By Peter Makem
I remember when driving through Cooley, Co Louth a few years ago with a friend of ours, Claudine Thornton, a native of the area and who was showing us around. She suddenly told me to pull up outside a small pub and as I drew up beside it she asked if I had ever heard of Joe Biden?’
I told her of course that I did, that he was the vice president of the U.S., but I knew little else about him.
“That’s where his people came from on his mother’s side, just there,” she said, pointing to the quaint little house. “His ancestors were the Finnegans from an Owen Finnegan who left in the 1840’s and when Joe called here in 2016 a few years back as vice president I was in a photograph with him and a crowd of other locals. He was very excited at being in the place of his ancestors and was so friendly and natural to everybody.”
As everybody now knows, his Irish ancestors on his father’s side were the Blewitts from Ballina, from where his great-great grandfather Patrick Blewitt left Ireland in the autumn of 1850 to settle in America. Joe Biden now joins 25 other U.S. presidents with identified Irish roots.
There was an immediate feeling over here that we now had a true friend of Ireland in the White House just like Clinton but with the bond of blood, and this was intensified with this declarations that the Good Friday Agreement was sacrosanct and must take precedence in the face of any threats from London regarding Brexit.
Naturally some of this was great pre-election stuff — but there was a solemnity attached that would follow him into office and insist he keep his word. His projected promise to visit Ireland “soon” as President has lifted things somewhat here out of the endless depressing lockdowns and false dawns surrounding Covid.
Memories of Kennedy’s 1963 triumphant return are stirring in the distance. But we have to be careful. Once he takes office, the doors of the wide world in all their intensities will open up and fill his attention to the roof, and Ireland will largely, more and more, enter that smaller slot of nostalgic relief, confined to a fresh breeze of belonging to sooth the tensions of the job.
A lot is being made of the fact that he is the second Catholic to be elected president of the U.S. after JFK. But it seems that there is a division in the U.S. between the Biden Catholics and Trump Catholics.
Despite his religion, Biden is at odds with the Church over abortion and same-sex marriage while the Trump Catholics are largely in keeping with traditional teaching. Some commentators over here claim that while a Catholic has again reached America’s highest office, the forthcoming Biden leadership might actually be anti-Catholic, especially with Kamala Harris as his vice president.
Back at the end of the Famine times when Biden’s ancestors from Ireland ventured over to the United States, a small group of Sisters of the Mercy Order led by Newry-born Katharine Russell (Sr. Mary Baptist) sailed off to the West Coast of America via Panama at the invitation of an America bishop to cope with the thousands coming to California in the Gold Rush.
Despite the massive anti-Catholic hostility in California, which was organised by the secret Know Nothing movement, devoted to preserving an Anglo-Saxon Protestant society, Sr. Mary Baptist and her helpers set up a voluntary hospital where they used their expertise learned in the Famine to treat a series of diseases.
Gradually, as hostility diminished because of their central role, they built many hospitals and schools and she is now recognised as one of the founders of the State of California with a statue to her honour in Sacramento.
But it seems that veins of the old anti-Catholic feeling remain out there. There is reference to an incident as recent as 2014 when as California’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris blocked the rescue of six not-for-profit Catholic hospitals with financial difficulties under the Daughters of Charity. These hospitals are the descendants of those set up in the 1850’s by the Irish nuns.
She has apparently also been described as “anti-Catholic” because in 2018 she challenged the appointment of a district judge because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus and thus anti-abortion.
But Biden is to be congratulated on his massive record breaking vote and that he received 51 percent of the Catholic vote. Yet almost a half of Catholic voters voted for Trump and that tells another story
Somehow, while Biden will receive the full Cead Mile Failte when he makes his way over here, and there is general pride in Ireland regarding his superb election result, I doubt if his picture will hang on the walls of Irish houses along with a picture of the Pope. That will remain the single legacy of Kennedy
But isn’t it powerfully strange that the ancestors of former US presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and president-elect Joe Biden all left Ireland for America within a decade of each other. The main reason in each case was of course the Famine.