US President Joe Biden ends his state trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland on Friday: the official reason was the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the decade-long violence of the so-called Troubles. But among other things, the trip was noted for the satisfaction and satisfaction with which Biden spent time in Ireland, which is the country where his family is originally from.
“I’m not going home,” Biden said Thursday after a meeting with Irish President Michael Higgins in the presidential palace in Dublin. «I’m staying here because… isn’t this place incredible?». Then, jokingly addressing the American journalists present, he said that the Irish presidential palace “looks just like the White House”, as if to say that they could all have stayed there. (Indeed, the Irish presidential palace has a neoclassical architectural style not so different from that of the White House, and on the outside it is all white except for the roof).
Biden has shown admiration and complacency on multiple occasions during his journey. “This is wonderful, I feel at home,” she said on her arrival in Dublin on Wednesday morning. “I feel at home,” she reiterated in the afternoon. Speaking before the Irish Parliament on Thursday, you said: ‘I feel at home. I feel at home. I just wish I could stay here a little longer.’
“It was a remarkable message for the president of the United States, who has among the requirements of his job to exalt his country as the greatest in the world“. he wrote ironically the Washington Post.
Biden often claims his family’s Irish ancestry. His maternal great-grandparents left the country and immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s. Probably they did it to escape the great Irish famine of those years, when a potato disease, combined with the harmful policies of the English colonial government, caused the death of about a million Irish people and the emigration of the same number.
Biden is famous for his long and frequent quotes from memory of Irish poets (his favorite is Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995) and last year on St. Patrick’s Day, the patron saint of Ireland, said: “Today I am the son of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden” (his mother’s full name). He is also the first Catholic American president since John F. Kennedy.