Murphy’s Law (assuming that things, no matter how bad, can always get worse) is simply the crude expression of the essence of what it means to be Irish. The poet Seamus Heaney, often quoted by Joe Biden, summed it up in a more philosophical way: “An identity that is based on the relationship between suffering and hopeâ€. And American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the Irish are the only people on the planet who are nostalgic for the future. Get up here!
Biden, in addition to being American, feels Irish, and very Irish. He is perhaps the most Irish president of the United States since JFK, whose visit to the island in 1963, shortly before his assassination, is remembered as a major event. How the two countries have changed in sixty years! The Emerald Isle is no longer that retrograde, antediluvian place of recalcitrant Catholicism where divorce was forbidden, women went to England to have abortions and it looked poor (as well as cold and rainy) even to those who visited it from Franco’s Spain. And the giant on the other side of the Atlantic has become so socially conservative that many of its 30 million citizens with origins in Cork, Galway or Donegan are republicans.
In the United States, the liberalism of either the Jews or the Irish can no longer be taken for granted, but sixty years is a long time. Joe Biden was 20 when Kennedy traveled to New Ross, County Wexford, the land of his ancestors, in what he said were the best four days of his life. The current holder of the White House expects an equally momentous experience. Yesterday he was in Callingford (Louth) with his cousins, the Finnegans; visited Kilwina Cemetery and a pub linked to the family, and walked the streets of Dundalk, two kilometers across the Ulster border, a known hideout for IRA paramilitaries after committing their mischief But that was before.
The president’s stay in Northern Ireland was short, just eighteen hours, just enough time to deliver a speech at the university; call for the resumption of the regional government that the DUP unionists have blocked for fourteen months; to promise, when that happens, money and investments, and to meet with the leaders of the five main political parties.
With the commitment to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreements fulfilled, Biden packed his bags (or rather, packed them), and happily boarded Air Force One for the short trip to Dublin and start the fun part of the journey there. Today he will interview President Michael Higgins and address the Irish Parliament, as Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did before. It is said that the American president who does not have Irish roots is strange, especially on St. Patrick’s Day or when the election is coming up. Obama found roots in Moneygall, County Offaly, and joked that there he had found the lost apostrophe in his surname (O’Bama instead of O’Hara, like Maureen O’Hara, the actress -red from The American Quiet by John Ford and John Wayne, the very essence of the Irishman).
In the case of the current president, the roots are the most authentic, and for two reasons. Apart from the relatives he visited yesterday on the Cooley Peninsula, tomorrow he will greet those in Ballina, County Mayo, from where his great-grandfather Edward Blewitt escaped in the mid-19th century to Scranton (Pennsylvania) fleeing the hunger, and he went to work on the railways and mines, like so many compatriots. One of them is distant cousin Joe, who has already visited the White House. For days the town has been decorated with American flags, and a large poster of Biden that was made for the last election and that had been hidden behind a work has been uncovered.
Biden also has English roots in Hampshire and West Sussex, but he does not claim them. He has compared the oppression of the Palestinian people to that of their ancestors by the British empire, and when asked for an interview by a BBC reporter, he warned: “Dude, I’m Irish.” He is clear on which side his heart is. But at eighty you have to be very careful with Murphy’s law. Both in health and in politics. Things in general can only get worse.
