Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to County Mayo on the second day of his visit to the Republic of Ireland on Sunday, meeting cousins and visiting the ancestral village his grandparents left a century ago.
Carney, who spent Saturday in Dublin with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, arrived in the village of Aughagower where his grandparents Robert and Nora Moran lived before emigrating to Canada in 1925. The couple were tenant farmers on the estate of Lord Sligo, according to local records, and left during a period of mass emigration that saw more than one million people sail from the island of Ireland.
Carney has said he is proud of his family heritage and described his Irish ancestry as a “big part of who I am,” according to remarks reported by Irish broadcaster RTÉ.
Irish President Catherine Connolly met Carney at Westport House on Sunday morning. During his Mayo visit, Carney and his wife Diana Fox Carney attended Mass at the parish church and visited a graveyard where some of his relatives are buried.
Speaking after Mass, Carney said: “It’s fantastic to be back, I’ve been here twice, but no one noticed the last few times I came, so it’s a great thrill.” He planted an Irish oak tree in the cemetery, joking that he had a previous “career as a gardener.”
Carney met more than 20 of his cousins, including Pat Carney and Maureen O’Malley, first cousins of his father and among his closest Irish relatives. Maureen O’Malley’s daughter, Rosaleen Heraty, told RTÉ about the family connection, saying: “Mam and Pat’s father was John Carney and he was the brother of Robert Carney, who is Mark Carney’s grandfather. Imagine, his grandson is the prime minister of Canada.”
Heraty noted an “uncanny likeness” between Carney and his grandfather Robert, adding: “I noticed it when I spotted him on the telly when he was Governor of the Bank of England. I saw the name Carney and saw the face and said it to Mam. She hardly missed a beat and just said ‘ah yeah, we haven’t seen them for years.’”
The Carney and Moran families were tenant farmers in the townlands of Ayle and Mace North, respectively, both in the parish of Aughagower. The Carney homestead was a thatched cottage with two windows in the front where nine people lived in two rooms, with a third room added later, according to the source material.
On Sunday night, Carney attended a reception in Westport where he was presented with a civic scroll by Mayo County Council. He was also given a commemorative history of the Carneys written by local Westport historian Harry Hughes alongside fellow researchers James Kelly and Micheál Casey.
Speaking to RTÉ earlier, Carney said he was encouraged by progress toward a potential “more durable ceasefire” between the US and Iran. He said the question of how to “reinforce” the ceasefire would be “topic number one” for Monday’s G7 Summit in France, which he is expected to attend.