Family memory across the Atlantic.
AERO’s 2023 mural connected an Irish emigration story with Joe Biden’s visit to Dundalk on 12 April that year. EPSO’s account follows the Finnegan family’s nineteenth-century departure from County Louth and the memory of Ireland passed between generations.
The visit itself is preserved in a published United States presidential transcript of remarks at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. Alongside the festival’s account, that contemporary record helps place the mural in its particular moment. The artwork was replaced in 2024; its photographs preserve this chapter in the town’s public life.
The full story of The Emigration Story IN PUBLISHED WORDS / 12 April 2023Remarks at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk, IrelandJoe Biden · Daily Compilation of Presidential DocumentsAn official contemporary speech record, provided as historical context for the mural’s subject.
Learn moreLearn more about the subject 2
- Remarks at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk U.S. Government Publishing Office · 12 April 2023
- Emigration Story: festival account EPSO
Historical context and editorial interpretation are distinguished above. Sources researched October 2026.
This artwork is preserved in photographs. It is part of the festival’s history and is no longer available as a walking-trail stop.
The story behind the wall.
‘‘Coming here, it feels like coming home’’ President Joe Biden
President Biden visited Dundalk on Wednesday 12th of April 2023. It was a great honour for the 46th president of the Unites States of America to visit our town.
And not only that, but he is actually the second US President to come here, with the 42nd President, Bill Clinton, also having visited Dundalk back on December 12th 2000!
This visit catapulted Dundalk, and County Louth, onto the world stage like never before, showcasing the town and the genuinely warm & cheerful welcoming reception Joe Biden received here on global news networks and to the diaspora across America and the world!
Joe Biden’s ancestral home is only a short distance from Dundalk, 20 kilometres north along the coast. In its origins his ancestors story begins like tens of thousands of others… poverty, hardship, trying to scrape a living and feed his family in famine stricken land, and even collecting seaweed along the shore at Templeton beach and selling it to farmers as fertilizer for their land.
President Biden’s Irish ancestry tells a fascinating story of immigration and determination, a man desperately looking for a better life for his wife and children in ‘The New World’
His great, great grandfather, Owen Finnegan, immigrated from Ireland in 1849, boarding a ship bound for New York! He was a hard worker, and also skilled as a shoemaker, and worked round the clock to gain employment and establish a stable life so that his family could join him in New York.
In 1850 the rest of his family set sail from Ireland, and Owen was reunited with his wife and children, one of whom James Finnegan, who would become Joe Biden’s great-grandfather!
Little did any of them know, or could even have imagined, that in only a few short generations, a future President of America would come from their bloodline!
The thing with President Biden is that he is immensely proud of his County Louth heritage. He is sincere, and genuine in his admiration for the sacrifice his ancestors, and a million like them, made – leaving family and friends behind, and taking a leap of faith into the unknown in the hope of a better life for future generations of their families. Joe Biden is the ultimate example of this aspiration!
Even with the passage of time since his great-grandfather James Finnegan emigrated to America, Joe Biden feels very passionately about his personal connection to County Louth, his roots, run so deep.
The old Irish stories of the ‘home country’ were told down through the generations, and kept alive. Joe Biden was very close to his grandfather and grandmother Finnegan. He has in turn has kept the spirit of County Louth and Ireland alive within his own family and this continues down the generations with his son Hunter naming his daughter, Finnegan Biden.
Just before Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland as Vice President in 2016 he penned a letter to Ancestry.com and wrote “Over the course of my life, I’ve been to a lot of places. I’ve travelled all around the world – more than a million miles on Air Force Two alone. I’ve been honoured to have held a lot of titles. But I have always been and will always be the son of Kitty Finnegan. The grandson of Geraldine Finnegan from St. Paul’s Parish in Scranton; a proud descendant of the Finnegans of Ireland’s County Louth.”
This is a story of rags to riches, poverty to politics, shoemakers to policy makers – this is an Irish emigration story.
Meet AERO.
View artist profile & all their workBorn in Rennes in 1981, lives in the clouds.
A self-taught painter from the French graffiti of the 1990s, passionate about human exchanges and life in natural territory; it is in all of his travels that AERO draws inspiration and builds his artistic identity.
With his head in the clouds but his feet on the ground, he started graffiti in 1997 in Rennes.
Elusive, sliding like a draught in the streets of his hometown, he did not imagine that he would sow his paintings all over the world. However, in 2002, her job as a chef led her to
start an initiatory journey that will last 15 years. From Europe to the Indian Ocean, from New Zealand to Canada, from South America to the Pacific Ocean, he is full of eyes, ears and taste buds.
He took advantage of these years of cultural enrichment to perfect the mastery of his favorite tool: the spraycan.
Back in Europe, he devotes himself to his art and multiplies street paintings, exhibiting in the open air his poetic compositions combining photo-realistic portrait and environmental approach. At the same time, he conceived and developed an even more eloquent pictorial style on these canvases that he baptized "Insprayssionism".
AERO takes advantage of the open environment to attract the attention of the passerby or the curious thus provoking emotions, reactions and reflections, and participates in giving meaning to the public space.
Replaced in 2024 - View current mural
