e. british. The planations and colonies tended to be funded by the same people. Those ancestors might spend a generation in the north before moving on to the newer colony. They are disportinately represented by presidents because they were among the first settlers thus becoming the elite. They get marked as Irish here but there’s really nothing Irish about them.

    Biden is only the second “Irish-American” president after JFK.

    You can tell from the religion. Those that are WASP are essentially and have embraced “british-american”. People like Reagan. Had a catholic father, but was Presbyterian himself.

  3. From Wikipedia

    The ancestral background of presidents of the United States has been relatively consistent throughout American history. With the exception of John F. Kennedy, Martin Van Buren, and perhaps Dwight D. Eisenhower,[1] every president has ancestors from Great Britain. Kennedy was of pure Irish descent, Van Buren was of Dutch lineage; and Eisenhower was of German and Swiss heritage.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_background_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

  4. my history teacher said new ross was the first place outside dublin to have an automatic telephone exchange, it was one of the secret services stipulations for jfks visit

  5. I see someone has visited that exhibit upstairs at the Barack Obama plaza on the M7. No better place to stretch the legs and learn some history.

Leave a Reply