The jury may still be out on President O’bama’s links with the supposed ancestral home in Co Offaly, but there’s no doubt that Newry blood courses through the veins of the new US Ambassador to Ireland.

Dan Rooney (76), whose appointment was announced by the White House on St Patrick’s Day, can point to clear Newry antecedents. And lest there be any doubt, Feargal McCormack, the doyen of the accountancy trade in the frontier town, has spelt it out in chapter and verse.

McCormack, whose company FPM has offices in Newry and Dundalk, not to mention Dungannon and Belfast, has long been an effective champion of the city.

Indeed, when FPM chartered accountants opened its new offices at Domalane Mill in Newry in 2004, they named a room in honour of Rooney.

That was all in recognition of the contribution the Irish-American had made to the economic regeneration of Newry and Ireland as a whole.

Rooney, best known in the US as owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers American football team, founded the Newry-Pittsburgh Partnership with the then MP Seamus Mallon in 1990.

One of the partnership’s fruits is the Rooney Fellowship, sponsored by the American Ireland Fund, which enables one student a year from the higher education course in business and management at the Southern Regional College to study at the universities of Duquesne and Pittsburgh.

Every year Rooney returns to Newry to present the scholarship to the fortunate student.

Efficient as ever, McCormack has drummed up a summary of Rooney’s family tree roots with Newry. It seems that his great great grandfather, James Rooney, was born in Newry on March 11, 1829. He left the area when the foundry closed in Edward Street in 1846 and went to work at an ironworks in Wales.

James Rooney’s son Arthur, who was born in Wales in 1850, married in Ebbw Vale and worked as an ironruffer there.

Rooney’s grandfather Daniel Rooney was born to Arthur and his wife Catherine in 1874, and emigrated to America, where with his Irish wife, he owned a pub and had nine children, one of whom was Arthur J Rooney, Daniel Rooney’s father.

So while it’s still not clear whether Obama will ever make that trip to Moneygall, it sounds like Newry is dead centre on Rooney’s radar.