Biden "I'm Home": His Visit to Belfast and Dublin
In Ireland, Biden reiterate at least 2 purposes: 2024, and his ancestry.
When Joe met Fiadh - US President Joe Biden meets President Michael D Higgins' granddaughter Fiadh. Sadly, “another” Fiadh: Fiadh O'Connor was first diagnosed with neuroblastoma just before Christmas two and a half years ago. The condition is a rare but very aggressive stage four type of childhood cancer that develops from immature cells left behind from the baby's development in the womb. The four-year-old, who was just days away from her fifth birthday, passed away peacefully at home after an illness "bravely borne" on Wednesday (April 5th, 2023).
President Biden still aware a disaster of leak, so he told reporters in Dublin on April 13 that there is no update on a leak of classified U.S. military documents.
On a divided island, Joe Biden brought a message of unity. But his businesslike visit to Belfast, with special speech in Ulster University, contrasted with a leisurely “homecoming” tour of Ireland, which gave the land of his ancestors the kind of attention that larger countries can only dream of. In a visit to Northern Ireland lasting just 18 hours, the US president promised that his country would be a “partner for peace” in a region that marked the end of the “Troubles” conflict 25 years ago this week.
Amid Biden’s visit to the 2 Ireland, Ireland & UK announce bid for UEFA Euro 2028. But maybe the chance is small because for Euro 2020 (but in 2021 — postponed because peak covid) Wembley already to be host not only several games but also Final Euro 2020. Maybe the (bigger) chance goes to another European country.
Back again to Biden “at home.”
Mr Biden, who had earlier met with PM Rishi Sunak, told a packed Ulster University: “This is real … the pride in those Ulster-Scots immigrants, those Ulster-Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep.
“Men born in Ulster are among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour for freedom’s cause.
"The man who printed the revolutionary document was John Dunlap. He hailed from County Tyrone.”
He spoke of countless Ulster-Scots who “established new lives of opportunity across the Atlantic” by planting farms, founding communities and starting businesses remarking that they "never forgot their connection to this island”.
The US President has extolled the "dividends of peace" as he addressed a gathering at Ulster University in Belfast city centre.
Standing in the new university campus, Joe Biden said such a glass-fronted building would have been "highly unlikely" during one of his previous visits to the area in 1991.
Terrorist bombs destroyed scores of buildings in Belfast during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, with one hotel - the Europa - even dubbed the most bombed hotel in Europe.
"This very campus is situated at an intersection where conflict and bloodshed once held a terrible sway," Mr Biden said.
"The idea to have a glass building here when I was here in '91 was highly unlikely.
"Where barbed wire once sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning built of glass and let the light shine in and out.
"This has a profound impact for someone who has come back to see it.
"It's an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace."
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Mr Biden paid tribute to the peace makers.
This included "pioneering women who said 'enough' and demanded change", political leaders, and the "determined efforts" of his "good friend" former US senator George Mitchell to bring about the accord.
"His time serving as special envoy for Northern Ireland is one of the great examples in history of the right person for the right job at the right time, in my view," President Biden said of Mr Mitchell.
"I think sometimes, especially with the distance of history, we forget how hard-earned, how astounding that peace was. It shifted the political gravity in our world.
"In 1998 it was the longest-running conflict in Europe since the end of World War Two - thousands of families had been affected by the Troubles, losses are real, the pain was personal.
"Every person killed in the Troubles left an empty chair at the dining room table, a hole in the heart that was never filled for the ones they lost.
"Peace was not inevitable, we can't ever forget that. As George Mitchell often said, the negotiations had 700 days of failure, and one day of success, but they kept going because George and all the many others never stopped believing that success was possible.
"I want all of you, especially the young people, to know the American people are with you, every step of the way."
His comments about the Ulster-Scots were welcomed by DUP leader who described Mr Biden’s 22-minute speech as “measured”.
However Sir Jeffrey said that Mr Biden’s has not altered the political dynamic in Northern Ireland.
He said made clear his party would only be returning to devolution if the UK Government took further steps to address DUP concerns over post-Brexit trading arrangements.
Biden then spent three days in Ireland, visiting regions his ancestors emigrated from and taking time to connect with people. At the heart of what binds Ireland and the US, Biden told a rare joint session of Ireland’s parliament on Thursday, was a “history defined by our dreams, a present written by our shared responsibility . . . and a future poised for unlimited shared possibilities”.
Local broadcaster has provided wall-to-wall coverage as the relaxed-looking president paid emotional tributes — sometimes punctuated by poetry — to what he said were Irish-American values of dignity and respect. His heart was firmly on his sleeve, and Biden’s Ireland — his ancestors left in the mid-1800s — can feel like a sepia photograph seen through syrup.
Philip Breslin, a vet in the town of Ballina in County Mayo in the west of the country where the president will conclude his trip on Friday night, said he would turn out to see Biden, even as his “view of Ireland may be rose-tinted”. “But as a person, and his values, he’s quite reflective of the Ireland of today,” Breslin said.
Biden has a special connection to Ballina, where his ancestors made some of the bricks that were used to build St Muredach’s cathedral, which he was set to visit on Friday. Biden swept through the north-eastern County Louth on Wednesday. It was his first chance to press the flesh, flashing smiles, taking selfies — and buying cake. “He was taller [than I expected], younger-looking and had amazing teeth,” said Jerome McAteer, owner of The Food House in Dundalk, where Biden selected lemon meringue pie, chocolate eclairs, rhubarb crumble, bread-and-butter pudding and cream buns to take away, whipping out a €50 note to pay for them himself.
Cheering crowds braved atrocious weather to share in the emotion. “American presidents obviously do this to get the ‘green’ vote, but Biden’s really Irish. He really leans into it,” said Mark Hughes, a quiz writer sporting a hat and scarf in Ireland’s national colour. “Maybe he’s not the greatest American president of all time, but he resonates. I feel he really does care because of his connections with this area,” Hughes said in Carlingford, near Dundalk, where Biden visited a tumbledown 12th century castle overlooking a picturesque lough. Shops, houses and pubs were decorated with bunting, balloons and welcome signs in the town, which also boasts a leprechaun and fairy cavern. Irish and US flags dotted the landscape among the hills, gorse bushes and lambs in fields.
But Biden’s trip is intended to celebrate the island’s present and future as much as bask in the past. In Belfast on Wednesday, he celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of conflict and he hailed the UK and EU’s new Brexit deal, the Windsor framework, as key to investment. Hours later, in the aptly-named Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk, he praised the “faith in an uncertain future” that his ancestors had as they set sail across the Atlantic.
He might hope Northern Ireland, where a Brexit row has paralysed politics for nearly a year, can muster the same. The gaffe-prone president did drop a clanger in the Windsor, suggesting that his distant cousin and former rugby star Rob Kearney had trounced “the Black and Tans” — the notoriously violent British police in Ireland’s war of independence. The White House corrected his remarks to “the All Blacks”, the nickname of the New Zealand rugby team Kearney had played against. Biden’s trip comes 60 years after John F. Kennedy’s visit, when the US was glamorous and modern to the rural Irish.
Like Biden’s forebears, a woman in Carlingford — who gave her name only as Breda — also fled to the US, but in the 1980s, when poverty and unemployment forced many Irish to emigrate. “People used to ask me ‘Do you have electricity?’” she said. Now, Ireland has first-world problems: a housing crisis; a squeezed health service; and lay-offs in the very tech industry that has helped make it rich. That has pushed many young people to move abroad again, including Breda’s daughter, who manages a construction site in Australia.
