“I am Irish !” Joe Biden, who is preparing to spend a few days on the land of his ancestors, claims his roots with a fervor tinged with well-felt political interest.
“The BBC? I’m Irish!” This undated video, in which the American president dismisses a British journalist with a smile, was a great success on the internet.
For the 80-year-old Democrat, second Catholic president in American history after John Fitzgerald Kennedy, every opportunity to recall his origins is good.
When the Irish rugby team beat the fearsome All Blacks in November 2021, he picked up his phone to congratulate them.
In October 2020, in one of his last campaign clips, Joe Biden read a poem by Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney.
Of course, the President of the United States does not have an Irish passport. And he is of British descent on his father’s side.
But, in public, Joe Biden generally only mentions his maternal ancestors, a line that the “Irish Family History Center” has very officially traced, at his request.
His ancestors left counties Mayo (west) and Louth (east) in the middle of the 19th century, fleeing famine-ravaged Ireland like so many others, to finally settle in Pennsylvania (east), in Scranton, the family cradle of the American president.
Joe Biden will therefore go the other way. His trip includes stops in Belfast on Tuesday, to commemorate the signing 25 years ago of the peace agreements on Northern Ireland, and from Wednesday a very official sequence in Dublin.
But the White House has also organized more personal stops on the lands of his ancestors, as already in 2016, when Joe Biden went to Ireland as vice-president.
Will he go to that village pub his family founded again? If so, no pint of beer for Joe Biden: “I’m the only Irishman who has never had a drop of alcohol,” he joked recently.
The Democrat, who already seems to be campaigning for 2024 even if he refuses to say so officially, has promised to reinvigorate the American “dream”, to restore hope and confidence to his compatriots. What better way to do this than to rely on a willingly lyrical account of Irish emigration?
In a speech in 2013, marking his induction into the “Irish America Hall of Fame”, he evoked the history of his family to better praise the United States, this land of “opportunities for those who are ready to work hard and to respect the rules”, and to assert the right to “dignity” – references that are still essential in his speeches today.
“It’s a powerful story of origins, which draws on the imagination of America”, analyzes for AFP Coilin Parsons, director of Irish studies at Georgetown University.
The octogenarian with a private life strewn with mourning – Joe Biden lost two children – and a political life filled with bitter failures, often explains that he drew the strength to bounce back from two sources: his faith and his family values .
On March 17, commemorating the Irish National Day, he confided that his maternal grandfather had given him this motto: “Joey, never bend, never bow, never kneel, never confess defeated.”
The visceral attachment of Joe Biden, willingly sentimental and sometimes a bit soupy president, to this Irish heritage obviously also has a political dimension.
“No other country has this level of consideration” in the United States, comments Coilin Parsons, recalling that since 1952, a representative of the Irish government has been received each year at the White House and in Congress for Saint Patrick’s Day.
More than 30 million Americans claim Irish roots and “the Irish-American vote still matters today in strategic states like Pennsylvania and Ohio,” he continues.
For the academic, however, Joe Biden’s trip will not only be an evocation of the past and folklore.
“There are the clubs and the traditional dances, but more and more Ireland is telling a different story.”
“At a time of conservative turning point in the United States, Ireland is the country that challenged the influence of the Catholic Church” to authorize gay marriage, he argues in particular.
Joe Biden himself, though a devout Catholic, has become a staunch abortion rights advocate in the face of attacks from the American religious right.
09/04/2023 14:03:19 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
