Bidens, Blewitts and lots of baby kissing

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK Lisa Coen sent in this picture of her godson Rían Nolan with Enda Kenny and Joe Biden, taken today in Ballina.

Neill O’Neill
In a Vice Presidential motorcade somewhere in Mayo

If you were on the roads of Mayo today, chances are you encountered the unfamiliar sight that is the almost one-kilometer-long motorcade of US Vice President Joe Biden.
There are not too many people who command a fuss like this, but for the deputy to the most powerful person on the planet, Mayo is pulling out all the stops today and tomorrow.
Quite simply, you have never seen anything quite like this – unless you recall the visit of then President Ronald Regan in 1984, though security for VPOTUS (as he is called by the Secret Service and just about everybody else) is likely every bit as intense in today’s world as it was for the Commander-in-Chief 34 years ago.
Air Force Two (as any plane carrying the US Vice President is known) touched down on the runway of Ireland West Airport Knock shortly after 1.30pm and taxied to a private area, where media, schoolchildren and enough armed personnel to invade a small country were waiting away from public eyes.
An Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his wife, Fionnuala, with other politicians and local and airport officials, waited at the foot of the plane’s stairs to greet Joe Biden and members of his family. After a quick welcome and blessing by Fr Richard Gibbons from Knock, the vice president then jogged the short distance to the excited local schoolchildren, who formed the welcoming party, waving Tricolours and Star Spangled Banners.
One schoolchild asked Mr Biden if he could tell President Obama that “I think he’s great,” and the response was that he would be delighted to pass the endorsement on to his boss.
With no time to wait, the media were rushed off to the awaiting transport in the motorcade, and somewhere between the mean-looking guys with the automatic weapons and the ambulance at the rear (just in case anything happened to VPOTUS) we departed like a scene straight out of Hollywood, looping around the enormous military plane that had brought the Bidens and their entourage to Mayo, and hitting out the N17.
Crowds lined the roadways, peering out of cars and gardens and standing at junctions waving Mayo jerseys as the train of Chevrolet Suburbans carrying the Bidens, military support units, other support vehicles, buses of staff and media, all flanked by at least a dozen Garda motorcycle outriders, sped to Ballina. The motorbike escort ensured that every oncoming car was stopped, every junction blocked. Mayo’s roads never saw such a spectacle, but such a train of vehicles never moved so freely on them either.
In Ballina, huge crowds lined the streets to greet the Bidens. A walk down the Bidens’ ancestral home Garden Street saw the Vice-President meet and greet with hundreds of individuals, some waving giant posters, and one woman shouting ‘there’s no show like a Joe Show’. There was more baby kissing than even Enda Kenny could manage by VPOTUS, and enough Secret Service agents with their stereotypical dark shades to make it seem like a sunglasses convention.
Joe Biden genuinely seemed to enjoy the afternoon, though his team of press handlers nearly went into cardiac arrest when his brother Jim, wandering freely and mostly unnoticed, was surrounded by the Irish media gang, hungry for a soundbite.
They need not have panicked; he spoke of his mother and his family history, revealing, bizarrely, that he is related to famous Irish rugby-playing brothers Rob and Dave Kearney. Producing a business card with their names scribbled on them, he said he has to meet them, and asked if it is true that Rob is better than Dave. Over to George Hook for that one!
After the Biden family dined with their distant relatives, the Blewitt family, they posed for a photograph before being whisked off to Castlebar to do it all over again.
The large contingent of undercover Irish protection Garda officers in my company at present are not happy that we are so far behind on the schedule, as with a third stop in Westport scheduled after the Taoiseach tours Mr Biden around his home town, they are destined to miss the crucial Ireland v Italy game this evening.
We are in the motorcade near Swinford as I write this line. I feel their pain!

MORE See next Tuesday’s Mayo News for more on Vice-President Biden’s visit to Mayo.