Like so many Americans do each year, President Joe Biden returned to Ireland this week in search of his roots, seeking some connection and some answers in the land his people left so many years ago.
He found it in pubs but also in Parliament, which he said (in the Irish language) felt like home: “Tá mé sa bhaile.” The reception was more rapturous than anything he could hope for from Congress.
Offering a vibe break from divided and bitter Washington – if not necessarily all of its difficulties, like a massive leak of classified information that preoccupied White House aides but which he sought to downplay – Biden’s four-day trip left such an impression he said repeatedly he did not want to leave.
“I’m not going home,” he said. “I’m staying here.”
With a nostalgic eye that sometimes blurred history, Biden wondered why his ancestors left this island in the first place (answer: a famine). He found connections in the people and the landscape. Scranton, he said, was a dead ringer for the Boyne Valley.
He suddenly found himself identifying more with local traditions than those from America. “I’d rather have my children playing rugby now for health reasons than I would have them playing football,” he declared.
He tried not to get too lost in the past, insisting modern-day Ireland would write its own story. For Biden the president, the Ireland of 2023 is exactly the type of progressive, advanced democracy that can act as a bulwark against a global tide of populism.
But for Biden the man, Ireland sometimes seems more like a set of concepts: a loose yet somehow specific kind of destiny; a blend of future and past; an immigrant identity.
“As my mother would say, ‘That’s the Irish of it,’” he told a group of his cousins on Wednesday. “That’s the Irish of it. Whenever we’d say something was…
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