A SPECIAL meeting of Ennis Town Council will be held this afternoon to discuss the eagerly anticipated albeit short visit to the town next month of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali.
Mayor of Ennis Frankie Neylon has convened the special meeting to discuss how the three times world champion, now aged 67 and fighting Parkinson’s disease, will be honoured when he travels to the county capital on September 1st next.
Ali has formally accepted an invitation to visit his Irish ancestral home in Ennis from where his great-grandfather, Abe Grady, emigrated in the 1860s.
While Ennis Town Council will not discuss how best to honour one of the greatest sportsmen of our time, it is known that there are plans to name Ali the first ever honorary freeman of the town. The meeting will also debate, among many other proposals, whether a street should be named after the boxing legend.
Ali will be in Dublin on August 31st for a fundraising night in the Ballsbridge Court Hotel to raise money for the Alltech Ali Charitable Foundation.
It is understood that he formally requested that a visit to Ennis be included as part of his Irish visit and he had previously expressed an interest in visiting the town.
Ali will fly from Dublin to Shannon on September 1st before travelling to Ennis, where a series of special events will be held in his honour.
He will travel around the town in a motorcade and will visit the Turnpike Road area of Ennis where Abe Grady was born in the 1840s.
It is not expected, however, that Ali will be in Ennis for any longer than an hour.
He will later spend a few hours in Dromoland Castle before flying back to Kentucky from Shannon.
In the 1960s, Ali famously said: “My white blood came from slave masters, from raping. When we were darker, we were stronger.”
However, in his biography of Ali, Anthony O Edmonds stated that Ali’s mother’s (Odessa) lineage “was based on marriage and not rape”.
According to genealogists at Clare Heritage Centre, Abe Grady emigrated from Ennis to the United States in the 1860s. He sailed from Cappa Harbour in Kilrush and eventually settled in Kentucky, where he married an African-American woman.
Their son also married an African-American woman and one of their daughters was Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady. Odessa married Cassius Clay snr and they settled in Louisville, where their son was initially given his father’s name when he was born in 1942.
He changed his name to Muhammad Ali when he converted to the Nation of Islam after winning the world title in 1964.
There is also widespread speculation about whether any of Ali’s relatives still live in the area. It has emerged that the family of the late Eileen O’Donovan from Turnpike Road could be related to the iconic figure.
Genealogists say there are indications that Eileen’s grandfather Patrick could have been Abe Grady’s brother.