Earlier this week, Fine Gael issued a press release about a plan for something called an American President’s Trail. The plan, originated by Wicklow TD Edward Timmins, is being launched as part of the America250 programme – a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Of the 45 presidents in America’s history, the press release points out, 23 have had Irish roots, “and many of those connections lead back to communities in every corner of Ireland. There is a huge story here, and the American President’s Trail across our island is a chance to tell it properly.”
In an endearingly goofy video posted on Fine Gael’s social media accounts, Timmins can be seen reciting famous quotes from speeches by American presidents – Ask not what your country can do for you!; Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!; Yes we can! – to the soundtrack of Hail to the Chief. He then goes on to explain that the trail would celebrate the Irish connections of those 23 US presidents, and that each of the relevant counties would benefit from the trail. It would provide a huge boost to tourism across the whole island north and south, he says, on a scale similar to the Wild Atlantic Way.
My first reaction to this idea was, I must admit, surprise that nearly half of America’s presidents can claim some kind of Irish ancestry. Your JFKs and your Reagans and your Bidens – those guys I knew about, obviously. And of course I was aware of the fact that Barack Obama’s somewhat tenuous but nonetheless cherished Irish roots had been honoured by perhaps the most internationally-celebrated of all US presidential-themed motorway service stations: the Barack Obama Plaza, located on the M7’s historic Junction 23. And I was vaguely aware that Andrew Jackson’s parents had both been born in Antrim before emigrating the US.
I was not aware, though, of quite how many presidents had, like Jackson, specifically Ulster-Protestant heritage. I was not aware that, after Jackson, there was James Polk and James Buchanan and Chester Arthur and William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, among many others, who claimed some Ulster-Scots connection.
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To be fair to Edward Timmins and his Fine Gael colleagues, there are ways in which this is an appealing idea. What is suggested by my not knowing of these US presidential links – apart from my own admittedly vast and regrettable ignorance – is that, while the primary aim of such a programme would clearly be touristic, it might also be informative for Irish people.
🇮🇪🇺🇸 Ireland and the United States share a unique bond.
— Fine Gael (@FineGael) March 1, 2026
That’s why @EdwardTimmins_1 wants to create an American Presidents Trail, where all 23 presidents with roots in Ireland will be celebrated in the relevant counties.
For more: https://t.co/arebjKarPg pic.twitter.com/Kl7YVaEb2C
And if you’re interested in a nonsectarian route toward a conception of Ireland as a whole, a tourist trail that focuses on historical connections between Ireland and United States – and which treats, say, Andrew Jackson as just as Irish-American in his way as JFK – might not be a bad idea. One of the ways in which the psychological border that divides our island has become less hard and intractable is, after all, tourism. The Americans who visit here on bus tours, indefatigably taking in everything from the Blarney Stone to the Giant’s Causeway, are by and large much less invested in the psycho-political division of the auld sod than most of the people who live on it.
All of which is to say that I can hold off on my instinctive scepticism on this subject. But only, alas, so far. One of the more prominent of presidents in recent American history – albeit one of the less obviously “Irish-American” – feels instructive in this regard. Richard Nixon’s mother, Hannah Milhous, was descended from a family of Quakers from the town of Timahoe in Co Kildare, who left for Pennsylvania in 1731. In 1970, the year after he was elected president, Nixon made an official visit to Ireland. (JFK’s visit, seven years previously, had inaugurated an era of US politics in which courting the Irish-American vote was seen as crucial.)
Nixon’s stay in Ireland, frequently referred to as “the forgotten visit”, was by no means an unqualified success. As his motorcade was making its way from the Phoenix Park, where he’d met president Éamon de Valera, through the city towards Dublin Castle, Nixon stood up through the sunroof of his car, the better to soak up the vibes, when he was pelted with eggs on no less than three separate occasions by people protesting his waging an imperialist war in Vietnam. (None of them managed to make contact with old Tricky Dicky.)
In the Ireland of the present, the presiding attitude toward the US president and American power more generally is probably significantly closer to that of the Nixon egg-pelters than it is to, say, that of Patrick, the small starry-eyed boy who offers president Kennedy a slice of his Swiss roll in Patrick and the President, Ryan Tubridy’s work of JFK fan-fiction for children.
We Irish are, of course, a practical people, at least when it comes to the realpolitik of our position in the world, and in particular our relationship with United States, which might most accurately (if paradoxically) be described as precariously cosy. We don’t want to alienate the Americans, or their dollars. I don’t love this aspect of our collective life, but I understand its necessity, given the vital position of tourism – and tourism from the US especially – in our national economy.
[ Why are US presidents so drawn to Ireland?Opens in new window ]
At the same time, I wonder how valuable such a project might ultimately be, even – and perhaps especially – on its own terms. Are American tourists really going to want to visit a Richard Nixon interpretive centre just outside Naas, let alone a William McKinley homeplace in Conagher, Co Antrim? How seductive a prospect would the birthplace of Grover Cleveland’s maternal grandfather (who died years before Cleveland was born) amount to? I suspect that visitors from United States, who in any case make up only 24 per cent of our tourist trade, might well be more enthusiastic about learning something of this country’s history, than in being sold back some tenuous and overstretched scrap of their own.
