US PRESIDENT BIDEN TO VISIT THIS OCTOBER
Garda planning under way for prospective trip
US PRESIDENT Joe Biden is set to visit Ireland for a three-day trip planned for October, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Security sources involved in the preparations confirmed plans are already under way for the presidential visit, which is due just ahead of the US mid-term elections. Senior security figures who helped to
TWO of Joe Biden’s great-greatgrandfathers were born in Ireland and the US president has long used his Irishness to frame his political identity and life story – and to explain some of his quirks.
He can trace his roots back to Ballina, Co. Mayo, on his mother’s side, and on his father’s side to the Cooley peninsula in Co. Louth, where relatives include former Ireland rugby international Rob Kearney, who is a distant cousin of the president’s.
Mr Biden’s great-greatgrandfather Patrick Blewitt was born in Ballina in 1832 and emigrated to America at 18. Some years later he was joined there by his mother and father, Mary and Edward, and the Blewitt family set up home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Patrick worked as a mining inspector and his son Edward, named after his grandfather, became a civil engineer.
In 1907 Edward was elected to the Senate. He and his wife Mary Ellen Stanton had four children – Patrick, Arthur, Gertrude and Geraldine.
Their daughter Geraldine married Ambrose Finnegan, and their daughter Jean was born in 1917. She married Joseph Robinette Biden Senior and had four children – Valerie, Francis, James and Joe Junior, who went on to be elected to the White House.
The president’s other Irish greatgreat-grandfather was Owen Finnegan, born on the opposite side of the country in the ‘Wee County’.
Owen married Jean Boyle in 1839 and the couple had four children – one of whom was the president’s great-grandfather James Finnegan. It is this connection that makes Mr Biden a distant cousin of Rob Kearney.
The Finnegan family emigrated to America and settled in Seneca, New York. After his parents died, James moved with his wife Catherine to Pennsylvania. They had six children and their son, Ambrose, married Geraldine Blewitt, Mr Biden’s grandmother.