If there is a single room on this island that functions as our family ordinary — the place where the clan name is held in trust on a daily basis — it is Two O’Dowd’s, on Bury Street in the centre of Ballina.

It is a small pub. Standing-room for ten if everyone breathes in. White-painted front, the name O’DOWD’S in plain black letters across the fascia, a single door, a single window. You could walk past it on your way to somewhere bigger. Most people do. That is the point.

Ask for John

The proprietor is John O’Dowd. He is the man behind the bar, and he is the reason the pub is what it is. Walk in, shake his hand, tell him your line. If you have travelled from America, Australia, England, Canada, or anywhere else the Famine and the centuries scattered our people, tell him that too. He will know what to do with the information. He has been doing it for a very long time.

The President on the North Wall

On the north wall of the building, mounted outside where anyone passing can read it, is a board that tells the story of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. — 46th President of the United States — and his Ballina roots. The Blewitts of Ballina are his great-great-great-grandparents on his mother’s side. Edward Blewitt sailed from Ballina to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1851. The American branch grew from there. President Biden returned to Ballina in 2023, in front of a crowd of tens of thousands, to stand on the same ground his ancestors left.

You don’t need to be a Biden to feel what that board is doing. It is the same instinct that brings any of us back — the conviction that the place a family came from still matters, no matter how many generations or oceans sit in between. It is the whole reason this clan exists.

Why every O’Dubhda should stand in this room at least once

We have ten castles, four abbeys, an inauguration mound, and a coast full of carns. Those are our monuments. Two O’Dowd’s is something else. It is a working room with our name over the door, run by a man of our name, in the principal town of our country. It is what every diaspora family wishes it had and very few do.

If you make it to Ballina — whether you’re here for the Salmon Festival, a rally year, a self-guided tour of the castles, or just a long Saturday — this is the stop. It will not take long. It does not need to. Order a pint, look at the wall, talk to John, and leave a little of yourself in the room.

If you haven’t had a beer here yet — go in, and tell them the Taoiseach sent you.

— Sean O’Dowda Stephens
Taoiseach, Clan O’Dubhda