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Joe Biden has started a three-day personal and political pilgrimage to the Republic of Ireland, receiving a rapturous welcome despite heavy wind and rain.
The US president flew into Dublin on Wednesday afternoon after concluding a politically charged visit to Northern Ireland. The taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, greeted Biden after he descended from Air Force One for an expected three-day celebration of the president’s Irish heritage.
Biden met US embassy staff and other well-wishers who waved US and Irish flags at an airport hangar. “Everyone I grew up with became a cop, a firefighter or a priest – I couldn’t qualify for any of them, so here I am,” he joked.
Weather conditions grounded the president’s helicopter, so a cavalcade of armoured vehicles – watched by people from motorway overpasses – ferried the entourage to the Cooley peninsula in County Louth, where the president’s great-grandfather James Finnegan was born.
Biden was scheduled to visit ancestral graves in Kilwirra cemetery and the 12th-century Carlingford Castle before visiting Dundalk, a town close to the border with Northern Ireland.
Bunting and flags lined the main street in Dundalk, which teemed with Irish police and US Secret Service agents.
The president, accompanied by Ireland’s foreign minister, Micheál Martin, was to meet local dignitaries and other people in the Windsor pub and restaurant, the venue apparently selected because of its upstairs floor and 200-person capacity rather than a nod to the Windsor framework or the British royal family.
“If they start looking for food I’m in trouble because there’s no chef on today,” said the owner, Donal McGeough. “But we have plenty of drinks, including non-alcoholic beverages like Guinness 0.0.” Biden is a teetotaller.
McGeough said he was notified about the visit just a few days ago. “It’s a huge honour but I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m quite calm at the moment but it’ll probably get a bit hairy later,” he said.
Driving rain cleared as Biden’s cavalcade arrived in Dundalk just before 7pm. US flags lined the route.
Hundreds of people lining Clanbrassil Street cheered when the president emerged from his vehicle and spoke to a group in front of Gino’s diner. He took selfies with their phones and waved to the crowd before entering a deli called McAteers The Food House.
Residents expressed pride that Biden had chosen to emulate Bill Clinton’s visit to Dundalk in 2000. “It’s not every town in Ireland that can boast two presidential visits,” said Barry Holland, who works in his family’s hardware store. “It’s very significant for the region, it puts the region on the map.”
Since Clinton’s visit to Dundalk – a republican bastion nicknamed El Paso during the Troubles – the town had transformed, said Holland. “In those days you couldn’t walk up the street with a union jack on your clothing. Now no one would bat an eyelid.”
His mother, Maeve Holland, founded the hardware store with money she and her husband earned while working in New York in the 1960s, reflecting Ireland’s tight links with the US.
Colm Coburn, 58, who works in a paint shop, said Biden, 80, was very welcome but the excitement did not match the euphoria of Clinton’s visit. “Clinton was charismatic like a film star. Biden is …,” Coburn paused, “older”.
Despite heavy security, the White House entourage – which includes the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Biden’s son Hunter and sister Valerie – is expected to be more relaxed south of the border. The one-day visit to Belfast involved delicate political choreography – celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement while navigating the Democratic Unionist party’s boycott of power sharing.
Donald Trump mocked the president’s sojourn to the land of his ancestors. “He’s now in Ireland, he’s not going to have a news conference, when the world is exploding,” he said.
Biden was to return to Dublin on Wednesday night. On Thursday, he will hold separate meetings with the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, and Varadkar, before making a speech to a joint sitting of parliament, following in the footsteps of John F Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Clinton in 1995. There will be a banquet dinner at Dublin Castle.
On Friday, the US’s second Catholic president will fly to County Mayo and tour the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Knock, a Catholic shrine. He will also visit the North Mayo Heritage Centre’s family history research unit and meet relatives from another side of his family, before making a speech in the evening outside St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina.
Some commentators said the president’s devout Catholicism reflected an Ireland that was disappearing. “Biden is here because he identifies passionately with a religious idea of Irishness that has lost much of its grip on the homeland,” Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “It’s Irish, Joe, but not as we know it.”
The president is to return to Washington on Saturday.
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