Presidential Visits to Ireland

President Joe Biden: “It feels like coming home”

President Joe Biden visited Ireland in April 2023 in what was a diplomatic and family visit. The trip began in Belfast, where Biden celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. He met with representatives of Northern Ireland’s political parties, and in a speech at Ulster University he paid tribute to those who had helped broker the peace accord, saying, “I think sometimes, especially with the distance of history, we forget how hard-earned, how astounding that peace was. It shifted the political gravity in our world,.”

Following Belfast, Biden went on visits to numerous sites and landmarks tied to his family heritage.

It was Biden’s first trip as president but not his first trip to Ireland.

In June 2016, while serving as vice president, Biden spent six days in Ireland and visited counties Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Mayo. Arriving with his brother, sister, daughter, and five grandchildren, Biden was formally welcomed by Taoiseach Enda Kenny at the Government Buildings in Dublin.

Biden had initially promised to make the trip with his son Beau, who died of brain cancer the year before at the age of 46. In a keynote address at Dublin Castle, Biden said that despite Beau’s absence, “we decided we would bring the whole family.”

Biden, who grew up in Scranton, PA, and whose Irish ancestry genealogist Megan Smolenyak traced for Irish America, spoke of his family’s pride in their Irish heritage. He also emphasized the importance of tolerance and inclusiveness for immigrants whose experiences mirror those of the Irish in America during the 19th century. He said his mother often reinforced a “thoroughly Irish sentiment” in him when she said, “Joey, no one is better than you, and every other person is equal to you and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”

After his speech, Biden was presented with the gifts of a hurley stick and sliotar (a leather ball used in hurling). He expressed his remorse that hurling wasn’t more commonly played in the United States: “I played American football and American baseball in high school and college, but this… this is a dangerous game.”

He traveled with the Taoiseach to Knockmore, Co. Mayo, the town from which his paternal great-great-grandfather emigrated, where they played a round of golf together. He then moved on to the Cooley Peninsula in Co. Louth, the birthplace of his maternal great-great-grandfather, who left for America in 1850.

On his 2023 trip, Biden again visited Mayo as the final stop on his tour. Roughly 27,000 people gathered in Ballina at the foot of St. Muredach’s Cathedral to listen to Biden speak. He did not disappoint. “Over the years, stories of this place have become part of my soul,” he told the massive crowd, adding: “Being here does feel, it feels like coming home,” Biden said. “It really does.”

Ulysses S. Grant in Ireland

The first president to visit Ireland was no longer president when he arrived in Dublin in 1879. Ulysses S. Grant had dominated the American political scene for well over a decade. By the end of the U.S. Civil War, he was the Commanding General of the Union Army. Such a prominent role in the military made him a strong candidate for president in 1868 when he defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour, New York’s governor.

Following his two tumultuous terms as president, Grant announced he would be taking a trip around the world. Stops included Germany, China, Russia, Britain – and Ireland.

Grant arrived in Dublin on January 3, 1879, and over the next few days, visited Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy, and the Bank of Ireland. Speaking to a crowd outside of City Hall, Grant said: “I am by birth a citizen of a country where there are more Irishmen, either native-born or the descendants of Irishmen than there are in all of Ireland.”

But Grant’s public embrace of the Irish concealed some disturbing facts. For example, he had sympathized with the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement back in the 1850s. The anti-Catholic label stuck to Grant in Ireland. Catholic members of the Cork City Town Council objected to Grant’s visit, so Grant went to Ulster instead. Historians have speculated that Grant felt more comfortable in the heavily Protestant North.

Nevertheless, President Grant had voiced support for the Irish Fenians movement and did visit Pope Leo XIII during his world tour. Grant visited (what he called) Londonderry as well as Belfast, speaking warmly of Ulster’s deep connections to the U.S. Grant’s roots are in Dungannon, Tyrone, where his great-grandfather left in the 1730s.

Grant, ultimately, was embraced by the Irish, even if the tour he was given tended to conceal the nation’s political and social problems. (Grant later wrote that he saw “no distress and no poverty in Ireland.”) Not long after Grant visited Ireland, a stevedore on the Boston docks was on his way to buying a saloon and becoming an influential ward boss. Little did P.J. Kennedy know that his grandson John would make a famous visit to the Irish village P.J.’s parents had fled at the height of the Famine.

JFK’s Homecoming

When John F. Kennedy finally decided to visit his ancestral home in Dunganstown, Co. Wexford in June of 1963, most Irish Americans were thrilled. Not all, however.

“You’ve got all the Irish votes in this country that you’ll ever get,” Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell objected. “If you go to Ireland, people will say it’s just a pleasure trip.”

To which Kennedy responded: “That’s exactly what I want!”

Between civil rights and the Cold War, these were tense times for JFK. Right before he visited Ireland, Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the Berlin Wall.

