Shamrock blunder leafs green Team O’bama red-faced

Team Obama may be made up of some of America’s brightest — but as we’d say back in the old country, they made a hames of their latest effort to garner the Irish-American vote.

In an effort to bolster election 2012 coffers, the US president’s fundraising team decided to flog a few Paddy’s Day T-shirts on the president’s election website, barackobama.com.

Up appeared two different styles of O’bama T-shirts — a reference to his joke about “coming home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way”.

However, the shamrocks emblazoning the T-shirts appear to be a different plant species to the ones we get over here. Turns out the O’bama shamrock isn’t a shamrock at all but a four-leaf clover.

62-year-old Dave Hunt owns Coogans Irish bar in Upper Manhattan and the mistake didn’t get past him.

“That is my particular pebble in my shoe, when four-leaf clovers are interchanged with three-leafs,” said Mr Hunt, who wrote a letter to the White House.

A spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, when questioned about the logo by the New York Times, asked for documentation of its cultural incorrectness and said she’d look into it.

However, executive director of the American Irish Historical Society, Christopher Cahill was able to clear up any cultural misunderstanding. “Basically everything associated with St Patrick is essentially legend... the shamrock, derived from seamróg, meaning ‘little clover’, is properly depicted with three leaves,” he said. Using a four-leaf clover, he said, would be “kind of off”.

We’ll just leave it to Enda to explain this to the president when he presents him with a bowl of the stuff.