'Feels like coming home': US president visiting ancestral hometown in Ireland

By Burak Bir

LONDON (AA) - After nearly seven years, Joe Biden is once again visiting Ireland, but now on his way to his ancestral homeland as the US president.

On the first day of his Ireland visit, Biden arrived in Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of violence.

Following his meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a brief conversation with party leaders in Northern Ireland, and his speech at Ulster University on peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland, Biden departed from Ireland's capital Dublin.

On Wednesday, he visited the Irish town of Dundalk to meet with some relatives, where he also made a speech mentioning his Irish roots.

"Coming here feels like coming home,” Biden said, as he participated in a community gathering at the Windsor Bar along with his sister Valerie Biden Owens and younger son Hunter Biden.

"Thank you all for the homecoming welcome. The bad news for all of you is we'll be back. There's no way to keep us out, but thank you," he concluded.

On Thursday, he met with Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Dublin.

Later addressing the Irish parliament, Biden praised the Good Friday Agreement on the occasion of its 25th anniversary and called on London and Dublin to work closer to maintain peace in Northern Ireland.

"The United Kingdom should be working closer with Ireland. Political violence can never be allowed to take hold again in this island," he said.

Meanwhile, during his visit to Northern Ireland, Biden called for a return to power sharing, a political design that was established as a result of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), said Biden's visit will not change his party's more than a year-long boycott of the region's power-sharing government.

On Friday, the US president will conclude his Ireland visit with a trip to the Ballina town in County Mayo, the region which his ancestors had family ties with.

- Blewitts, Finnegans

Biden is a person who mentions his Irish root and expresses his pride in his heritage on all possible occasions, although it has been more than 165 years since his ancestors made their way to America.

"Every time I'd walk out of his house in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when I lived there for a while, he'd look at me and say, 'Joey, remember, the best drop of blood in you is Irish,'" Biden said of his grandfather during St. Patrick's Day remarks last month.

Meanwhile, William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney are among the Irish poets that Biden quotes so often.

Biden's connection to Ireland comes on his maternal side through two families in particular: the Blewitts of Ballina in County Mayo and the Finnegans on the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth.

The earliest traceable ancestor that researchers have found is the Biden's great, great, great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, who was born in 1795 and lived in Ballina, once known as the salmon fishing capital of Ireland.

In 2016, ahead of his visit to Ireland as vice-president, the White House asked the Irish Family History Centre (IFHC) to research Biden's lineage.

Biden "is among the most 'Irish' of all US presidents" – 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were from the Emerald Isle – which makes him roughly five-eighths Irish, according to IFHC.

His great-great-great grandfather, John Finnegan, in County Louth is another part of Biden's roots in Ireland, back five generations. Finnegan is also the name of one of Biden's granddaughters.

On his last day of Ireland trip, Biden is visiting County Mayo where people have been preparing for some time to welcome "Cousin Joe."

Meanwhile, one of Biden's great-great-great grandfathers was born in Sussex, England and emigrated to Maryland, US during the 1800s.

In the 1800s, during the Great Famine which killed about 1 million people, Biden's ancestors traveled across the Atlantic and settled in America.

The greatest single disaster Ireland has ever suffered, Gorta Mor in Gaelic, forced more than 1 million people to migrate to the US, but those who were too poor to go anywhere were doomed to die from starvation or illnesses that struck the weak and malnourished.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the first of four children of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden and Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr.