On Joe Biden, Ireland, and Brexit

| Ar Seosamh Biden, Éire, agus an mBreatimeacht

[This piece has been adapted from an all-team email I shared at work. Yes, we have a culture where that’s not only allowed, but encouraged! Take that CoinBase!]

There have been a few think pieces recently about President-elect Biden’s attitude to the Belfast Agreement (known as the Good Friday Agreement) and what this means for a distinctly pro-Brexit UK government. Some of the headlines…

• Joe Biden and the weaponisation of Ireland [Spectator]
• JOE’S IRA SHAME Joe Biden cuddles IRA chief with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams as they ‘discuss a united Ireland’ [The Sun (who else)]
• Ireland predicts Brexit boost from ‘stalwart friend’ Biden [FT]

Most overtly, after a request for comment from Nick Bryant at the BBC, he retorted jokingly — “BBC? I’m Irish!”

We all know the meme that US Americans are all 1/256 Irish, along with an Iroquois great-grandmother and a sprinkling of Italian because they like lasagne (apologies to our wonderful American colleagues — do forgive the jibe).

However, Biden’s political and personal attachment to Éire is deeply held and genuine, and could have a real effect on the UK-US relationship when it comes to the B-word.

Biden’s stance on the GFA was well-known pre-election — his intervention that ‘we can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit’ prompted many young people (at least, those who didn’t grow up in a post-conflict society) to wonder why some old US politician was so concerned about the antics of some protestants and catholics on a small European island.

So, I thought I’d explore the potential cultural reasons behind Biden’s evidently strong connection to Ireland, as well as indulging in a few musings about why this has been an obsession with the British press recently.

Part 1: From Blewitt to Biden

Biden’s great, great grandparents came from around County Mayo, which is in the West of Ireland and (disappointingly) not the origin of Mayonnaise.

His great-great grandfather Patrick Blewitt [ed: an unfortunate last name] was born in 1832, and left in the autumn of 1850 to settle in America. He then promptly returned in 1851 to bring his parents Edward and Mary and his siblings to America, whom he had presumably forgotten along the way.

Being from the West of Ireland, it is highly likely that at that time they were native Irish* speakers. This area is still one of the most prominent Gaeltacht areas today — where Irish is encouraged to be spoken as a vernacular language, and schoolchildren are sent for Irish language immersion.

In other words, they were immigrants, with English as a second (although likely native) tongue.

Their story, and their journey, is not unique. I myself have cousins in Canada, California and Ohio (from a more recent migration due to a wee bit of trouble we had in the 70s).

[Strangely enough, the Californians voted for Trump, the Ohioans for Biden. Perhaps less strangely, the Californians are rural and the Ohioans are suburban.]

Part 2: So why did so many Irish people leave the country? Was there not enough freedom?

It is no coincidence that the proto-Bidens chose to leave in the year that they did. By 1850, the Great Famine (an Gorta Mór, or The Great Hunger in Irish) had been raging for five years. At its peak a year earlier, it was contemporaneously known as An Drochshaol — literally ‘The Bad Life’.

The Famine was itself a pandemic, a type of a disease called blight, albeit one that affected potato crops, rather than humans. The resultant crops became rotten and inedible, and the disease spread quickly.

The potato was a staple crop in Ireland — easy to grow, cheap to maintain, and providing enough nutrition to survive. Other, more profitable crops, had to be sold for export to the British by law.

Why? Because most Irish farmers didn’t even own the land they farmed from. Some aristocrats with stately homes in England did. If the farmers could not produce enough profitable crops, they could be sent to the poor houses, which were essentially concentration camps — and while in those concentration camps, they were forbidden to farm at all,even for subsistence.

Franz Kafka, take notes, you could use this.

The loss of this crop was so devastating that its effect is hard for modern humans with our varied diets to process. So here’s a couple of sobering stats

1. About one million people died, and a further million emigrated (the majority to the US, but a sizeable number to cities like Liverpool, Manchester, and London — such as Kilburn, where I live, and where there is a permanent Irish foods section in Sainsbury’s…)

2. The population fell by as much as 25%. (On a UK wide scale, it would be as if the entire population of Wales and Scotland, and Northern Ireland ceased to be)

To put that in perspective, the current death toll of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide is 1.26M, out of a population of over 7Bn. I would be fairly confident in saying that (outside of wartime genocides) in recorded history there has not been a single natural event that has had an effect of a similar scale on a single country’s population.

Joseph Biden’s ancestors (Mr and Mrs Blewitt and co.) would have been among the million strong Irish who left their country, traditions, and language behind with hope for a stable source of food and a secure future.

Part 3: But what does this have to do with Biden today? Why are you talking about old dead people?

The cultural memory of a diaspora (an ethnic or religious group that is removed from their ancestral homeland) is long. Anyone who is Jewish, for example, will understand this innately. Bernie Sanders may not be wearing the kippah and bopping to the Klezmer Spotify playlist at his rallies, but he is undoubtedly a part of the New York Jewish diaspora, and that has informed his politics and his personal life.

(He also once played a Rabbi called ‘Manny Schevitz” in a direct to video romantic comedy, which is possibly my favourite Bernie Sanders fact ever.)

Joe Biden’s situation is similar — although the immediacy and scope of the famine is incomparable to the Holocaust, it is still recent enough that it would have been in living memory of his grandparents. Remember, Joe Biden is old. He was born *less than 100* years after the Great Famine.

For the media to frame his Irishness as an innate cultural antipathy to Britain (as Boris Johnson once said of Obama’s ‘Kenyan ancestral dislike of Britain’ — ugh) is a greatly reductionist view, and (I think) a uniquely British one. The British imagination tends to conflate being proudly Irish as being innately anti-British, a view which still manages to centre britishness at the heart of what it means to be Irish, in a weirdly psycho-colonial way. This is entirely incorrect.

Joe Biden’s Irishness manifests on a policy level as a strong desire to protect and safeguard the Good Friday Agreement, which is only anti-British in the sense that our current government seems to want to forget it exists. The Good Friday Agreement binds each side to a ‘rigorous impartiality’ when it comes to matters of the Irish border. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Boris Johnson, and the current Northern Ireland Secretary (let’s play a game — if you can name them, answer below before reading further) have lived up to this statement.

Part 4: What’s left to say?

This email is already too long, so I will end with this. There is a wonderful centre in Dublin — it’s not really a museum, you have to pay to enter and it’s very strangely funded personally by the current owner of Coca-Cola — another strange diaspora thing.

It’s called EPIC. It’s a museum / exhibition / visitor centre dedicated to the contributions of Irish emigrants or expats to the world. It’s a wonderful, uplifting, positive portrayal of the strength of immigration, and rather than ‘claiming’ people as Irish, it simply demonstrates how powerful the world can be when people are allowed to travel and work freely. Rather than lamenting the loss of great artists, politicians, playwrights, it celebrates the far reaching heritage of people who have chosen to leave Ireland, or whose ancestors did so.

After four plus years of anti immigration rhetoric, sending the navy into refugee boats, casting those fleeing war as scroungers or lazy — to see a such an earnest, wholehearted (and very well-funded) cultural embrace of the contributions of immigrants to society made me embarrass my boyfriend as I cried almost the whole way through the experience.

Anyway, I thought it had been a while since I shared musings in an all team email. And sometimes you get a brain worm to write something and share it.

Hope you have wonderful evenings!

Ted

(*addendum 1: ‘Irish’ is the official name of the language of Ireland, and much more commonly used in Ireland than ‘Gaelic’)

(*addendum 2: if you said Brandon Lewis, you win a prize! And the ability to break international law ‘in a specific, limited way.’)