Joe Biden
US President is in Ireland in the footsteps of his ancestors
US President Joe Biden is currently in Ireland and clearly feels at home in the homeland of his great-great-grandparents.
©Paris Malone/Shutterstock
Joe Biden is looking for clues in Ireland: During a speech in a pub, he now emphasized how comfortable he felt in the homeland of his ancestors.
The US President in the footsteps of his ancestors: Joe Biden (80) is currently in Ireland and pays tribute to the homeland of his great-great-grandparents. In a speech he gave in a pub in the Irish town of Dundalk, he said: “Being here feels like coming home.”
He talked in detail about the values that his Irish-born mother Catharine Eugenia Finnegan gave him. Also in the audience were Biden’s son Hunter (53) and Biden’s sister Valerie (77), whom he expressly welcomed at the beginning of his speech in the traditional pub The Windsor.
In search of traces of his ancestors
The incumbent US President is currently on a three-day visit to Ireland and is also there in search of traces of his ancestors. He had previously given a speech in the Northern Irish capital of Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The “BBC” quotes, among other things, a US genealogistwho researched his parentage and found that Joe Biden was “about five-eighths” Irish.
Biden’s maternal great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, left County Louth in Ireland in the late 1840s to emigrate to America. His great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, left the town of Ballina, County Mayo, for his American voyage in the 1850s. He settled in Pennsylvania at a time when famine was devastating in Ireland. Between 1845 and 1849 several potato crops in Ireland failed almost completely and the resulting famine halved the population within those few years.
As Biden pointed out in his speech, his ancestors left Ireland around the same time as former US President Barack Obama’s great-great-grandfather (61). “You never dreamed that your grandchildren would become Presidents of the United States,” Biden said in his speech in Dundalk.