“Over the years, the stories here have become a part of my soul,” said the US President in a speech in Ballina, one of his family’s birthplaces.
By Le Figaro with AFP
Published on 04/15/2023 at 09:38
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U.S. President Joe Biden in Ballina, Ireland April 14, 2023. KEVIN LAMARQUE/ Portal
A bracket, intimate and symbolic, before diving back into the American political arena: Joe Biden on Friday concluded a visit to Ireland, where he was hailed as the country’s child. “It’s really like coming home. The stories here have become a part of my soul over the years,” said the US President during a speech in Ballina (Northwest), one of the cradles of his family, in front of around 27,000 enthusiastic spectators.
His journey in the footsteps of his ancestors, already emotionally charged, had taken a very personal turn during an early morning visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock. The American President, the only other Catholic to take the White House with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had planned to meet there privately.
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“It was like a sign”
He also unexpectedly met a former US Army chaplain who was giving last rites to his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, the shrine’s priest, Father Richard Gibbons, told the BBC. “The President cried, he was very touched, and we prayed for his family,” said the priest. “It was like a sign,” Joe Biden said in his speech before returning to the United States.
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The Democrat, accompanied by his other son Hunter and sister Valerie, also visited a center for historical and genealogical research on Friday, he who had meticulously traced the path of his maternal ancestors who emigrated in the mid-1800s.
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Joe Biden addressed 27,000 in Ballina. KEVIN LAMARQUE/ Portal
The American President certainly did not wait to arrive in Dublin to proudly claim his legacy, which also allows him to polish the image of a middle-class child raised in Pennsylvania (East) in a close-knit and hard-working family .
“One of us”
But when he said in Dublin on Thursday that he “didn’t want to go back,” it was questionable whether he was actually joking, so much did Joe Biden express his connection to the homeland of his distant ancestors. . “As the Irish saying goes, your feet take you where your heart is,” he wrote in the guest book of his visit.
In his closing speech at Ballina, however, he returned to more political overtones, praising the shared values of Ireland and the United States. “We’re fighting for freedom, democracy,” he said, while across the Atlantic at exactly the same moment, the one he may face again in 2024, Donald Trump, addressed the powerful gun lobby, the NRA.
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“Even in times of darkness and despair, hope has led us to a brighter future with greater freedom, greater dignity and greater opportunity,” he said, the Democrat, picking up his favorite political refrain.
A parenthesis from afar
In recent days, Joe Biden, who had started with a whirlwind visit to Belfast, had indeed raised serious issues: the blockade of institutions in Northern Ireland, the war in Ukraine… But the Democrat seemed to offer himself a parenthesis above all, away of world news and the campaign for the 2024 presidential election, which he says he “intends” to throw himself into.
He took all his time chatting, shaking hands, and taking selfies in a cordial atmosphere he won’t find in the United States, a country politically violently divided and where he is hardly popular. If Joe Biden was truly celebrated in Ireland — “You are the most Irish of all American presidents, not because of your bloodline but because of your soul,” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar assured him on Friday — that trip did not immediately arouse disproportionate interest in the United States. For example, the major American television networks did not broadcast his last speech live.