At the end of a winding country lane on the shores of Lough Allen in County Leitrim sits a beautiful little cemetery, seemingly all alone in the world. I discovered it while looking for the resting place of my grandad’s long-lost father; a man he’d never known and about whom we still know little. My grandad was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Liverpool. His mother had moved to England sometime before he was born, desperately tried to keep in touch but eventually lost contact after going into service. Such was the world that was.
The cemetery is all that is left of my connection to Leitrim — that and my surname. In this tiny patch of Ireland, far from home, lie various McTigues and McTeigeus, the ancestors who may have given us our name. But that link has been frayed in the churn of emigration and divorce, remarriage and death. Today, the banal truth is that I’m English, not Irish. All my immediate family were born in England. Everything I know and feel has been shaped in England. Like Joe Biden, my closest connection to Ireland is three generations ago. And yet, I’m English and he, as he claims, is Irish.
But don’t just take his word for it. Before the US President arrived in Dublin, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said how honoured he was to be welcoming Joe Biden “home” to Ireland; fifth cousins lined up to celebrate this homecoming; over the next few days, every sinew in the Republic will be strained to affirm the President’s Irishness. And why not? Not only is it wise to claim the most powerful man in the world as one of your own, doesn’t it make sense to greenwash those US corporate profits sloshing through Ireland?
Not that Biden is faking it. The President’s grandfather, Ambrose — whose father came to America from from Ireland in the 1850s — drummed it into the young Joe Jnr that he should remember “the best drop of blood in you is Irish”. The worst, you see, was English, which had dripped down through the generations on his father’s side. In his speech in Belfast yesterday, Biden even joked about this somewhat embarrassing revelation.
Just as nations are no more than “imagined communities”, so too are diasporas. What is important is not the purity of Biden’s bloodline — a horrible, fascistic idea — but the strength of belief in the idea of Irish-Americanness. If enough people believe they are Irish-American, then Irish America exists not only in theory but in practice — a living reality with its own power that must be reckoned with in Belfast and London. Irish America votes and feels, and therefore has to be taken seriously. In the Seventies and Eighties, it funded the IRA. Today, it warns Britain there will be no trade deal should it abandon the Northern Irish Protocol.
The real potency of the idea of Irish America is that it shapes not only how America sees Ireland but also how Ireland sees itself. “Biden comes with a vision of Irishness which is really an Irish American vision,” Kieran Cuddihy, an Irish radio presenter, told me. “It is quaint and twee — all comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.”
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