One of his typical slip-ups has marred Joe Biden’s visit to the land of his ancestors. While passing through the Windsor pub in Dundalk, and at the time of highlighting the feat of his distant cousin and distant rugby player Rob Kearney, Biden referred to the New Zealand team of the “All Blacks” as the “Black and Tans” , which was the name by which the fearsome British military guard was known during the War of Independence.
The North American president (accompanied for the occasion by his son Hunter and his sister Valerie) tried to correct the mistake at the time of the toasts – “It feels wonderful, it’s like coming home” – but the geese followed him during his second day on an official visit to the Republic of Ireland, after his fleeting visit to Northern Ireland.
Biden will speak on Thursday in a special session of Parliament and the Senate in Dublin, after his meeting with the President of the Republic of Ireland Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on a long political agenda, in contrast to the brevity of his visit to Belfast to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
During his visit to the Áras an Uachtaráin, the residential palace of the President of the Republic (erected half a century before the White House), Biden symbolically planted an oak tree and rang the Peace Bell. The North American president had the opportunity to fraternize with Michael Higgins, 81 years old (one older than him), who was a poet, sociologist and commentator as well as a Labor senator before becoming the ninth president of the Republic of Ireland in 2011.
Accompanied by his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Biden will later hold a long meeting with the “taoiseach” Leo Varadkar, also in contrast to the coffee that was taken in Belfast with the “premier” Rishi Sunak. Varadkar himself welcomed him to Dublin on Wednesday and greeted him as “the son of Ireland”. After lunch, the two will attend a Gaelic games demonstration at Farmleigh House.
The North American president will intervene on Thursday afternoon in a joint session of the Parliament (Oireachtas) and the Senate (Dáil) where he is expected to make a very personal speech about his Irish roots and with a marked economic character. In the evening he will attend a gala dinner in his honor at Dublin Castle.
His last stop will be in the North West, to meet his other Irish branch of the family tree: the Blewitts. Biden will say goodbye with a speech in the Ballina cathedral – built with 20,000 bricks sold by his great-great-grandfather – in which a surprise announcement is not ruled out.
Despite the massive welcome to the second Catholic president of the United States, not everything has been congratulations for Biden on his way through Dublin. “Biden is here because he passionately identifies with a religious idea of ??Ireland that has run out of steam in the land of his ancestors,” writes Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times. “She’s Ireland, Joe, but not like we used to know her.”
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