But Jerry Buttimer, an Irish senator, praised Biden for leading the way on marriage equality, part of huge social changes in Ireland. At the Food House in Dundalk, McAteer said Biden bonded with him and his husband Bobby Wain over a shared love of canines — the president bought a mug decorated with a picture of a dog — and was “really brilliant” with an employee with Down syndrome and autism, giving him a €10 tip. Visibly emotional throughout, the president — whose secret service code name is “Celtic” — promised to be back. As he wrote in Irish president Michael D. Higgins’ visitor’s book on Thursday: “Your feet will bring you where your heart is.”
Tánaiste Micheál Martin said “the peace process is one of the most successful interventions from an American foreign policy perspective in terms of assisting and being, you know, indispensable in terms of bringing peace to the island of Ireland.
“And that is something that sometimes we underestimate the degree to which others outside of Ireland really highlight the significance of the Irish peace process in terms of how you resolve conflict globally and how you can successfully bring values and principles to bear on a situation of conflict and to get a result like we have in Northern Ireland, although not complete, but certainly has transformed the situation for generations of young people on the island of Ireland.”
Former Irish presidents and Taoisigh along with serving politicians and figures from the worlds of sport and the arts assembled in St Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle for a banquet in honour of US President Joe Biden.
In pre-dinner remarks Taoiseach Leo Varadkar thanked Mr Biden for his support of Ireland throughout his career while Mr Biden told those gathered there is “nothing Ireland and the United States can’t achieve together”.
Mr Varadkar and Mr Biden were seated together at a table that also included Marie Heaney the wife of the late poet Seamus Heaney.
During his remarks Mr Biden told Ms Heaney that one of his “great regrets” was being unable to accept an invitation to introduce her husband at a university presentation.
He thanked her for being there and said: “I’ve had a life-long love for Irish poets and words made famous by Yeats like ‘in dreams begin responsibility’.
“We have a lot of dreams... I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of both our countries than I am today...
“As your husband would have said ‘believe that further shore Is reachable from here’.
“I believe the further shore is reachable. I honest to God do.”
Mr Varadkar praised the role of the United States in the Northern Ireland peace process saying: “America helped make that peace possible, and your country across the aisle has helped protect that peace in the years since”.
He also told Me Biden: “Thank you for putting yourself on the line for Ireland on so many occasions throughout your career...
“You have made an enormous difference”.
President Joe Biden made a historic address to a packed Dail chamber on Thursday evening, where he spoke of the strength of the Irish-US relationship and promised a future of unlimited shared possibilities.
Sadly, 2024 issue: same minute Biden’s speech, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted today to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — a key policy win for Ron DeSantis ahead of the 2024 elections. This outlaws abortion in one of the country's most populous states, eliminates a critical access point for abortions in the South. Then, Gov. DeSantis press office sends out email at 11:10 pm announcing he signed controversial 6-week abortion ban named "Heartbeat Protection Act" just hours after it was signed and sent over to his office.
When President Biden arrived at the historic Knock Shrine on Friday, he entered the basilica for a moment of private prayer. For a lifelong Catholic who goes to church every weekend and keeps a rosary on his wrist that once belonged to his late son Beau, it marked a quiet moment of devotion.
He didn’t realize how personal and meaningful the stop would soon become.
“The president came as a pilgrim, and as most pilgrims do, they want to talk about their family and themselves and their faith,” said Father Richard Gibbons, the parish priest and rector who accompanied Biden.
Biden quickly brought up Beau, his eldest son who died in 2015 from brain cancer. Gibbons then shared a surprising connection he had just learned of that morning: Friar Frank O’Grady, the priest who read Beau Biden’s last rites at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center nearly eight years ago, was now working at Knock.
Biden, startled, asked for a meeting. “When he met Father O’Grady, he gave Father O’Grady a big hug,” Gibbons said. “He was quite emotional at that point.”
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Tears in his eyes, Biden thanked the priest for being at his son’s bedside as he passed away. O’Grady, who served in the military for 30 years and had worked at Walter Reed, returned to Ireland in August and began his service at Knock Shrine in September.
