The people of New Ross eagerly anticipated Kennedy’s visit, which was preceded by a rush to buy TV sets, “because it was going to be put on television,” Willie Keilthy recalls. He had really nailed the Irish thing to the mast, and he was coming to New Ross… unheard of really.”
All his eight great-grandparents were Irish. Mark Minihan, who was a 16-year-old student in New Ross at the time, told CNN, “He was the first president to kind of declare his Irishness. Kennedy, the great-grandson of barrel-maker Patrick Kennedy, from New Ross, County Wexford, started Ireland’s love affair with Irish-heritage American presidents when he visited in 1963 in what he described as “the best four days of my life.” Irish Government/Pool/Getty ImagesĪndrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are just some of the US presidents to trace their roots back to early Irish immigrants to America.īut Biden – a descendent both of the Blewitts in Ballina and the Finnegans of County Louth on Ireland’s east coast – has been touted as the most “Irish” of Americans to sit in the Oval Office since John F. US President Barack Obama greets the locals in his ancestral home of Moneygall on in Moneygall, Ireland. “He tells great stories of basically growing up in an Irish household, even though obviously they are very much American.” Patrick’s Day event Biden hosted at the White House. He talks about it all the time.” Laurita has just returned from a St. Over coffee, Joe Blewitt’s sister, podcaster and fundraiser Laurita, tells CNN: “His family are steeped in Irish traditions. The family’s Irish identity has held strong for more than 100 years, as the Blewitts who remain in Ballina testify, and Biden is no exception. Painted during his 2020 campaign for the White House, it illustrates how this town of about 10,000 near Ireland’s wild western coast celebrates America’s commander in chief as a native son.īiden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, was among the millions of people who left Ireland in the 19th century after the Irish potato famine, sailing to the US and settling in the President’s birthplace of Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania. The family speak to CNN in front of a large mural of Biden’s face that overlooks the market square in central Ballina. Today, residents’ WhatsApp groups are buzzing with reported sightings of Secret Service agents, while the local council is “mending the manhole covers” and the community is “pulling out all the stops,” the girls’ father, plumber Joe Blewitt, 43, says.
Joe Blewitt, a distant cousin of US President Joe Biden, with his daughters Lauren and Emily, and wife Deirdre in Ballina, County Mayo.
0 kommentar(er)
