In January 2020, Joe Biden, then seeking the Democratic nomination for the US presidency, dismissed a request from BBC correspondent Nick Bryant in Iowa for a “quick word for the BBC”. Biden replied, “The BBC? I’m Irish”, and walked off. Such an exchange is unlikely to happen again. As Biden’s presidency ends, it also represents the close of an era for a particular type of Irish-American political narrative and attitude given demographic, cultural and generational changes.
While in Washington this week, Taoiseach Simon Harris was keen to talk up a century of Irish-American relations and a bright future for them, but the days of an American president touching the pulses of Irish ancestral memory are over.
For reasons of tradition, Irish visits to the White House may continue in some form, but they are unlikely to carry the same emotional heft or diplomatic significance of yesteryear. Having Ireland “written on my soul” as Biden claimed in 2016, is hardly going to apply to future US presidents. In March 2023, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told his White House audience: “As we know, every American president is a little bit Irish on St Patrick’s Day ... but some are more Irish than others.”
That Biden Irishness belongs to the past, honed as it was by a traditional, family and community-centred Irish-American Catholicism in Pennsylvania in the 1940s – “Irish Catholics like me, who grew up in Scranton” as Biden put it during his earliest sparring with Donald Trump.
The scale of the historic Irish exodus to America was extraordinary. Of the ten million who emigrated from Ireland from the early 1600s to contemporary times, more than six million settled in the US. The contribution of these emigrants, both Protestant and Catholic, to the “building of America” has been well documented. The status of the Irish-American connection mattered hugely to both the Irish revolutionary decade and the fledgling Irish Free State a century ago. As Joseph P Walshe, acting secretary to the Department of External Affairs, put it then, “America is the only country with which our relations are entirely free and independent from any outside control”.
There is little doubting the significance of the relationship over the century since due to the social, cultural and economic influence of the Irish-American diaspora, the boost that John F Kennedy’s election represented in 1960, the later interventions relating to the Troubles and the peace process, and the scale of economic investment. But there have always been limits and tensions, including the preoccupation of the US with its “special relationship” with the UK, fury in Washington at Ireland’s neutrality during the second World War, and anger in Ireland at different stages due to American foreign policy aggression.
Whether Harris or Trump wins the presidency in November, Ireland will not be much of a priority. There has often been comment on Ireland’s “soft power” in its diplomatic reach and its capacity to build bridges, but as the fraught issues of Brexit and Northern Ireland fade, US-Irish relations may well come to be marked by a sense of Irish peripherality.
An “America first” stance regarding investment, taxation and migration are central now to debate in the US, and when it comes to US-EU relations, issues of defence, security and energy raise uncomfortable questions about Irish foreign policy and our dependence and deference. Alongside those issues, the American politics of belonging highlights a shifting ground regarding ethnic identity. One of the preferred narratives of Biden – that his Irishness especially equipped him with the capacity to overcome obstacles and develop an empathy for the plight of immigrants – carries less weight, especially given that America is now so toxically divided.
The number of Americans who claim Irish descent is estimated to have declined by a quarter in 40 years. It is still over 30 million, and Irish-Americans were specifically targeted by Biden’s campaign in crucial states in 2020, including Pennsylvania, and that may have made a difference. Yet scholars of Irish-America have highlighted, in the words of Liam Kennedy, that the “conservative Irish attach themselves to a history of oppression in Ireland and ancestral struggle in the US, but rarely with a sense that this should entail empathy for the oppressed of the present”.
Many Irish-American families have experienced a drift from Democratic to Republican affiliations across the generations. Diane Negra has argued that Irishness in the US draws on a history of racial othering that colours it as an “enriched whiteness”. White Catholic America supported Donald Trump in large numbers in 2016 and 2020 and will do so again. There are many Irish-US linkages beyond the White House; tourism, business and all the informal and formal social, cultural and political bonds will retain some relevance, but we are likely to have seen the last occupant of the White House who will wear Irishness so proudly.