“Our Local Joe”

In the border county of Louth, in the shadow of a historic castle, a pipe band played a new hit called “Our Local Joe” as people gathered with masks on, tricolor flags in hand and several cardboard cutouts of Biden somehow procured during a pandemic.

News of Biden’s election win sparked celebrations in his ancestral Irish home, where one of the president-elect’s great-great grandfathers emigrated from around the time of the famine. Amidst the ongoing lockdown, the potential of a future presidential had people thrilled.

There is relief for many Irish people that Biden is was the president-elect chosen by the American people, particularly given the strong and dedicated support he has expressed for the peace agreement on this island in the face of Brexit.

Trump allied himself with hardline Brexiteers in Britain who used similar anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric to gain support. Trump even made an ignorant yet enthusiastic reference to a “wall” on the border in Ireland post-Brexit while comparing it to the US-Mexico border. 

Given our history of emigration, it has been difficult for many people in Ireland to understand how Irish Americans can support Trump’s extreme policies that have separated families, vilified immigrants and threatened undocumented Irish people in the US. 

The dependence of Trump on the religious right and his war on access to reproductive healthcare have also been in direct odds with the changes Irish people have fought for politically in recent years, legalizing abortion in a landslide referendum and reckoning with a long legacy of abuse and injustice that took place when Ireland was a de-facto theocracy.

The last time I was in county Louth, the county where Biden’s relatives hope he will visit again as president, it was to speak about my book Republic of Shame and the painful legacy in Ireland of separating children from their families through religious-run institutions. These so-called mother and baby homes, funded by the state and mostly run by religious orders, operated from the first years of the Irish state until as recently as 2006.

Women were sent away in secret, forced to work unpaid for the nuns and separated from their children. The system was intended to hide the reality of pregnancy outside of marriage at a time of repressive morality and also to prevent “repeat offenders” as they were called, to shame women for having extramarital sex as a deterrent. Thousands of children born in these institutions were taken from their mothers and sent to the US for adoption.

A few years ago, at a commemoration for more than 900 children who died in one of these “homes” in Ireland, a woman born in Ireland but now living in America made the parallel between the forced separations of children at the border and her own experience of being taken from her mother when she was only a few years old and forced to grow up in a carceral system.

In the weeks running up to the election, with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett taking place and fears of a quickening crackdown on reproductive rights, a public campaign was gaining speed in Ireland to open up access to records of these religious institutions.

Maree Ryan-O’Brien was adopted through a religious-run institution just one county over from Biden’s ancestral home in Louth. The adoption rights organization she runs, Aitheantas, set up a #RepealtheSeal petition against the sealing of records relating to these religious institutions and adoptions that received more than 196,000 signatures. Biden’s winning of the election was a “huge relief,” O’Brien said, especially “as a cohort who are campaigning for access to our information, a legacy from the forced and coercive adoption policies of the past.”

The news that more than 500 children were still separated from the parents they had been taken from at the border due to Trump’s extreme immigration policy of deterrence was of particular concern. Aitheantas supports a campaign in the US to ensure the right to citizenship for people adopted as children and brought there, with many adopted people at risk of deportation, especially under the Trump administration.  

“We can see from our context in Ireland from the massive support, still ongoing, that we received for the #RepealtheSeal campaign that the separation children from their biological parents touches a nerve,” she said. “It is understood at a human level.”