Murphy's Law (assuming that, no matter how bad, things 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 as "an identity that is based on the relationship between suffering and hope." And US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the Irish are the only people on the planet who are nostalgic for the future. Take now!
Biden, in addition to being an 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 still remembered as a great event. How the two countries have changed in sixty years! The Emerald Isle is no longer that retrograde and antediluvian place, of a recalcitrant Catholicism, where divorce was prohibited, women went to England to have abortions and it seemed 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, liberalism can no longer be taken for granted, neither of the Jews nor of the Irish, but sixty years is a long time. Joe Biden was twenty when Kennedy's trip to New Ross, in County Wexford, the land of his ancestors, which he said was the best four days of his life. The current head of the White House expects an equally momentous experience. Yesterday he met his cousins the Finnegans in Callingford (Louth), visited the Kilwina cemetery and a pub linked to the family, and toured the streets of Dundalk, two kilometers across the border with Ulster, a renowned hideout for the IRA paramilitaries after committing their misdeeds. But that was before.
The president's stay in Northern Ireland was brief, barely eighteen hours, just enough to deliver a speech at the university, ask for the resumption of the autonomous government that the unionists of the DUP have blocked for fourteen months, promise when that happens money and investments, and meet with the leaders of the five main political parties. But without telling anyone what he has to do, so as not to hurt feelings or appear arrogant.
Fulfilled with the commitment to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreements, Biden packed his bags (or rather, they did) and happily hopped on Air Force One for the short trip to Dublin to begin the part there. fun of the trip Today he will meet with President Michael Higgins and address the Irish Parliament, as Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did before him. It is said that the American president who does not have Irish roots is rare, especially on Saint Patrick's Day or when the elections are approaching. Obama found them in Moneygall, County Offaly, and made a joke that he had found the missing apostrophe of his last name there (O'Bama instead of O'Hara, like Maureen O'Hara, the red-haired actress in The Quiet American of John Ford and John Wayne, very essence of the Irish).
In the case of the current president, those roots are the most authentic and doubly so. In addition to the relatives he visited yesterday on the Cooley Peninsula, tomorrow he will greet those in Ballina in County Mayo, from where his great-great-grandfather Edward Blewitt escaped in the mid-19th century to Scranton, Pennsylvania, fleeing famine, and put on 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. The town has been decked out with stars and stripes flags for days, and a large Biden poster made for the last elections, which had been hidden behind a piece of work, has been uncovered.
Biden also has English roots in Hampshire and West Sussex, but he does not claim those. He has likened the oppression of the Palestinian people to that of his ancestors by the British empire, and when asked for an interview by a BBC journalist, he warned: "Dude, I'm Irish." She knows which side his heart is on. But at eighty you have to be very careful with Murphy's Law. Both in health and politics. Things can usually only get worse.
