Arrangements for a visit by boxer Muhammad Ali to Co Clare will be finalised this weekend when officials from Ennis Town Council meet the former three-times world champion’s representatives.
Ali, now 67 and fighting Parkinson’s disease, is expected to take up an invitation from the council to visit his ancestral Irish home.
Research by Irish genealogists at the Clare Heritage Centre at Corofin in north Clare discovered in 2002 that Ali’s great-grandfather was Abe Grady, who was born in Ennis in the 1840s.
Grady - who hailed from the Turnpike area of Ennis - emigrated to the US in the 1860s from Cappa Harbour, near Kilrush in west Clare.
Grady settled in the state of Kentucky, where he married an African-American woman. It is understood that their son also married an African-American woman and one of their daughters became Ali's mother, Odessa Lee Grady.
In the 1930s, Odessa married Cassius Clay snr and they settled in Louisville, Kentucky, before their son Cassius Clay jnr, was born in 1942. He later changed his name to Muhammad Ali when he converted to the Nation of Islam after winning the world title in 1964.
Mayor of Ennis Frankie Neylon has confirmed the details of Ali’s visit will be finalised this weekend. He is expected to arrive on September 1st.