The intruder of the news gives each evening a spotlight on a personality who could have passed under the radars of the news.
It is a visit full of symbols for Joe Biden who comes to commemorate 25 years of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland. Republicans with a Catholic majority who wanted to reunite Ireland and Unionists with a majority Protestant who wanted to stay in the United Kingdom, had ended 30 years of violence (after 3,500 deaths). Joe Biden is therefore expected in Dublin, Belfast but also on Friday April 14 in the village of his ancestors in the north-west of Ireland in County Mayo. The town is called Ballina.
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This is where this cousin Joe Blewitt lives, who still bears the name of the ancestor who emigrated to the United States in the 19th century. Joe Biden’s maternal grandparents both have Irish origins – Finnegan family on the grandfather’s side, Blexitt family on the grandmother’s side in this city of Balina where the American president will go. Joe Blewitt, 43, is a plumber in Ballina and descends from the Blewitt of origin: Edward Blewitt, great – great – great – grandfather of Joe Biden who had left the city in the middle of the 19th century fleeing, like many, the famine which was raging in Ireland. Joe Blewitt lives there with his wife and the next generation, his three children. For the past few days, he has been in charge of interviews with the international press. On CNN, he explains: “My father is Joe Biden’s third cousin, his great-great-grandfather moved from Ballina in the 1860s to Scranton.” It is in this small Pennsylvania town where a century later, Joe Biden will be born in 1942 and where – for series fans – the American version of The Office.
No inauguration ceremony due to the Covid-19 pandemic
The two “Joes” don’t see each other very often. The Irish cousin returns from Washington where he went to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day at the White House on March 17. In 2020, Joe Biden had invited him to his inauguration but he had not been able to go because of the Covid-19. They had seen each other in 2016 in Ireland already: Joe Biden, vice-president, had come to Ballina, promising to return as president! That was seven years ago, Joe’s daughters Emily and Lauren who are now 10 and 12 remember. They told CNN reporter Donny Sullivan.
Donny Sullivan: How does it feel to be related to a president?
Emily and Lauren Blewitt: It’s very exciting, he is president!
Have you already met him?
Yes, twice!
And what did he tell you?
He just ate our fries! And even when the fancier dishes arrived, he preferred to eat our fries and our chicken nuggets.
He stole your nuggets?
Yeah! (bursts of laughter)
And you have to imagine the family interview in front of a huge portrait of Joe Biden painted on a wall in the city during the 2020 American presidential election – a tribute from this city of 10,000 inhabitants to the child of the country. The house of the ancestor Edward Blewitt still partly exists, inhabited by an 86-year-old former Irish senator: Ernie Caffrey.
Irish origins claimed by many presidents
Joe Biden is not the first to claim Irish origins. Many American presidents have done it before him. The reason is always the same: this “potatoe famine” of the middle of the 19th century which caused a quarter of Ireland to flee, including a good part in the United States. John Fitgerald Kennedy came to Ireland in 1963 and paid homage to his ancestors, Ronald Reagan to his Catholic great-great-grandfather. Barack Obama, who has Irish blood through his mother, does the same at Moneygall. But Joe Biden, according to Joe Blewitt, is the most Irish of them all. He alludes to it constantly, it has even become a recurring joke. He made the audience laugh when, in January 2017, Barack Obama presented him with the Medal of Freedom and he launched from the podium, “I can’t help quoting an Irish poet.” In 2020, when he is nominated candidate for the Democratic Party. He even declaims lines from the Irish poet Seamus Heany: “But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme” In French : “But suddenly, once in a lifetime, this long-awaited tidal wave of justice breaks and makes “hope” rhyme with “history”..”
Between now and Friday, Joe Blewitt won’t have too much time to play the poet, between the whatsApp groups who report secret service agents here, there a manhole cover to be repaired, the plumber will neglect no detail to welcome the better cousin Joe in Ballina.
