Stealing their hearts away

United States President Joe Biden has recently been through his beloved Ireland, less like a dose of salts than a river of soothing treacle.

- JANE CLIFTON

The normally measured and non-editorialising media here found themselves on a royal tour-style footing, reduced to intoning, over extended nightly coverage, things like, "What flavour of oice cream d'ye tink he'll choose here in Dundalk?" 

Resistance would have been churlish. Were any superpower leader to visit New Zealand professing such a crush, a similar welcome would have been rustled up. It's priceless global publicity - and doubtless we, too, would have thought we absolutely deserved it.

But while Biden's ecstatic love-bombing charmed the bejesus out of his hosts, it caused comical umbrage across the sea, where English commentators launched an indignant tug-of-war over Biden's English-versus-Irish DNA.

Barack Obama might have thought his "birther" opponents aggressive in alleging he was secretly born in Africa and ineligible for office. That had nothing on the fury of a certain stamp of Brit whose culture Biden had by omission relegated as less romantic, beguiling and courageous than that of the upstart Irish.