By Lisa Van Dusen

June 10, 2026

The Irish political pilgrimage — or world-leader “roots tour” as an adaptation of the ancestral tourism that fuels so much Blarney-Stone kissing — is a classic of personal diplomacy pioneered by President John F. Kennedy.

“If this nation had achieved its present political and economic stature a century or so ago,” Kennedy said in his speech to the Oireachtas Éireann, or Irish parliament in June 1963, “my great-grandfather might never have left New Ross, and I might, if fortunate, be sitting down there with you.”

Kennedy’s visit also included the first ancestral-village walkabout, in New Ross-adjacent Dunganstown, County Wexford, where his last living relative, Mary Ryan, hosted an outdoor village tea party replete with more journalists and Kennedys than locals.

When Brian Mulroney — the most genetically and temperamentally Irish Canadian statesman since Thomas D’Arcy McGee — went to Ireland in July 1991, he visited both his own ancestral village in County Carlow, and D’Arcy McGee’s in County Louth.

In the ensuing decades, there have been optics tweaks to the Irish political pilgrimage. By the time Barack Obama visited Moneygall, home of his great-great-great grandfather Falmouth Kearney, in 2011, the tea had been replaced by a ceremonial pint of Guinness at the local pub. He was re-christened “O’Bama” throughout.

Perhaps the most elaborately staged Irish political pilgrimage ever was President Joe Biden’s in April 2023, which marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement with a stop in Belfast first, before a massive rally and evening speech at Saint Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina, County Mayo. It was more like a belated, Irish Catholic inauguration than a homecoming.

But Prime Minister Mark Carney, who will arrive in Dublin on Saturday for a two-day stop on his way to the G7 Evian next week, is the only Canadian prime minister or G7 leader, for that matter, to have held an Irish passport (renounced when he became prime minister), thanks to his more recent Irish antecedents, also from County Mayo.

Carney’s paternal grandfather, Robert Carney, hailed from Aughagower, and his grandmother, Nora Morann, from nearby Mace.

The Irish Times scene-setter on the trip includes the following, priceless quote from a Carney relative: “So, I rang my mother and I said: ‘Mam, there’s a guy on the telly and he looks awful like Gramps Carney,’ and my mother said: ‘Oh! Yeah, that would be your second cousin’.”

At a time when Canada faces political threats internal and external, Ireland has some experience in that regard.

The most frequently cited anecdote about Carney’s Irish roots involves his office at the imposing Bank of England headquarters, where he hung a small but prominently displayed map of County Mayo.

As a political statement in the Governor’s Parlours of the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”, it was a little more potent than a map of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories might’ve been.

Carney told the story himself on St. Patrick’s Day at the Irish Embassy in Ottawa, where he also attended a meeting of Irish business leaders in May. That asymmetrical diplomatic footprint of the Irish mission may have as much to do with the arrival of veteran tourism, strategic communications (for the Department of the Taoiseach) and marketing guru John Concannon as Irish ambassador in 2024 as with Carney’s Irish background.

With bilateral trade nearly doubling since 2020, reaching $14 billion in 2025 — $6 billion of that in merchandise trade — the Canada-Ireland relationship was already becoming an example of trade diversification before trade diversification became an urgent imperative in 2025 amid Donald Trump’s tariff war.

It is also an example of Carney’s embrace of variable geometry, made doctrine at Davos in January and defined as coalitions of middle countries based on values and interests.

Canada and Ireland are both liberal democracies that respect multilateral institutions, the rule of law, and human rights. Two officially bilingual countries that share English, both have forged distinct identities and defended their sovereignty in the shadow of formidable imperial powers.

Right now, Canada’s growing closeness with the European Union, of which Ireland remains a steadfast post-Brexit member, is among those shared values and interests.

“In July, Ireland will take on the rotating presidency of the EU,” Campbell Clark wrote in his Globe and Mail advance piece this week. “When Mr. Carney meets Micheal Martin, the country’s leader, or Taoiseach, on Saturday, the talk will be of taking more steps to wire Canada closer to Europe.”

And, at a time when Canada faces political threats internal and external, Ireland has some experience in that regard.

“This is a time when Canada has been forced to get its elbows up, and the Irish know something about fighting,” Belfast-based Policy Contributing Writer Ben Collins wrote in 2025. “As stable, open economies and transatlantic cousins, we have much to gain by working together.”

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.