Dreams from Moneygall: a tale of two gardens

MONEYGALL in Co Offaly, with its newfound fame as President Barack Obama’s Irish ancestral home, could honour this gifted world leader in a way he might be really proud of while also showing commitment to the social values he holds dear.

I suggest Moneygall’s residents should twin the village, and in particular its “Kearney’s Gardens”, which Offaly County Council had earmarked for social housing, with Altgeld Gardens, a community of approximately 3,400 residents on the southside of Chicago. This is where Obama began his career as a political activist — the kind of neighbourhood where his wife Michelle, (“a daughter of the southside”) grew up and described as “one of the first public housing developments ever built in the United States”.

Is it accident or fate that has decreed Moneygall and Altgeld Gardens should share so many similarities and now have so much potential for bringing together predominantly white and black communities in two widely separated locations?