Biden wraps up ‘homecoming’ Irish tour with church visit, rally

By Graham Fahy and Steve Holland

BALLINA, Ireland (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden maintained a mood of convivial nostalgia on Friday, the final day of his tour to Ireland, visiting a Catholic shrine ahead of rally in the West of Ireland hometown of his great-great-great-grandfather.

The tour, a celebration of his close links to his ancestral homeland, has been filled with photo-ops with distant cousins, long, loquacious speeches, enthusiastic flag-waving crowds and the occasional gaffe ahead of a planned 2024 re-election bid.

Back home some are keeping an eye for signs of how well the 80-year-old, who acknowledged on Thursday that he was at the end of his career, may perform on the campaign trail. He is already the oldest serving U.S. president.

“Nobody works the room like Joe Biden. It doesn’t matter what age he is, he’s the man of the moment.” said John O’Dowd, owner of O’Dowds American Bar in the western town of Ballina, where the president will speak later on Friday.

Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheál Martin, who spent Wednesday afternoon with Biden greeting crowds in County Louth in the northeast, said he detected no waning in Biden’s appetite for meeting the people. “He’s a natural politician,” Martin told state broadcaster RTE.

Biden started his tour on Wednesday in Belfast by urging political leaders there to restore their power-sharing government. On Thursday, he became the fourth U.S. president to address the Irish parliament and attended a state banquet at Dublin Castle.

Everywhere he has gone, Biden has spoken of his love for Ireland and sense of Irishness, regaling stories his grandparents and parents told him in between the odd misstep.

Biden mixed up New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team with the Black and Tans, an early 1900s British military unit reviled in Ireland, while making a televised address to relatives in a County Louth pub.

The White House later corrected the error.

“HOMECOMING”

After leaving Dublin, Biden, a devout Catholic, followed in the footsteps of two popes in visiting the shrine at Knock, in western Ireland, where he was due to be presented with a stone from the gable wall of the Church where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared in 1879.

He will later travel to Ballina, the home town of his great-great-great-grandfather Edward Blewitt, who emigrated to the United States with his wife and their eight children in 1851.

Biden will address a crowd in front of St Muredach’s Cathedral, whose construction Blewitt was involved with in the 1820s. Blewitt assisted decades later in the planning of the city of Scranton, Biden’s hometown that is twinned with Ballina.

“It is a homecoming for him,” said Joe Blewitt, a distant cousin of Biden’s. “He’s so proud of his roots.”

Day-to-day politics in Ireland have taken a backseat with every step of the trip covered live on television, on furiously updated news website blogs and mobile phone push notifications which pinged as the president arrived in a new location.

There has been little in the way of policy discussion, just a short meeting with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

But for Ireland the longest ever visit by a U.S. leader further cements close economic ties. U.S. multinationals including Google (NASDAQ:), Pfizer (NYSE:) and Apple (NASDAQ:) are among Ireland’s largest employers.

Ahead of his return to Ballina – where Biden visited in 2016 and 2017 – the was town decorated with U.S. flags, bunting and cardboard cutouts of the president peering out of windows. A mural of Biden overlooked the local school.

“This is massive for the town,” said pub owner Michael Carr, 52, who compared the impact on future tourism to that of actor John Wayne’s visit to the fellow County Mayo town of Cong in 1951 to shoot The Quiet Man.

“This is going to last for 40 years.”

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