Even by the shameless standard of attempting to claim every American president as Irish, Joe Biden’s April 2023 visit to Ireland was remarkable — not because of the U.S. president’s genuine affection for the land of his great-great-grandfather, but because the three-day agenda read more like a prolonged family bonding retreat than a serious attempt at forging deeper transatlantic ties.

In reality, Biden’s view of Ireland — mired in his ancestors’ escape from poverty, washed down with a heady dose of prose and poetry — represents an increasingly distant part of Irish-American folklore. This is old immigrant America: white, European, chip-on-the-shoulder Catholic; cops and firefighters downing whiskies as rebel songs bleed out from Irish bars in nameless U.S. cities.