O’Grady began Friday on the sidewalk near the shrine hoping to catch a glimpse of Biden’s motorcade. He happened to be standing near a reporter and mentioned his connection to the president’s son. Gibbons got word of the media report and conveyed it to Biden.
“It all happened very quickly,” said O’Grady, who was ushered past security as soon as Biden requested a meeting.
O’Grady said he had a “delightful” 10-minute encounter with the president, as well as his sister Valerie Biden Owens and his surviving son Hunter.
“He finds great strength in his faith,” O’Grady said in an interview. “He misses his son very much, and he was so happy that he ran into me.”
It was striking, O’Grady said, that the encounter occurred at the Knock Shrine, where Catholics from all over the world come for healing. “His visit to Knock, where healing goes on and people come in their hurt, reverberated in terms of his own son who went through a lot of sickness,” O’Grady said.
Biden invited him to the White House on his next visit to the United States, O’Grady said.
The president said later he was deeply affected by the meeting. “It was incredible to see him,” Biden said during his final speech in Ireland. “It seemed like a sign.”
After their conversation, Biden lit a candle for his family, recited a decade of the rosary and then prayed alone.
Beau Biden died near the end of his father’s tenure as vice president, a major factor in Joe Biden’s decision not to run for president in 2016, and he remains an ever-present force in Joe Biden’s political life. The president often mentions him in speeches and has sometimes cited his son’s experiences when explaining policy decisions.
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The president can regularly be seen donning a Beau Biden Foundation hat, as he did on Wednesday when he toured a site in Ireland where his ancestors departed in 1849. And the president often suggests his son is the one who should be serving as president.
“I hadn’t planned on running for president again in 2020,” Biden said Thursday in a speech to the Irish Parliament. “My son, Beau, had just died of stage four glioblastoma after coming back from Iraq after a year. He was the attorney general of Delaware. As a matter of fact, he should be the one standing here giving this speech to you.”
Knock Shrine is a historic Catholic pilgrimage site where locals in 1879 said they saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis have visited the site, which attracts numerous pilgrims every year.
“It has a worldwide appeal to the Irish diaspora, and everybody knows the hymn to Our Lady of Knock,” Gibbons said. Biden “knew about Knock, obviously, and he wanted to spend that moment in prayer. In a schedule that has been hectic and full of political moments, this is the soul moment — a little bit of calm in an oasis of peace.”
Biden’s visit to Knock Shrine came on the final day of a three-day trip to the United Kingdom and Ireland. He began with a brief visit to Belfast to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which sought to end decades of sectarian violence. He then traveled to the Republic of Ireland for a largely sentimental journey through his ancestral homeland, during which he often questioned why his ancestors ever left the Emerald Isle.
During the trip, Biden met with Irish leaders, addressed the Parliament and visited County Louth and County Mayo, two of the areas where the president traces his family lineage. On Friday, he also stopped by Mayo Roscommon Hospice, which Biden visited during his 2017 trip to Ireland, and where a plaque is dedicated to Beau Biden’s memory.
Back again to Dublin.
President Biden received a standing ovation as he entered the Dáil chamber before opening his speech by saying: 'Well mom, you said it would happen.'
Joe Biden was born into a proud Irish American Catholic family in the blue-collar city of Scranton Pennsylvania - a state his ancestors settled and met in.
While the president has pronounced Ireland "part of his soul", it is also part of his DNA.
"My Grandpa Finnegan would also say… 'Remember, Joey, the best drop of blood in you is Irish,' he quipped during an address at the Windsor Bar in Dundalk on Wednesday evening.
But this is not just about the wise words of Grandpa Finnegan, the facts and historical figures are there to back it up.
His strongest ties appear to be with Mayo but there are also links to Louth, Galway and Donegal.
Ten of his 16 great-great-grandparents were from the Emerald Isle.
