Expert Explains | Past and Presidents: Politics and cultural signalling in Biden’s Ireland visit

The President’s first stop, unsurprisingly, will be in Belfast, where he is expected to meet the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Overall, however, this visit will be more than about highlighting the 1998 Belfast Agreement or the Good Friday agreement, which, with crucial American mediation, had ended nearly three decades of armed conflict in Northern Ireland.

Biden’s four-day itinerary in Ireland will aim to reaffirm the historical links between Ireland and the United States. It will also underline how having distant cultural roots and social anchors continue to nurture American political imagination.

At a time when India has begun to wake up to the varied political implications of having an Indian-origin political leadership in many countries around the world, President Biden’s cultural signalling and the crafting of a sense of belonging in Ireland while remaining American should be instructive to Indian observers.

US Presidents’ Irish roots

In the south of the island, Biden will be visiting Dublin, County Louth and County Mayo, where he will visit Carlingford Castle. Biden is the second Catholic (after John F Kennedy) to be elected US President, and it is from one of these counties that his great-great grandfather, Owen Finnegan, had left for America in the 1840s as the potato famine (1845-52) ravaged Ireland.

Biden will visit the catholic Knock shrine as well as the home town of his great-great-great grandfather Edward Blewitt, who had emigrated in 1850 to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Politically, only since the 1990s have American Presidents begun to show an interest in tracing their ancestry to Ireland, and publicly celebrating their Irish roots. Ronald Reagan’s great grandfather Michael Reagan was born in Ballyporeen in 1829 and when the former President visited Ireland in 1984, he delivered a speech at this Irish village.

John F Kennedy was the only Roman Catholic Irish American president. His great grandfather Patrick was from Dunganstown, County Wexford, and the Irish ballad Danny Boy was often played at Kennedy’s political rallies. Kennedy also interacted closely with prominent Irish Catholics like Tip O’Neill, who later became the second-longest serving House speaker in history.

Political historians and experts view this display of Irish ancestry as a strategy adopted by American Presidents to accumulate Irish American or, more specifically, Catholic votes. During Barack Obama’s presidency, his visit to Moneygall in Ireland played out effectively in the Rust Belt, which included former steelmaking cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit, in New York City, and in parts of Massachusetts.

Such a campaign ensured exposure in the Catholic newspapers, which were not traditional Obama supporters because of his stand on abortion, and also because of his African-American roots.

The Irish and US politics

Thirty two million people claim Irish heritage in the United States. Historically, more than 4.5 million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1930. Between 1740 and 1922, around 7 million people emigrated from Ireland to Northern America. In 31 US states, people of Irish ancestry are the third largest group by population. Irish Catholic men and women who came to America between 1945 and 1960 were young, single, and worked hard as babysitters, contractors and domestic assistants in houses and restaurants. The Irish who immigrated between 1981 and 1991 were better educated and technologically more globally connected.

By the late 20th century, Irish-Americans had become effective foreign policy entrepreneurs. As the first President of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic in 1919-1920, Eamon de Valera travelled throughout the United States seeking to mobilise the Irish diaspora to convince President Woodrow Wilson to grant diplomatic recognition to the Irish Republic.

Many politicians in Ireland, in fact, believed that the Irish diaspora in America could be used to leverage the US government into aligning with Irish interests. De Valera and many other Irish leaders, however, soon discovered that while the Irish-American diaspora often expressed sympathy for the idea of Irish independence, they could not translate it into American foreign policy outcomes. Great Britain, Ireland’s enemy of those times, continued to be valued as the United States’ most reliable partner.

If lessons of history are to be learnt, then clearly Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland, while celebrating deep cultural roots, will remain distant to American domestic politics and foreign policy calculations. Immigrants may indeed be strongly possessed of a nostalgia about places, cultures, and the need for sustaining bonds, but if the American President’s tryst with their deep pasts in Ireland are anything to go by, then it would be only fair to conclude that politics and the diaspora do not really mix.

Dr Atwal is Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Visiting Professor at UCD School of History, University College Dublin. She has been researching and teaching Irish history for the past several years, and is co-editor of India, Ireland and Anti-Imperial Struggle: Remembering the Connaught Rangers Mutiny, 1920 (2021).