JFK’s trip to Ireland in June 1963 is now the stuff of legend. He met with de Valera and was greeted like a rock star.  In the weeks leading up to the trip, the humble cottage owned by Mary Kennedy Ryan – a distant relative – had to endure several modest improvements. Concrete was poured in the muck-filled front of the barn and indoor plumbing was installed.  (As Kennedy family historian Thomas Maier has noted, though Mrs. Ryan seemed like a quaint rural matriarch, she had an active past with the IRA.)

JFK told his distant relatives: “When my great-grandfather came to America and my grandfather was growing up, the Irish Americans had a song about the familiar sign which went: ‘No Irish Need Apply.’” He then said: “In 1960, the American people took the sign down from the last place it was still hanging – the door of the White House.”

In Galway, he added: “If the day was clear enough, and if you went down to the bay and you looked west, and your sight was good enough, you would see Boston, Massachusetts. And if you did, you would see down working on the docks there some Doughertys and Flahertys and Ryans and cousins of yours who have gone to Boston and made good.”

The fact that JFK was assassinated months later only lends a more sentimental glow to this trip. As the Cork Examiner noted at the time: “When John Fitzgerald Kennedy set foot on Irish soil he made a mark on the history of this country that can never be effaced.”

Eisenhower Visits

Ten months before J.F.K.’s visit to Ireland, former president Dwight Eisenhower visited Wexford to lay a wreath at the statue of Commodore Barry, the Irish-born founder of the U.S. Navy.  Embarking on a tour of Europe, Eisenhower arrived first in Dublin to stay in the Gresham Hotel and on the following day enjoyed a luncheon with President de Valera.

He arrived in Wexford on August 23, 1962, his helicopter landing on the G.A.A. pitch, and gave a short speech at the statue in which he praised Barry as “a great patriot,” and was on his way.  It wasn’t Eisenhower’s first visit to the Island of Ireland.

Between 17th-19th May 1944, General Eisenhower, then the Supreme Allied Commander, inspected troops of 10th Infantry Regiment and Divisional Artillery of 5th (Red Diamond) Infantry Division. The regiment had bases nearby at Ballyedmond Castle, Rostrevor, Co. Down, and in the towns of Kilkeel and Newcastle, Co. Down. He was there to inspect Infantry and Airborne troops as they prepared for Normandy.

Nixon’s “Forgotten” Visit

Richard Nixon’s trip to Ireland?  Not quite as memorable as J.F.K’s visit. A recent documentary about the trip dubbed it “forgotten.”

Nixon went to Ireland to visit the Mayo home of his wife’s ancestors.  Nixon also paid respects at the site of his own Irish Quaker ancestors in Kildare.  He then stayed in Dublin for three days in October of 1970.

Of course, this was at the height of the Vietnam War, and so protesters greeted Nixon while his motorcade cruised through Dublin. Several even pelted the president’s limo with eggs.
But other crowds for Nixon were much more enthusiastic. Journalist Donncha O Dúalaing covered the Nixon visit for RTÉ and heard the speech the president gave in Timahoe, Kildare.

“I remember President Nixon and the speech and being very moved and touched by it and the crowds that were here. I think that what comes back to me today is that Ireland has changed in many ways but in other ways, it hasn’t changed at all,” O Dúalaing recently told the Irish Examiner. “I think of the wonder of an American president here talking about Ireland. It was unbelievable.”

Reagan’s Tipperary Roots

If JFK’s visit was about finally taking down the “No Irish Need Apply” signs, the Reagan era allowed Irish Americans to grant themselves a little hard-earned nostalgia.

Reagan himself acknowledged this when he visited Ireland for four days in June 1984: “I feel like I’m about to drown everyone in a bath of nostalgia.” While in Ireland, Reagan visited the small Tipperary village of Ballyporeen and the church at which his great-grandfather Michael, who left Ireland in the 1850s, was baptized. Though some protesters voiced displeasure at Reagan’s Central American policy and the president’s tight relationship with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher irked some, there was a festive feeling in the air as crowds cheered and a band played the theme from Rocky. Reagan famously visited John O’Farrell’s pub, which later changed its name to The Ronald Reagan.

The facade of that building was later transported to The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, where it still stands. “Of all the honors and gifts that have been afforded me as President, this visit is the one that I will cherish dearly,” Reagan told the crowd in Ballyporeen. “I didn’t know much about my family background – not because of a lack of interest, but because my father was orphaned before he was six years old. And now thanks to you and the efforts of good people who have dug into the history of a poor immigrant family, I know at last whence I came. And this has given my soul a new contentment. And it is a joyous feeling. It is like coming home after a long journey.”

Clinton Makes History

Arguably the most historically significant presidential trip to Ireland was Bill Clinton’s.

The first sitting president to visit the North, Clinton had already made his mark on the Northern Irish peace process by the time he visited in November of 1995.  Clinton had angered British diplomats as well as Unionists by granting Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams a visa in 1994.  That same year, George Mitchell was tapped as the lead negotiator in the ongoing peace process. The 1990s had already seen nearly 400 deaths as a result of the ongoing Troubles, so President Clinton was by no means intervening in a stable or easy situation. People from both sides of the divide, however, greeted him with wild cheers when he visited both the Shankill and Falls roads.

