Canadian PM Carney visits grandparents’ Irish village
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met distant cousins in his grandparents’ village in western Ireland during a visit to celebrate his Irish roots.
Grandfathers Robert Carney and Nora Moran immigrated to Canada in 1925 and were married in Vancouver; here Robert found employment with the Canadian Pacific Railway Police and later joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Carney’s father was born in 1933 and would later become a professor at the University of Alberta.
“I have a lot more cousins than I thought,” Carney told reporters after attending mass at the Catholic church in the village of Aughagower, where his grandparents were born.
Carney also visited the family cemetery and planted trees.
Carney, who visited Ireland on Saturday en route to the G7 meeting in France, said countries like Canada and Ireland needed to join “a dense network of connections…ad hoc coalitions” to survive and thrive in a world where the post-Cold War rules-based order is collapsing.
“Ireland and Canada are experiencing a global rupture, not a quiet transition,” he told students at Trinity College Dublin.
“I would argue that in the midst of this change, in the midst of this disruption, Canada, Ireland and Europe can be a very important, powerful and purposeful force for good,” he said.
Ireland’s Prime Minister, Micheal Martin, who took over the six-month presidency of the European Council on July 1, told reporters that his government would work to “embodied an improved European Union-Canada relationship.”
