Joe Biden was addressing the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Chicago last May, explaining how “middle-class folks” just want to provide for their families, when he returned to his favorite word.
“As my grandfather would say, ‘Maybe it’s the Irish of it.’ The word ‘dignity.’ The simple dignity,” the president said.
Biden has long made his Irish Catholic heritage central to his political identity, reciting Irish sayings, poems, humor and tales of his ancestors with regularity in an appeal, above all, to the common man.
Next week, Biden will make his first presidential trip to Ireland for a four-day swing, stopping first in Belfast to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended civil war in Northern Ireland, before revisiting where his ancestors lived in Ireland.
Yet the trip is also a way for Biden to connect with voters at home, allowing him to reintroduce his Irish-American roots – and lean into his economic message of “dignity” – as he works to win back working-class voters who have fled the Democratic Party.
“Joe Biden, in many respects, is a much more typical Irish American than Jack Kennedy,” said Brendan O’Leary, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, contrasting Biden’s humble upbringing to the enormous family wealth of the nation’s other Irish Catholic president. “Literally, an ordinary Joe.”
From famine-ravaged Ireland to Scranton, Pa.
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The Blewitts and Finnegans: Biden draws most of his Irish heritage from his mother Catherine “Jean” Finnegan’s side of the family, with lineage tracing back to the Blewitts in County Mayo and Finnegans from County Louth, Ireland. Biden will visit both counties during his trip.
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‘Most Irish of all presidents’: Ten of Biden’s 16 great-great grandparents are from Ireland. “He really probably is the most Irish of all the presidents,” said Fiona Fitzsimons, a genealogist from Dublin and director of the Irish Family History Centre, who traced Biden’s genealogy in 2016 at the then-vice president’s behalf.
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What did Biden’s ancestors do? Biden’s Irish ancestors were a diverse bunch: engineers and surveyors, overseers in charge of building roads, a coast guard, a stone mason and tenant farmers.
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Famine Irish: Fitzsimons said each of Biden’s Irish-American ancestors were “famine Irish.” They came to the U.S. between 1848 and 1855 to escape the Irish Potato Famine that ravaged the country, settling mostly in Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pa. to work in mining.
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Christmas Day 1850: Patrick Blewitt, one of Biden’s great-great grandfathers, sailed to the U.S. in 1850 and spotted the mining opportunities in Scranton. He returned to Ireland and gathered the rest of the Blewitt family. They left together for the U.S. on Christmas Day of 1850.
Irish values feed working-class pitch
Biden uses his Irish-American identity to cast himself as a political fighter and champion the hard-working American – the little guy fighting the odds – who deserves a chance even if lacking financial resources.
It’s Biden’s way of speaking the language of a factory worker even though he’s a millionaire.
“Their work has borne centuries of fruit,” Biden said, recognizing Irish immigrants at a White House St. Patrick’s Day Celebration last month. “And their values have been passed down, generation to generation, around countless Irish American dinner tables just like the one I grew up in.”
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Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Biden is leaning into those values to promote his economic agenda – one he says is aimed at “places and people that have been forgotten.”
The Biden administration is leveraging the power of the federal government to expand U.S. manufacturing of computer microchips and electric vehicles. Biden talks about turning depleted factory towns in the Midwest into manufacturing hotbeds of a new green economy. It’s an appeal to non-college educated voters, particularly white voters, who have turned Republican during the raging culture wars of the past decade.
“Every worker deserves to be treated with dignity,” Biden said Tuesdady in Fridley, Minnesota, speaking inside a facility that builds low- and zero- carbon engines for trucks.
How the image of the Irish-American politician was born
Timothy Meagher, retired associate professor at Catholic University, said the image of an Irish politician as the common man was “cultivated over time” as Irish-Americans embraced their working-class stature and made elitism the enemy.
Early Irish immigrants were depicted in American literature as dumb and bumbling, stereotypes that author Hugh Henry Brackenridge played off in his 1792 political satire “Modern Chivalry.” In the book, an Irish servant named Teague uses his plain-speaking appeal to become an American hero with ambitions to run for Congress.
“Breckenridge thought this was an indictment of the Irish, but in a way, in a democratic society, that’s a useful way to be understood,” Meagher said. “That image as working-class people pushes to a certain degree up to the present, even though it’s long been true that (the Irish are) no longer mostly blue-collar workers.”
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Biden’s political brand contains two central themes to Irish-American politics, according to Meagher: principles of egalitarianism and “communal solidarity” – the idea that “we’re all in this together.”
“My mother’s creed is the American creed,” Biden said in his 2008 Democratic National Convention speech accepting the vice presidential nomination. “No one is better than you. Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you.”
Takeaways: Biden’s $6.9 trillion budget proposal: Tax the rich. Cut the deficit. Take on the GOP.
Biden uses Irish heritage for humor and empathy
Biden reminds his audience of his Irish roots in almost any situation. He uses it to empathize with Black Americans seeking racial justice, identify with plights of immigrants and address conflicts in other countries.
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“My family is Irish American,” Biden said in Jerusalem last year, “and we have a long history of – not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish-Catholics over the years, for 400 years.”
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“Look, all of you know all of us in the United States are immigrants. And mine go all the way back to the Irish famine,” Biden said in January in Mexico City, standing alongside Mexican President Lopez Obrador as he discussed ways to tame migration at the southern border.
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Biden, commemorating this year’s Martin Luther King Day, said “I get accused of being an inveterate optimist. I call that the ‘Irish of it,'” Biden said, drawing laughter. “We’re never on top, always stepped on. But we are optimistic, like Dr. King was optimistic.”
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Amid a stalemate last year on his social-spending agenda because of opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., Biden dismissed holding animosity, saying: “Some people think maybe I’m not Irish because I don’t hold a grudge.”
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When Biden introduced Ketanji Brown Jackson last year as his historic pick as the first Black female Supreme Court justice, the president told her, “Judge, you are the very definition of what we Irish refer to as dignity. You have enormous dignity.”
More: With 2024 looming, how long can President Biden stay silent on Trump’s indictment?
‘Unmistakably a son of Ireland’
Ireland prime minister, or Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, visiting the White House last month, joked that all U.S. presidents are “a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,” but Biden is “unmistakably a son of Ireland.”
“President Biden, in your life story we see reflected the story of Ireland,” he said.
Biden last visited Ireland in 2017 after taking an ancestral trip the year before. His son, Beau Biden – who died of brain cancer in 2015 – had talked about taking the family to Ireland to see first-hand the places and people described by Joe Biden’s late mother.
“It was almost a way of leave-taking, of his son, but also of his mother,” said Fitzsimons, one of the genealogists who met the Biden family in Ireland in June 2016. Biden, according to Fitzsimons, came equipped with family stories written down over the years.
“We verified those stories,” she said.
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Biden, in his memoir, “Promise me, Dad,” recounted something former Democratic New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan told him. “To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.”
But hardship isn’t even half the “whole story of Irishness,” he continued, recalling the optimism his grandfather Finnegan often passed on: “Keep the faith, Joey. Remember the best drop of blood in you is Irish.”
Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @Joeygarrison.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden’s Ireland trip: How his heritage shapes his political identity
