On May 23 2011 Barack Obama visited Ireland for the first time and, amidst an enthusiastic crowd of 50,000 people gathered in College Green, Dublin, began his speech thus: “My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way” (RTE, 2011). The crowd went wild despite the rain and high winds of the classic Irish summer. Obama's trip to Ireland, his warm embrace by the Irish nation as a “true son of Ireland” (Lord, 2011), and his own recognition of the trip to Ireland as a trip home, all served to underscore Obama's roots and his newfound Irishness. Why does being Irish matter for Barack Obama? What do people in Ireland see when they look at him? Is his biraciality a factor?

Debates about what Barack Obama actually is racially tell us more about the state of racial thinking in the U.S. and Ireland than they do about any racial reality that Obama represents as a multiracial man of both Kenyan and Irish ancestry. I argue that while some see Obama as the first black President of the U.S. and therefore a symbolic watershed in U.S. race relations, it might be more realistic to recognize that Obama has been unique in his ability to use flexible racialization to make claims to blackness, whiteness, “cosmopolitan-ness”, and Irishness simultaneously. But what are the conditions and strategies that make this work?

This chapter focuses not on Obama's racial blackness or mixedness but instead his whiteness and specifically his Irishness through a content analysis, of print, television and popular cultural sources, from 2008–11, of the discovery of his Irish ancestry and his recent visit to Ireland.