Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Sunday met distant cousins in his grandparents’ home village in the west of Ireland on a visit to celebrate his Irish roots while urging closer cooperation in the wake of a global geopolitical “rupture”.
Grandfather Robert Carney and Nora Moran emigrated to Canada in 1925 and married in Vancouver, where Robert got a job in 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 realised,” Carney quipped to reporters after attending mass in the Catholic church in Aughagower village, where his grandparents were born. Carney also visited the family grave and planted a tree.
Carney, who was visiting Ireland on the way to the G7 meeting in France, on Saturday said countries like Canada and Ireland needed to join in a “dense web of connections … ad hoc coalitions” to survive and thrive in a world where the post-Cold War rules-based order is breaking down.
“Ireland and Canada are navigating a global rupture, not a quiet transition,” he told students at Trinity College Dublin.
“I suggest that amidst this change, amidst this disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful, a force for good,” he said.
Irish prime minister Micheal Martin, whose country takes over the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1, told reporters his government would work to “put flesh on the bone of an enhanced European Union-Canadian relationship.”
(Reporting by Graham Fahy; )
