DERRY JOURNAL Editorial: Joe Biden’s deep-seated Irishness is a major asset for the entire island

Watching him in Belfast, Carlingford, Dundalk, Dublin and Ballina, you would have been forgiven for thinking the US President was an 'ordinary Joe' on his holidays.

"Tá mé seo abhaile [sic] - I am at home," he told the Oireachtas and meant it. He quoted from Heaney's 'The Cure at Troy' - his ‘favourite poem’. It is a pity he didn’t visit the Bellaghy poet’s childhood stomping ground of Derry.

His sojourn in the six counties was curtailed due to the continuing, needless suspension of Stormont, thanks to hard-line unionism's quixotic fixation with the Irish Sea.

Mr. Biden’s deep-seated sense of Irishness is a positive for the whole of this island. Irish ‘soft power’ outweighs our nation’s size and population and should be celebrated.

This doesn’t preclude criticism of the US when necessary, of its wars, of its embargoes, of its treatment of Latin American migrants on its southern border, for example.

Yet 34m people in the US are Irish. A majority of these Irish – often unacknowledged – self-identify as Protestant.

The Irish-American relationship can surely be embraced by all of our people.

As an aside, the unhinged reaction to Mr. Biden’s visit from some quarters was interesting.

His pledge that the US will be Ireland’s ‘closest partner, your most dependable partner and your most enthusiastic supporter at every step of the way’ may have touched a nerve in a post-Brexit – post-‘special relationship?’ - Britain cut adrift, alienated from the EU and desperate for a US trade deal.

US Ambassador Claire Cronin, a key figure in Joe Biden visit, is a McLaughlin from Inishowen