![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2.84939391.jpg\" "\\"Canadian")
Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin (Conor O Mearain\/PA)<\/p>\nCanadian prime minister Mark Carney has arrived at Westport House to meet President Catherine Connolly.<\/p>\n
Mr Carney is the first Canadian prime minister to visit Mayo. His visit also marks the first bilateral visit by a Canadian leader to Ireland in close to 10 years.<\/p>\n
Mr Carney arrived in Dublin yesterday and will spend today in Mayo, his ancestral home.<\/p>\n
His paternal grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, were from Aughagower in Co Mayo but emigrated to Canada on the steamship Montnairn in July 1925 and married in Canada a century ago, in April 1926.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t remember the sun here,\u201d Mr Carney said, smiling, as he greeted locals gathered outside Aughagower church in the bright Co Mayo sun.<\/p>\n
As he walked into the church, Mr Carney stopped to greet little Malachy Morgan, aged 17 months, who was wearing a Montreal ice hockey shirt and holding a tiny ice hockey stick. He picked the little boy up in his arms.<\/p>\n
His parents, Mary Rose Connell, who is Canadian, and Mayo man Owen Morgan, met in Montreal but have recently moved back to Mayo.<\/p>\n
They drove the 40 minutes from their home to witness the Canadian Prime Minister\u2019s visit today.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t want to miss it,\u201d Mary Rose said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting Malachy and him [Mark Carney] in a photo was the dream. It was a really cool moment when he picked him up.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said it was great to see a Montreal jersey, especially in the west of Ireland. We\u2019re really proud of him [Mark Carney],” Mary Rose said.<\/p>\n
Jack Langan and \u00c1ron Gibbons, both aged nine, shook Mr Carney\u2019s hand in the Mayo village.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a memorable day,\u201d Jack said.<\/p>\n
The prime minister admired Jack’s sign, saying ‘Welcome home prime minister Mark Carney,’ which was made carefully from a Rice Crispy box and red markers this morning.<\/p>\n
“He said it was very good,” Jack said.<\/p>\n
The Carneys and the Morans were tenant farmers on the estate of Lord Sligo, according to research by the Westport Historical Society.<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert and Nora were raised during an era of great upheaval and transformation in Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir families had lived through the aftermath of the Great Famine and witnessed waves of mass emigration,\u201d research from the Westport Historical Society said.<\/p>\n
The Canadian flags lining the streets of Aughagower represent the Canadian people and the force for good that Canada is in the world, Mr Carney said.<\/p>\n
His grandparents left that village more than 100 years ago at a time of great diffculty and poverty following the famine.<\/p>\n
But in Canada, his father would become the first person in his family to go to university.<\/p>\n
And Mr Carney is now leading the country, a reflection of \u201cwhat\u2019s possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The visit also represents what\u2019s possible in Ireland today and celebrates the progress that has been made in both societies, he said.<\/p>\n
And both countries now have a responsibility to promote internationally the values they share, like respect for human rights, valuing diversity, valuing freedom, he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Carney said that it \u201cfeels wonderful\u201d to be back in his paternal grandparents\u2019 home of Aughagower.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had an amazing welcome,\u201d he said in Aughagower village.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a lot more cousins than I realised. I’ve met many of them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0The people of Ireland and Canada share \u201csuch strong feeling of kinship,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Connolly mentioned to me this morning that Aughagower means the field with the spring.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd from the spring springs out all these relationships and ties over the years and the centuries.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s the 180-year anniversary next year of, unfortunately, the start of the famine. In this area, one-third of the people were lost to the famine or emigration.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 180 years later, the flow is not one way,\u201d he said, with \u201cprosperous Canada coming to Ireland and Ireland coming to Canada, everyone bonded together and bonded with the same values”.<\/p>\n
Visiting the Abbey and the burial places of his great-grandparents had been emotional, he said.<\/p>\n
Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin (Conor O Mearain\/PA)<\/p>\n
At an event at Dublin Castle on Saturday, the Taoiseach suggested that the prime minister\u2019s historical ties to Ireland stretch back even further.<\/p>\n
He said that after visiting the Book of Kells in Trinity College, the two men saw a page in the Book of Armagh that linked Aughagower to the country\u2019s patron saint.<\/p>\n
Mr Martin said: \u201cThe page opened for T\u00edrech\u00e1n\u2019s account of St Patrick\u2019s journey through Mayo and he visits \u2013 you won\u2019t believe it \u2013 Aughagower before going to Croagh Patrick.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIn that paragraph, Patrick consecrates a church in that place, Aughagower, with the maiden Mathona, who\u2019s clearly setting up, we think, a nunnery there.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd Patrick said to the people gathered \u2018there will be good bishops here, and from their seed, blessed people will come forth forever in this sea\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Martin went on to joke: \u201cI knew he was a visionary, but I never quite knew that St Patrick was that visionary \u2013 and he clearly had Mark Carney in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Taoiseach also referenced the \u201cextraordinary journey\u201d of Mr Carney\u2019s grandparents in search of a better life across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey could scarcely have imagined that one day their grandson would return to Ireland as Prime Minister of Canada, welcomed by the people of the country they left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told Mr Carney that when he walks the roads his grandparents walked in Mayo, he would discover that \u201cIreland never forgets her own\u201d.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2.84938359.jpg\" "\\"Canadian")
Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin TD greets Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (Conor O Mearain\/PA)<\/p>\n
Referencing the poem Thresholds by Irish poet John O\u2019Donohue, Mr Carney told the same event: \u201cMy grandparents crossed their threshold in Mayo a century ago \u2013 into a life of a country that was still building itself, as Canada always has.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd they were part of four and a half million Canadians who are the product of similar decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cToday, half a million people who travel between our countries every year cross thresholds.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, there\u2019s one other threshold that I\u2019ll mention at which Canada, Ireland, Europe now stand \u2013 and that\u2019s the rupture in the global system.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom rules-based to arms-based, from right to might, from values to vanquished.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere will we go, and to what purpose? And I\u2019d suggest that the thresholds that we have crossed and those before us have crossed, the shared values that have been forged in doing so, will bring us forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the two leaders announced a new \u201cbilateral co-operation framework\u201d on trade and investment, life sciences, research and innovation, and security and defence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has arrived at Westport House to meet President Catherine Connolly. Mr Carney is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1111,61,60,43,1112],"class_list":["post-500512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-court-and-crime","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-politics-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}