Perhaps most poignantly, 9-year-old Catherine Hamill told Clinton and his wife, Hillary, how her father’s shooting at the hands of Ulster Freedom Fighters had shattered her life.

After the Clinton visit, the IRA broke its cease-fire with the February 1996 Docklands bombing in London.  But the slow, steady march to peace had been set in motion.

Clinton later returned and visited Omagh, the site of a horrific bombing in 1998.

“President Bill Clinton’s domestic legacy, belittled by opponents and tainted by impeachment, will be picked over for years to come,” the BBC has noted. “But few doubt the importance of the role that he played in helping to get Northern Ireland’s divided community to sit down together with the common goal of consigning violence and inequality to the past.”

Protesting Bush

If there are parallels to JFK’s and Clinton’s historic visits, so, too, are there similarities between Nixon’s and George W. Bush’s.
Wartime tensions were high once again when Bush paid a brief visit to Ireland in June 2004. Thousands of protesters hit the streets from Cork to Dublin. Then there was Bush’s infamous interview with RTÉ broadcaster Carole Coleman. Bush supporters felt the dogged Irish reporter refused to allow the president to answer her tough questions.

“The interview, broadcast from the White House on Thursday, 24 hours before the president visited Ireland, so displeased President Bush and his advisers that it led to the cancellation of another RTE exclusive… an interview with the president’s wife Laura,” the Irish Independent noted in the wake of the incident.

Given this inauspicious start, it’s not surprising the trip itself was rather banal.  Bush arrived in County Clare for the annual EU-US summit, which took place in Dromoland Castle. It is estimated that 7,000 security personnel were on hand guarding Bush and other top officials during the visit, which lasted just 16 hours. Not enough personnel to keep a photographer from snapping a photo of Bush in an undershirt, peering out the window of his bedroom at Dromoland that was published in the Irish tabloid newspaper The Star on Sunday despite a government ban.

Bush, however, maintained an interest in Irish affairs. In 2010, he broke his post-presidency diplomatic silence and phoned David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives in Britain. He made a plea for Cameron to press allies in Northern Ireland to support the ongoing peace process.

Obama’s “Heritage Link”

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrived in central Dublin to address thousands of people during their visit to Ireland on May 23, 2011. The President planted a tree in Phoenix Park and posed with schoolchildren before a meeting with the Irish president, Mary MacAleese, and her husband Martin.

As with JFK, there was something of a “pleasure trip” feel about the president’s May jaunt. Following their stop in the nation’s capital, he and first lady Michelle headed to Moneygall, in Co. Offaly. It was from here that his Irish ancestor, a 19-year-old shoemaker called Falmouth Kearney,  left Ireland for the new world during the Great Famine. The President and first lady were warmly greeted by the 2000 or so lucky official ticket holders who were allowed into the village. The Obamas briefly visited the president’s ancestral home, still standing after all these years, and stopped into the Ollie Hayes for a pint.

“My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way,” the president later quipped.

Obama – America’s first black president – firmly reasserted Ireland’s long historical ties to the U.S.“For the United States,” he said, “Ireland carries a blood link. ”President Obama visited Ireland again in June 2013, where he spoke to the people of Northern Ireland from the Belfast waterfront. It had been 15 years since the people of Ireland had approved the Good Friday Agreement, and President Obama called the achievement — and the progress that followed it — extraordinary. “For years, few conflicts in the world seemed more intractable than the one here in Northern Ireland. And when peace was achieved here, it gave the entire world hope,” he said, ending his speech thusly, “And you should know that so long as you are moving forward, America will always stand by you as you do.”

Trump’s “Golf Links”

On June 5, 2019, on his first official visit to Ireland, President Donald Trump met with then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the VIP lounge at Shannon Airport. The two briefly discussed trade, corporate tax incentives, Brexit, which President Trump supported, and the N.I. border. “I think it will all work out very well, and also for you with your wall, your border,” he said at a joint press conference. “I mean, we have a border situation in the United States, and you have one over here. But I hear it’s going to work out very well here.”

The Taoiseach interjected that he wished to avoid a border or a wall.  “I think you do, I think you do,” President Trump said. “The way it works now is good, you want to try and keep it that way. I know that’s a big point of contention concerning Brexit. I’m sure it’s going to work out very well.”

Over a hundred gathered outside Shannon airport, and several thousand more marched in Dublin, the nation’s capital, to protest the president’s visit.

It was a different story, some 40 miles away, at Doonbeg, the golf course that Mr. Trump bought in 2011 for a reported $11 million, and changed the name to the Trump International Golf Club–Doonbeg.

Here, the media reported,  the president was greeted warmly by the staff, some 300 whom he employs in peak season.

Local publican Tommy Comerford told the BBC that the resort keeps young people in the area from emigrating. “If you haven’t young people in an area like this, it will die,” he said.

“Whatever your politics, it would be hard to argue that Trump doesn’t know how to set up a golf course – he’s done a great job here,” blogger David Jones wrote on ukgolfguy.com♦

This article originally appeared in the August/September issue of Irish America and was updated in February 2024.