The story.
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.
‘‘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.
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