{"id":88249,"date":"2026-06-14T19:44:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/88249\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T19:44:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T19:44:07","slug":"sun-shines-on-canadian-prime-minister-as-aughagower-welcomes-world-leader-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/88249\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun shines on Canadian prime minister as Aughagower welcomes world leader \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although he didn\u2019t say it in so many words, Mark Carney<\/a> was helping launch another Maga movement: Make Aughagower Great Again. As he walked the tiny village near Westport<\/a>, the Canadian prime minister was surrounded by evidence that, long before his grandparents emigrated from it a century ago, this had once been an important place. <\/p>\n

St Patrick established a church here, now in ruins. Later Christians added a round tower.<\/p>\n

The many other ancient monuments include a holy well, a bath where pilgrims washed their feet on the way to Croagh Patrick, and even (discretely relocated in more recent times to a safe distance from the church) a sheela-na-gig.<\/p>\n

But a sign of the village\u2019s less happy modern history is that its living population is now greatly exceeded by the dead. There are no fewer than five cemeteries in Aughagower, of varying antiquity, whereas overground residents are fewer than 1,000, barely a tenth of the pre-Famine peak.<\/p>\n

And yet, with its small stone bridges and the babbling stream running underneath, it all made for a picture-postcard backdrop to be admired and photographed by a busload of visiting Canadian journalists.<\/p>\n

If you were designing a film set for the ancestral village of a returning Irish emigrant made good, it would be hard to improve on the real Aughagower.<\/p>\n

After attending Sunday mass and paying respects at the graves of his ancestors, Carney paused to address the media over one of the more photogenic cemetery walls.<\/p>\n

It became a trilingual press conference. While he stuck mostly to English, he was asked by one of the Quebec media if this was \u201cun moment \u00e9motif\u201d and agreed it was: \u201cOui, bien sur!\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Canadian prime minister Mark Carney\u2019s grandfather\u2019s heroics during the Civil WarOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He also demonstrated the benefits of a brief Irish lesson from Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin<\/a>, when noting that in the old language, Aughagower meant \u201cfield of the spring\u201d.<\/p>\n

Carney added: \u201cFrom the spring springs out all these relationships and ties over the centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lamenting that Aughagower lost one-third of its population during the Famine years to death and emigration, he welcomed that 180 years later the traffic between Ireland and Canada was two-way now.<\/p>\n

One small piece of evidence to this effect had greeted him on the way to mass at the modern St Patrick\u2019s Church. It took the form of 17-month-old Malachy Morgan, whose Mayo<\/a> father Owen met Malachy\u2019s Canadian mother Mary Rose Connell in Montreal some years ago, before the couple moved to Ireland together.<\/p>\n

Malachy was wearing a Montreal Canadiens (stet) jersey and wielding a miniature ice hockey stick, a sure-fire way to attract the attention of a Canadian prime minister in Mayo.<\/p>\n

In a similarly astute tactic, Jack Langan, a local nine-year-old, had invested the day before in a Canada soccer jersey. That also earned a brief audience with the prime minister.<\/p>\n

Carney later planted an oak tree in the village green, surprising locals with his horticultural skills. \u201cHe\u2019s used a shovel before \u2013 fair play to him,\u201d commented one woman.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Mark Carney pays tribute to John De Chastelain in Dublin lectureOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Poet Ger Reidy, tasked with commemorating the visit, opted wisely not to attempt the task of creating a poem lovely as a tree. Instead, he struck a political note, evoking the village\u2019s ancient history, including ruin by the Vikings, while appealing to Carney to help save the world from modern pillagers: \u201cAs democracies are subjected to coercion\/we look to Canada as we\u2019ve done before\/and with pride to our cherished native son\/to convene a coalition of the anti-war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier, at Westport House, the prime minster had met President Catherine Connolly, who joked about them climbing Croagh Patrick together. In fact, Carney and his wife had already climbed the Reek, in 2017, when he also visited Aughagower.<\/p>\n

But he was a mere governor of the Bank of England then, \u201cand it rained\u201d. Now he was back as a world leader. And much to the delight of local politicians, the sun shone on him, on the visiting international media and on Aughagower\u2019s finest hour (for at least a millennium).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although he didn\u2019t say it in so many words, Mark Carney was helping launch another Maga movement: Make…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[31177,17,111,31189,33637],"class_list":["post-88249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-micheal-martin","tag-canada","tag-mark-carney","tag-mayo","tag-westport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}