While nine of them were born in Ireland, the tenth was the daughter of Galway immigrants. Mary Ward was born en route to the United States and would, years later, marry a Galway man.
"To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington - just because you're born in a stable, it doesn't make you a horse. So, we claim her as being Irish," said Fiona Fitzsimons, Director of the Irish Family History Centre, who along with Helen Moss were commissioned by Joe Biden when he was vice president to delve deeper into his family's roots.
Fiona Fitzsimons said the president stands out not just because of his strong Irish links but because of the "extraordinary" fact that all his ancestors are considered "famine Irish" – meaning they arrived in the US between 1848 and 1861.
"Normally when you get that deep rooted Irishness, you might find somebody coming in, in the early 20th century… But this is what's extraordinary … is that all of these are famine Irish," said Ms Fitzsimons.
Four of his ten great-grandparents are from Mayo - the Stantons, the Arthurs, the Basquilles and (probably the most well-known) the Blewitts.
His third great-grandfather Edward Blewitt took the five-week journey across the ocean to the United States and set up his family in Pennsylvania.
Before he took the 'coffin ship' across the Atlantic to begin a new life in America, Mr Blewitt worked for the ordnance survey office - walking about the land and helping making maps in the mid-1800s.
According to Fiona Fitzsimons, a fascinating part of the Blewitt story is that it appears Edward and his brother James were educated in a hedge school.
"Yet somehow, [the brothers] picked up enough higher maths to be able to parlay that into a surveyors job," said Fiona.
She said Edward Blewitt's drive and "entrepreneurial" side would lead to a successful life for him and his family in the United States. His grandson would go on to become a very early Irish Catholic member of the senate in Pennsylvania.
Decades later his grandson's daughter, Geraldine C Blewitt would marry Ambrose J Finnegan - another second-generation Irish person. This branch of the family tree stems from Co Louth.
The Finnegans and the Kearneys, his third-great grandparents, lived right out by the sea on the Cooley Peninsula.
"The Kearneys being very industrious, they collected the seaweed off the beach. Part of their agreement with the landlord was that they could have some of the seaweed… but on the side they were selling the off product of the seaweed to the other farmers in the area," said Kayleigh Bealin, Research Manager with the Irish Family History Centre.
Not surprisingly the side hustle, when discovered, left the landlord unimpressed.
Owen Finnegan and his family left for the United States in 1849, opening a business as a shoemaker in Seneca Falls New York.
His son James would be the one to relocate to Pennsylvania along with his wife Catherine Roche and their six children - one them Ambrose J Finnegan, or Joe Biden's grandfather, who would marry Geraldine C Blewitt.
While the focus of this presidential visit to Ireland has been about Mr Biden's lineage in Co Mayo and Co Louth, there are more Irish branches to his family tree.
Joe Biden also has connections to Donegal. His great-great grandmother, Catherine Scanlon was from Co Donegal but grew up in the United States after her father, Anthony Scanlon brought his family to the US around 1848 when she was around 10 years old.
"We believe Anthony Scanlon was originally from Co Mayo… he was a coastguard," said Ms Fitzsimons.
In the 1800s, coastguards were an emerging profession and were first recruited as revenue enforcers – hired to prevent smuggling of wine, brandy, whiskey, and tea. Later in the 1840s/1850s they were moved into saving lives.
"Anthony Scanlon was posted at different times around the coast, and his children appear to have been born in Donegal. We think probably Ballyshannon. We have Anthony Scanlon there in the 1830s, but unfortunately the parish registers don't start early enough for us to find baptisms," said Fiona Fitzsimons.
From stories passed down through generations and more connections revealed over time, Ireland has always been a huge part of Joe Biden's life.
Many of the president's ancestors left an Ireland ravaged by famine - a tough reality that Joe Biden laments as he makes this historic visit.
"It feels like home. I know why my ancestors and many of your relatives left during the famine and - but, you know, when you're here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave."