Joe Blewitt is just about the busiest man in Ballina. His phone rings constantly with calls from locals and the world's media as he prepares to welcome a relative — U.S. President Joe Biden.
Biden is scheduled to travel to Ireland next week, with a stop in Ballina, the town from which one of his great-great grandfathers left for the United States in 1850. Blewitt, a distant cousin who first met Biden when he came to town as vice president in 2016, said the U.S. leader pledged to return once he'd won the presidency.
“He’s a people person. He loves meeting the Irish people,” said Blewitt, who shares Biden’s high forehead — he says people joke that he looks like the president “from the mouth up.”Buildings are getting a new coat of paint and American flags are being hung from shopfronts in Ballina, a bustling agricultural town of about 10,000 at the mouth of the River Moy in western Ireland that proclaims itself the nation's “salmon capital.
The White House says Biden will visit Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday and Wednesday to mark 25 years since the Good Friday peace accord, before heading south to the Republic of Ireland, where he will address the Dublin parliament. In Ballina, he’s due to deliver a speech Friday in front of the 19th-century cathedral, which local lore says was built partly using bricks supplied by his great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, a brickmaker and civil engineer.
“There’s a great sense of euphoria around the place. Everyone is asking ‘What’s happening, when’s he coming, where’s he going?’” said Andrea McKevitt, a local politician and distant Biden relative. “My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way,” he joked to a crowd in Dublin.
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