On a divided island, Joe Biden brought a message of unity. But his businesslike visit to Belfast 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. 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”.
State broadcaster RTÉ 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.
The president 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.”
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