{"id":507783,"date":"2026-06-19T10:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/507783\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T10:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:48:14","slug":"how-irish-is-andy-burnham-the-possible-next-british-prime-minister-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/507783\/","title":{"rendered":"How Irish is Andy Burnham, the possible next British prime minister? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Burnham<\/a> has cleared a path<\/a> back to parliament. <\/p>\n

Polling indicates<\/a> many members of the United Kingdom\u2019s Labour Party back him, and much fewer back anyone else. <\/p>\n

That makes him the t\u00e1naiste, in the heir-apparent sense, to the taoiseachdom of the UK, currently held by Keir Starmer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which means it\u2019s time to check how Irish he is. At first glance the link doesn\u2019t seem strong: Burnham is a Saxon surname. His mother\u2019s name, Eileen Mary Murray, is more promising, but possibly a dead end. It \u201ccame via Scotland\u201d, per Andy in a 2013 interview<\/a> with a Scottish magazine.<\/p>\n

The Murrays were Protestant and his father\u2019s side of the family Catholic, which reportedly caused some tension initially<\/a>, but his support for Everton apparently cleared the way. Burnham himself was raised Catholic.<\/p>\n

He has reported some specific Irish heritage farther back. His Louth ancestry is more recent, for example, than that of former US president Joe Biden. <\/p>\n

His family, according to his own account<\/a>, left Drogheda for Liverpool \u201cin the late 1800s\u201d, which is decades after Owen Finnegan<\/a> departed Carlingford to begin preparations for begetting a US president.<\/p>\n

In a 2010 interview<\/a>, Burnham revealed that he and his family had consulted research on their ancestry that revealed \u201clots of people, Finnemores and Kellys and other names, coming from parts of Northern Ireland to work in the docks in Liverpool\u201d at the time, mentioning Donegal in particular.<\/p>\n

Now that he has won the Makerfield byelection, clearing the path to possibly triggering a Labour leadership contest and winning it, he would possibly be in the top five most Irish UK prime ministers in history. Only the Dublin-born Duke of Wellington and a few others (Tony Blair\u2019s Donegal mother, Jim Callaghan\u2019s Famine-emigrant grandfather) are unambiguously ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy Burnham has cleared a path back to parliament. Polling indicates many members of the United Kingdom\u2019s Labour…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85530,42,5455,1194,43,15888,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-507783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-andy-burnham","tag-headlines","tag-joe-biden","tag-keir-starmer","tag-news","tag-tony-blair","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507783","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=507783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}