Nearly six years ago, I attended the first ever meeting of the Global Irish parliamentary diaspora, a gathering in Dublin of elected officials from national assemblies all around the world, each with Irish ancestry in common, and for most of us sharing the Catholic faith. My father was born in Dublin and as a child moved to England with his family in the 1950s. During this gathering, I was asked by Mark Daly, a member of the Irish Senate, whether I was related to the former revolutionary leader Michael Collins. I gave my usual answer that I was not aware of any direct connection. ‘Let me stop you right there,’ Mark replied with a laugh. ‘The correct answer is to say that you are distant cousins.’

Given that around one in ten citizens of the USA identify as Irish Americans, it’s not surprising that many Presidential candidates find that long lost link to Ireland. Even Barack Obama discovered a great-great-great-grandfather from Moneygall in County Offaly and quipped in a 2011 visit to Ireland that he’d ‘come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.’ However, for the Irish American Catholic Joe Biden, his ties to the old country are bound tighter. While he was not with us for that gathering in Dublin, he more than qualified through the direct links of his Irish American maternal grandparents, Ambrose Finnegan and Geraldine Blewitt. In 1850 Patrick Blewitt …