Now it's official: Tom Cruise has Westmeath roots!

Move over Bruce Springsteen: we’ve found an even more famous Westmeath man - more famous even than Niall Horan!
Screen star Tom Cruise has, as it turns out, connections to the Delvin area.
In Dublin today, the world’s most famous Scientologist was presented with a special “Certificate of Irish Ancestry” by Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore at Iveagh House.
According to researchers Fiona Fitzsimons and Helen Moss, of Eneclann, Cruise’s great-great-great grandfather was Patrick Russell Cruise, who was born in Dublin, and who inherited around 500 acres of land around Dardistown and Paristown.
Patrick Russell Cruise, jointly with his maternal grandmother, inherited the land from his maternal grandfather, Patrick Maguire, in a will made in 1801 - providing a firm genealogical link right back to the Delvin area.
However, in the US in 1843, Mr Russell Cruise, who had by then moved to America, received word that his his land agent had evicted the tenants from the lands, and so he came back to Ireland, and undid the work of the land agent.
By way of thanks, the tenants hosted a public dinner in his honour in Clonmellon in 1844.
Mr Russell Cruise did not return to the US, but sadly, died just five years later, in Dublin, and is buried in Donabate.  His family continued on in the US, with his youngest daughter, Mary Pauline, marrying the Dublin-born Dillon Henry Mapother of Louisville, Kentucky.  He died, leaving her with six children, and she remarried to a Thomas O’Mara, born in Kentucky to Irish parents. Their son was Thomas O’Mara Jnr, who assumed the name Thomas Cruise Mapother,