US President Joe Biden is celebrating his Irish heritage with a three-day visit to Ireland. “It feels like home,” the 80-year-old told residents of the city at a pub in Dundalk, north-east Ireland last night. “It’s good to be back.” Today, Biden wants to meet Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar for political talks in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, and to deliver a speech in front of Parliament. But he spends a large part of the trip on personal encounters and a search for traces of his family history.
Various ancestors of the Catholic US President hail from different parts of Ireland: his great-, great-great- and great-great-great-grandparents, the Finnegans and the Blewitts. And to this day he still has distant relatives there, the Kearneys.
Biden family in tow
Some hail from County Louth in north east Ireland where Dundalk is located. During his visit yesterday, Biden, together with his son Hunter and his sister Valerie, first had Carlingford Castle on the east coast shown to them. Not far away, the Finnegans had said goodbye to their old homeland in the mid-19th century. The castle was probably one of the last things the family saw when they left for America, Biden said. One of his granddaughters is first named Finnegan.
He does understand why his ancestors left the country in the midst of the famine at the time, the Democrat said at an improvised desk in the Windsor Bar pub. “But when you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave.”
After a brief visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland, the US President arrived in the Republic of Ireland yesterday afternoon and was greeted with some enthusiasm. Onlookers lined the streets with Irish and American flags. Residents of the towns Biden visited had baked, decorated, and cleaned up their shops—all in hopes of the president stopping by and chatting with him.
President with baseball cap
In the small town of Dundalk, which is roughly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, Biden actually made a lengthy visit and strolled through the city center with his entourage. He was approachable, shook hands, took selfies. In a snack bar he chatted and joked with employees, then the trip to the pub. Outside, Biden was wearing a blue baseball cap, also to protect himself from the constant rain. But even that didn’t bother him: “That’s fine,” said Biden. “This is Ireland.”
He is not the first US President with Irish roots. The most famous was probably John F. Kennedy. Biden’s predecessor Barack Obama also has some Irish ancestors. Overall, about half of all US presidents are partly descended from Irish immigrants – and incidentally, so are about 10 percent of US citizens. But hardly any incumbent in the White House before has celebrated his connections to the Emerald Isle like Biden. The Democrat often references his Irish origins and regularly quotes Irish poets.
Hope as a link
He also got a little poetic in the wood-panelled pub with Guinness and Whiskey signs on the walls: “In my opinion, the Irish are the only people in the world who actually look to the future with nostalgia,” Biden said . “Hope is what beats in the heart of all people – especially in the heart of the Irish.” The United States is also built on hope. That connects both countries.
Biden once again told an anecdote that he had told in a similar way back in 2016, when he was Vice President on a six-day visit to Ireland: Around the same time as his great-great-grandfather Finnegan, a shoemaker, from Ireland Biden said that when he left for America, another shoemaker also made his way there. “They left everything behind, but they had confidence.” An uncertain future lay before both men. But despite all their dreams, he doesn’t think they could have imagined “that 175 years later their two great-great-grandchildren would be Presidents of the United States: Barack Obama and Joe Biden”.
For Biden, the emotional trip is also a change from all sorts of national and international problems. In addition to the political appointments in Dublin today, he also wanted to attend a sporting event there. Tomorrow he is planning a trip to County Mayo in north-west Ireland, where his ancestors also come from. Biden already warned in Dundalk that it would not be his last visit. “The bad news for you is: we will be back. It will not be possible to keep us away.”
