Whichever side of the Atlantic or the Irish Sea you live on, you probably heard a great deal of hype about Joe Biden’s “historic”, four-day “feels like I’m coming home” trip to the island of Ireland last week. If you live on the English side of these bodies of water, you probably heard the outpouring of a good amount of scorn over it, too.
You might have heard, for instance, that while he calls Ireland “part of [his] soul”, Biden isn’t actually very Irish at all, and that given his ancestors left the Emerald Isle almost two centuries ago, he should just accept the fact that he is “American”. You might have heard that despite never making any special trips to his British family, Biden is just as English as he is Irish. And you might have heard that this visit was largely about taking cheap shots at the British, and winning easy votes at home.
“Joe Biden’s trip to Ireland was nothing short of two fingers to the UK,” seethed Mark Dolan on the perpetually indignant GB News channel, dubbing Biden “the world’s most famous ‘Plastic Paddy’”, and calling his “absurd claims to be an Irishman . . . a load of old blarney”. (Dolan gets to use such a term by virtue of his Irish parents and surname, we are to understand.) Rod Liddle wrote an article under the headline “Biden’s special relationship with Ireland is as big a sham as Britain’s with the US”, blasting his “ludicrous shamrock-hugging”.
The Times even managed to wheel out a distant English cousin for the occasion, one Ralph Biden of Cobham, Surrey, to make disparaging remarks about the president’s claims to Irishness. “Being Irish is much more sexy to the American voters and he’s majoring on that even though he’s only an eighth Irish,” the British Biden told the newspaper.
Apart from the fact that Joe Biden is in fact about five times as Irish as his English relative claims (10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were Irish, nine of whom were born in Ireland itself and the other rather poetically born en route to America), these criticisms are unwarranted.
Being Irish — or, more specifically, being a Catholic Irish-American — has always been an important part of the president’s identity. Biden, whose Secret Service code name is “Celtic”, grew up among Irish-Americans in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and was educated by nuns in Catholic schools. He memorised the poems of WB Yeats as a teenager in an effort to overcome his stutter and, according to his biographer Evan Osnos, as vice-president he quoted Yeats’s “Easter 1916” at least 20 times. His grandfather, he says, used to tell him: “Remember, Joey, the best drop of blood in you is Irish.”
No matter what labels we might want to put on the rest of Biden’s blood, to argue that he is a “Plastic Paddy” because he is also American is to falsely imagine that national identity is some kind of provable, immutable fact rather than what it really is: a construct that helps us make sense of ourselves and get a sense of belonging to a particular group.
According to my sister’s DNA test and my knowledge of my ancestry, I am about as Irish as Biden, but with more recent claims to this heritage. My late Irish-Catholic father was born and is buried in Ireland, as were all the paternal ancestors that I am aware of, and my maternal grandfather was born in Dublin too. And yet I would not — despite being very proud of my “Irish roots” — call myself “more Irish” than Biden, as many British commentators have been lining up to do.
A fairer criticism of Biden is that his vision of Ireland is a simplistic one that does not fully represent the modern, wealthy, multicultural and increasingly secular country that exists today. That is partly down to his age — at 80, he is some 34 years older than John F Kennedy was when the only other Catholic US president visited Ireland in 1963 — and is partly just the nature of diasporas, as Mary Burke, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and author of Race, Politics, and Irish America, tells me.
“There’s this notion of the past that is caught in amber, in some ways, as is always the case for any ethnic group,” Burke says. “Their idea of the motherland has stalled, it hasn’t evolved, and hasn’t been complicated in the way that it has in motherland, where life keeps going.”
If Biden wants to attach his identity to an old-fashioned, idealised vision of Ireland, we should let him. Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar got it right last week when he called him “the most Irish of all American presidents, not because of what is written on [his] family tree, but because of what is enshrined in [his] soul”. Biden’s claims to Irishness are just as real — and just as false — as anyone else’s.