WESTPORT, Ireland — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney felt the embrace of an entire Irish county Sunday as he visited his ancestral homeland — and celebrated Catholic Mass and family ties alongside dozens of cousins he’d never met before.
His trip to County Mayo on the second day of his first official visit to Ireland included morning discussions behind closed doors with Ireland’s head of state, President Catherine Connolly, at Westport House, a stunning Georgian mansion on the edge of town.
But this exceptionally sunny day belonged to the Carney clan. They had spent weeks with their neighbors planting trees, sprucing up floral displays, whitewashing walls and decking shops and streets with Canadian flags and bunting in Westport, a town renowned both as one of Ireland’s tidiest and as the global home of Botox.
An emotional high point came in the nearby crossroads village of Aghagower, where Carney’s paternal grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, grew up on adjoining farms on the lands of Lord Sligo before emigrating together to Canada in 1925.
Waiting to meet Carney outside St. Patrick’s Church in Aghagower were dozens of cousins and hundreds of people from the surrounding community, including at least one impressively articulate local boy, as well as Ireland’s prime minister, Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
Carney tried to shake everyone’s hands, all the while noting that Mass was supposed to start at 11:30 a.m.
“I don’t want to hold up the service,” he said at one point before stopping to take a picture with 17-month-old Malachy Morgan, who had arrived with his Irish-Canadian mother donning a Montreal Canadiens jersey and nibbling on a toy hockey stick. Carney told them, in French, how pleased he was to see the jersey, “particularly in the west of Ireland.”
Inside the church where his grandparents were baptized, Carney sat in the front pew beside his nearest relatives living in Ireland, Pat Carney and Maureen O’Malley, who are first cousins of his late father, Robert Jr.
After Mass, Carney popped into Aghagower’s only shop, which does triple duty as the village’s post office and pub, and toured a cemetery beside the church bearing a 10th-century round tower and more than a few headstones with the Carney name.
Along the way, he heard how the village is on the pilgrim path taken by St. Patrick in the fifth century to Croagh Patrick, the mountain that towers over Westport. The parish priest, Father Tod Nolan, pointed out nearby sites where Ireland’s patron saint reputedly slept and baptized locals on the way to spending 40 days and nights atop the mountain.
As Carney negotiated a tide of well-wishers, many remarked that he looked from photographs to be the spitting image of “Gramps Carney” — a.k.a. his grandfather Robert.
“The genes are strong. They run deep,” he told them.
Later, Carney was due to be feted at a civic reception in Westport’s theater in a ceremony featuring the presentation of a 28-page booklet documenting his Aghagower roots — and the reading of a commemorative poem honoring Carney as a voice of sanity in a loony world.
“As democracies are subjected to coercion we look to Canada as we’ve done before, and with pride to our cherished native son,” the work by local poet Ger Reidy read, “to convene a coalition of the anti-war … to defend civilized values despite the struggle, so we can all resume living our sacred ordinary lives.”