CONFIRMED: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to make historic Mayo visit
The Mayo News will have extensive coverage in this week’s paper previewing the historic homecoming and will be on the ground for every moment of the high level visit next weekend.
The Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will visit Mayo next weekend.
As revealed by The Mayo News last month, the Canadian premier will visit Westport and Aughagower.
The news this Sunday of the visit is official confirmation of the worst kept secret locally.
Excitement has been building for weeks to welcome home arguably Aughagower’s most famous son.
The visit will have a hugely personal element to it as it is something of a homecoming to where two of his grandparents hailed from.
His grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, emigrated to Canada in 1925 and got married a year later.
At that time, the Carney and Moran family farms were almost within a stone’s throw of each other, either side of the Ayle crossroads.
The couple left Mayo, as so many families and young people did, and across the generations their descendants built lives in Canada, with one of them ultimately becoming Prime Minister. Next weekend, that arc comes full circle.
A decade in the making
This will be the first official bilateral visit to Ireland by a Canadian Prime Minister in nearly a decade, and the first ever official visit to County Mayo by someone holding that office. Carney will meet President of Ireland Catherine Connolly during his time in the west.
It will be second trip to Mayo in a week for the Irish President as she unveiled a plaque to mark 30 years of west Mayo lifeboat station last Saturday.
The Canadian Prime Minister’s Dublin stop will include talks with Taoiseach Micheál Martin focused on agri-food, digital innovation, artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals, and climate.
The Irish leg is part of a broader European tour running June 11–17. Carney first travels to Paris to meet President Emmanuel Macron, with discussions spanning trade, defence, AI, quantum technologies, and critical minerals. The trip concludes at the G7 Leaders' Summit in Évian, where Canada will build on its G7 Presidency priorities from last year, centring on economic security, clean energy, and emerging technologies.