LONGFORD, Ireland — Most evenings, Marie Farrell sits in her home in the Irish midlands, and watches CNN’s political coverage. The blonde-haired 54-year-old never took much interest in U.S. elections before. But this year is different. Come January, her cousin could be the president’s right-hand man.
“I didn’t expect that Tim Kaine would become so famous,” says Farrell, who is the Democratic vice-presidential pick’s fourth cousin. As she speaks, a brown cow ambles into what remains of her — and Kaine’s — ancestral home in Derryadd, a hamlet near Killashee, a picture postcard village of hanging baskets and soft green verges in County Longford.
Kaine’s great grandfather, P.J. Farrell, was born in Derryadd in 1848. The house is now just a couple of outer walls barely three feet high. A corrugated iron roof has been added to provide shelter for the cattle.
Despite its humble setting, it is a place close to the Virginia senator’s heart.
“I am pure black Irish. There is not a red-headed Norseman anywhere in our family,” Kaine said at the American Ireland Fund Leadership Award presentation earlier this year.
Life in Ireland in the middle of the 19th century was nasty, brutish and, often, short. Between 1845 and 1852, the potato famine left at least a million dead.
Kaine grew up surrounded by Ireland — “it was Roman Catholicism and it was music and it was St. Patrick’s Day” — but had not visited the land of his ancestors until he made the trip on an unseasonably warm December day in 2006, aged 48, with his wife and two children.
“When we landed in Longford town, my 11-year-old daughter said to me, ‘Dad, why does everyone look like us?’ And they started to get it,” Kaine said.
“Then we drove the 10 kilometers to Killashee parish, parked the vehicle and traipsed a half a mile across fields and found two still-standing walls of what had been a house with windows and doors, now with a tin roof stacked with hay. I told my children, ‘This is where we come from.’”
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Rural Irish towns are no strangers to American politicians. They come armed with their family trees and registers of births, marriages and deaths. Ronald Reagan was said to have relations in Tipperary.
Most of Ireland claimed JFK. In 2011, Barack Obama visited the tiny village of Moneygall in County Offaly. But Tim Kaine seems to have a far deeper attachment to his paternal homeland than almost any other senior Irish-American politician.
“Genuine” is how those who have met him in Ireland describe him. “He was so down-to-earth. There were no airs or graces,” recalls Declan Shanley, a journalist with the Longford Leader, who accompanied the then Virginia governor and his family as they slalomed through cow dung and brambles to reach what was left of their ancestral home.
“There was no bulls–t, which is just like the Irish. He was just on our level.… He had a real interest in the place. You could see that,” says Shanley, as we sit in the same kitchen in which he entertained his American guests.
As he did a decade ago, Shanley serves homemade apple pie and cups of strong tea. A framed image of Jesus Christ has pride of place over the cupboard and the evening news plays on the radio. On the range, sods of turf from the nearby peat bog slowly burn.
The Kaine family’s ancestral home in rural Ireland | Peter Geoghegan for POLITICO
“There was turf on the fire when [Kaine] was here, too. His family had never seen it before. It was a real novelty for them,” says Shanley.
There was novelty for Shanley, too: the Kaines had brought along their security detail. “Two men and a woman in long coats came out of this limousine. Not something you’d often find in Derryadd,” he says, laughing. “But they stayed by the car rather than chance the mucky field.”
There is little mud when I visit, on a late summer’s evening. A wan light coats the green fields in a soft glow. Expansive sheets of brown bog slope off toward the west. As a boy growing up in Longford town, I would sometimes escape on my bicycle to the quietude of the bog roads.
Cows still roam the fields around Derryadd, but two housing estates in the middle distance — built during the ill-fated “Celtic Tiger” period of massive economic growth in the 1990s — are testament to the changes in the more than a century and a half that have passed since Tim Kaine’s great grandfather swapped Derryadd first for Illinois and then, ironically, for Longford, Kansas.
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Life in Ireland in the middle of the 19th century was nasty, brutish and, often, short. Between 1845 and 1852, the potato famine — as much a product of British economic policy as any shortage of food — left at least a million dead. Many more emigrated.
P.J. Farrell, one of 12 children born to Patrick, a farmer, and his wife Mary Milnamow, was just four years old when he made the long, dangerous crossing from Ireland to a new life in the United States.
The family arrived in Illinois in December 1852. Family legend has it that at least one child was left behind in County Longford, but that has never been proven.
What is known is that P.J. moved to Kansas in his early 20s, along with a brother and a cousin. There he married a Canadian of Irish extraction, Mary Fleming, and had 11 children of his own, three of whom died young. One of those to survive was Tim Kaine’s grandmother, Annella Farrell, after whom his own daughter is named.
A grainy black and white photograph taken around 1900 shows a well-dressed family taking shade from the Kansas sun under a tree with P.J. as the patriarch in the middle of the frame.
Tim Kaine’s father, Albert, was six years old when his grandfather died and he recalls a friendly man who had a reputation for business acumen.
“[P.J.] was scrupulously fair in providing for his children with respect to dividing his property among them,” says Albert Kaine, who lives in Kansas City and visited Derryadd in the 1990s.
The Farrells on both sides of the Atlantic kept in regular contact.
“They were always sending money back home to Ireland,” says Marie Farrell in Derryadd.
As she speaks she flicks through a sheaf of old photographs, yellowing images of a succession of smiling Irishmen with strong jaws and soft eyes posing outside pebble-dashed houses.
Marie Farrell, Kaine’s fourth cousin | Peter Geoghegan for POLITICO
She lingers in front of one portrait a little longer than the others. It is Tim Kaine’s third cousin, Jimmy Farrell. “Jimmy was always playing the harmonica in our house,” recalls Marie Farrell.
Kaine, it seems, has kept up this family tradition, and belied his strait-laced persona when he broke out his harmonica at the American Ireland Fund dinner in March.
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Not long after Tim Kaine’s confirmation as Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Marie Farrell sent her fourth cousin an email. She wished him luck, saying that she was following his progress from thousands of miles away. “He replied three minutes later,” she says, beaming broadly. “He said, ‘Thanks Marie. I’ll be in touch after the election.’”
In Killashee, hopes are high that Tim Kaine could put the quaint if sleepy village of a few hundred people on the map.
“Wouldn’t it be great for Killashee if he got in?” Gerry Dooner says as he sips a pint of Guinness in the Chestnut Tree pub. “Things would change around here.”
Behind him on the wall is a framed photograph of the local football team dated 1934-1935. The bar was wired for electricity in 1979.
Kaine’s oldest relative, Brigid Meleady (née Farrell) in Longford carried a newspaper cutting of Kaine’s visit in her small, battered red purse until she died in 2014, at age 102. “She was so proud of him she was,” says Marie Farrell. “She wouldn’t believe where he is now.”
Many locals point to Barack Obama Plaza — a motorway service station built near the village of Moneygall after the president’s visit. “Why can’t we have Tim Kaine Plaza?” says Declan Shanley with a smile. “Or the Tim Kaine Center?”
But right now what Marie Farell wants most is a victory for Tim Kaine and the Democrats in November. And after that? Perhaps an invitation to the White House. “I wouldn’t say no if he asked,” says Kaine’s fourth cousin. “Then maybe he could come back to Derryadd, too.”
Peter Geoghegan is a writer and journalist based in Glasgow.