President Joe Biden’s ancestral surname was brought to the United States in the early 19th century by one William Biden, a stonemason who moved to Maryland from the village of Westbourne in southern England. As far as anyone knows, Mr. Biden has yet to visit. But this week he made his third pilgrimage in seven years to Ireland, the homeland of his maternal ancestors: the Blewitts of Mayo and the Finnegans from Louth. He made the first of these visits in 2016 as the Vice President; the second as a private citizen a year later; And the latest, triumphantly, as President. Wherever he goes, he is showered with shamrocks.
to a small, militarily neutral country, Ireland punches well above his weight When it comes to the iconic tours of serving US Presidents. In 1963 John F. Eight have gone since Kennedy became the first to do so. One hundred percent Irish by blood, and the first Roman Catholic to occupy the Oval Office, Kennedy inspired an almost religious devotion during his visit. Decades later many Irish homes displayed his picture with the Pope. In 1970, Richard Nixon, his reputation at home hurt by the Vietnam War, came seeking similar worship, only to have eggs thrown at him by peace protesters. His visit otherwise made little impact. Perhaps, as a descendant of Irish Quakers, he didn’t strike a chord enough in a country where Irishness and Catholicism were still deeply frowned upon by many at the time.
Ronald Reagan, who had shown little interest in his Irish surname before becoming president, became Irish again in 1984 after he was warmly received. Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Even America’s first black president, Barack Obama, made a pilgrimage in 2011 to Moneygall in County Offaly, the birthplace of his great-great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, who emigrated to America in 1850 at the end of the Great Famine. Obama joked, “I came home to find that apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.”
What is it about Ireland that makes so many presidents go green and dizzy? Electoral considerations have been a factor: in the 2021 American Community Survey, an annual poll administered by the Census Bureau, more than 30m Americans, or 9% of the population, claimed Irish ancestry. Yet as a voting group their loyalties have shifted over the decades. Long before moving to Wexford, Kennedy was guaranteed what was at the time the staunchly Democratic vote of Irish-American Catholics. Later Reagan, though a practicing Protestant, was wooing voters with roots in Catholic European countries—Ireland, Poland, Italy, and more—to the Republican Party, where his support now largely resides.
Dublin’s astute diplomat Engaging successive American presidents to help trace claimants’ Irish roots long before election day, says Lynn Kelleher, author of a recent book on Ireland and the White House, has played a role. The then Irish ambassador to Washington, Sean Donlan, presented Reagan with his genealogy when he was still a candidate; He was rewarded when, as president, Reagan encouraged his British counterpart and ally, Margaret Thatcher, to work more closely with Dublin on Northern Ireland, then racked by the Troubles. The agreement eventually led to the Good Friday Peace Accords, for the 25th anniversary of which both Mr. Biden and Mr. Clinton are traveling to Ireland this week.
One president who appears less eager to steer his relationship with Ireland is Donald Trump. His mother, born in the Outer Hebrides, was a native speaker of Scottish Gaelic, a language closely related to Irish and the country’s official language (though few Irish people now speak it at home). But when Mr Trump visited the country in 2019 he spent most of his time at his golf resort in Clare. No Irish ancestry has been found for him – or, perhaps, no one has been curiously searched. While the list of Donald Trump’s allies and benefactors is filled with Barrett, Conway, Kelly, Kavanaugh and more, Ireland’s politics seem to be increasingly catching up with their own. The country has become much more socially progressive in recent years, legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage.
Unlike some others, Mr Biden is sincere in his love of the old country and his Irish identity, says Liam Kennedy, who researches Irish-US relations for the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin. “We have to be careful with shamrockery, or what Biden himself calls malarkey, but I think he’s the genuine article.”
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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