US President-Elect Joe Biden's pride in his Irish roots is as much a part of his political brand as his Scranton birthplace but now that Irish American heritage is set to become a headache for a British Government which has been a shameless cheerleader for President Trump.

Few Irish Americans were surprised at Joe Biden's celebrated comments to Britain's national broadcaster, "BBC, I'm Irish" for Ireland is embedded in his DNA - right down to his Secret Service codename, 'Celtic'. Indeed, there's also a Mongolian horse out there which he named Celtic. 

But for Boris and co, that quip might just be the least of their worries as they wake up to the reality that they will soon be dealing with a US President whose love of Ireland is matched only by one of his predecessors: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Like JFK, he is deeply committed to his Catholic faith, a cornerstone of the identity of the Great Hunger Irish who helped build America. 

Joe Biden already fired a shot across the British bows in September when he warned  the Tories not to mess with the Good Friday Agreement as they backtracked on the EU exit agreement. 

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit," he Tweeted as Britain's Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb was doing the rounds on Capitol Hill. “Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

Not much room there for misunderstanding, despite Rabb's Orwellian claim today that he was only in the American capital to appeal for an ally to help him shore up the Good Friday Agreement against the depredations of those nasty Europeans. 

It's get worse for the Little Englanders who lauded Trump's nativism for Kamala Harris is also proud of her own Irish heritage. 

Her Jamaican great-grandmother "Miss Iris" was born Orah Allen. Patrick Finegan was the name of her first husband. The Boston genealogist Jim McNiff believes that Patrick A. Finegan, who married Orah Allen, aka Miss Iris, in 1908, was the mixed-race son of a man called Patrick Finegan from Ireland. (You can read the full article by Peter McDermott of the Irish Echo here.)

A Jesuit priest Fr Patrick Mulry referred to the family in a missionary dispatch back to New York from Jamaica in 1906. “Mrs. Finnegan, one of the congregation, looked after the priest, and eggs and milk were supplied with true Finnegan generosity,” he wrote. “She is the widow of Patrick Finnegan, who with her cooperation started an Irish colony in this part of the world."

Could the Presidential pair be related? Joe Biden is the great-grandson of Owen Finegan, who left behind his father John Finegan in County Louth in the 19th Century. 

SCRANTON ROOTS

Joe Biden's mother Catherine Eugenia Finnegan was born into a middle-class Irish-American family in Scranton, Pennsylvania. in 1917. Her father, Ambrose Finnegan was a college quarterback at Santa Clara who returned to Scranton without graduating following the San Francisco Earthquake. He married Geraldine Blewitt. Her father was Edward Blewitt who served as the city engineer and later a state senator. Ambrose and Geraldine had five children. Finnegan, who worked in newspapers, moved his family to Green Ridge. It was, according to author Richard Ben Cramer, “a good neighbourhood, not easy for an Irishman to buy there, not back then.” 

On being inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame in 2011, he remembered his aunt Gertie joking about his father, "Joey, it's not his fault he's English!". In the same address he noted that his heritage was linked to the Irish Catholic exodus post-Famine. However, he recalled, his "grandfather Finnegan" approved of his belief that "Wolfe Tone was one of the most noble figures in Irish history even though he was a Protestant". He also joked that his older relatives all told of how they fought in the IRA against the Black and Tans even though "they weren't even in Ireland". 

He recounted how his great-grandfather Blewitt was the first Catholic Senator in Philadelphia in the early 1900s and had been accused of being a Molly Maguire. "He denied it, we all hoped it were true," he added. 

"PRESIDENTIAL-MATERIAL"

He also has connections in Co Mayo where in Ballina, townspeople gathered in the market square last night to celebrate his victory. Joe Blewett, Biden's third cousin, joined the celebrations and told the New York Times that the President-elect was "presidential material". Joe Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward Blewitt was born in Ballina and emigrated to Scranton just after An Gorta Mór of 1845 to 1849.

A longstanding supporter of the peace process, Joe Biden, has long called out Britain's refusal to deliver on the long-standing pledge to set up an independent international inquiry into the 1989 murder of human right lawyer Pat Finucane. Both Obama and Biden were members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which in 2007 rejected any attempt to establish an inquiry “under the limited authority” of the British government’s Inquiries Act of 2005.

On the issue of immigration, President-Elect Joe Biden and the current incumbent of the White House are polar opposites. Joe Biden has called for the 50,000 undocumented Irish in the US to be brought "out of the shadows" — along with 11 million other undocumented immigrants who should be able "to earn" a path to citizenship. 

In his heart and his head, the President-Elect is well-disposed to Ireland and the Irish. As an African-American and an Indian-American, Kamala Harris will be equally empathetic to the Irish cause. Indeed, there's only one politician in these islands who might be more worried than Boris Johnson about the pair's instinctive support for a shared, peaceful and united Ireland: Micheál Martin.

You can also read our report here of then Senator Joe Biden's opposition to British efforts in the eighties to change the US extradition treaty with the UK to facilitate the handing over of IRA jail escapee Joe Doherty.