Biden said his Irish heritage was the «saving grace» of his English father. Photo: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
It was a touching moment, a reminder that at the end of the day the leader of the free world is just one of the guys. When the wheels of Air Force One touched the tar at Belfast International, the President of the United States was no longer the most powerful man on earth. He was plain old Joseph Biden, another quirky 80-year-old American in a windbreaker and baseball cap obsessed with his «pedigree.» We landed at night, apparently so that he could get some rest and not spend the last four hours looking out the window in search of a rainbow.
Unfortunately for Biden, his tour of Ireland is a work trip, so he had to do boring things like meet Rishi Sunak and give speeches about the Good Friday Agreement. You sense that with a free hand, he'd rather do what the rest of his tribe does: roam the country, admire something that's over 80 years old, and ask strangers if he's related to them. At least he was allowed to go to a cafe in Dundalk, where he said it was «so beautiful» that he wished «his ancestors had never left». A cheese and ham sandwich can be a powerful thing. This man has the most powerful military force in history, but he would be reduced to rubble in 10 minutes in the Titanic Museum.
Biden has more claims than most: 10 of 16 Irish great-great-great grandparents, whom genealogists apparently call 5/8. This tiny majority was enough to defend their Irish identity at every opportunity. He said that Irish ancestry was the «saving grace» of his English father. He once refused to speak to the BBC, citing «I'm Irish». He joked that people in orange [i.e. Protestants] were «not welcome» in his house.
But his Irish obsession places him in the tradition of American presidents, 23 of whom claim Irish ancestry but whose public attachment to the place tends to trump any real connection. Ireland's first president was Andrew Jackson, and in 1879 Ulysses Grant was the first president to return and visit the country. There, he gave a speech to Dublin City Hall in which he said that he was «by birth a citizen of a country where there are more Irish people, either native or Irish descended, than in all of Ireland.» Conveniently, this overlooked his strong anti-Catholic leanings.
The modern standard was set by John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic Irish President and the first to visit Ireland in office, who reportedly described his short trip to Ireland in 1963, a few months before he was assassinated, as the most happy days in your life. Unlike some presidents, the Kennedy family was a true immigration story: both sides left Ireland around the time of the potato famine to seek their fortunes in America. Since then, every president has been here, except for Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. Everyone claims that Trump is of Irish descent, and his connection is that he owns Trump's international golf course at Dunbeg. Bill Clinton, who was instrumental in the Good Friday Agreement, claimed Irish ancestry, but this has not been conclusively proven.
You can understand why he wanted to claim it even though he wasn't negotiating a peace deal. The Irish connection makes good political sense in America, where Ireland is mostly seen as a beautiful green land of sexy drunken poets who have been oppressed by evil neighbors for hundreds of years, with some evidence. There are a large number of Catholic, Irish and other voters. No one has serious grievances against the Irish, except other Irish. Best of all, an American president loitering around the Irish Sea, sipping Guinness (or, for Biden's teetotaler, its non-alcoholic equivalent), quoting Yeats, and generally enjoying the craziness, achieves something every American would agree is worth it: he completes English.
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