Joe Biden's life has been less than ordinary

JOE Biden was a no-show last year, so US president Barack Obama’s confirmation last week that his vice-president plans to visit Ireland may not have set the political world on fire.

But Biden is not just another sentimental, if powerful, Irish-American visitor.

While he appears the quintessentially sunny American leader, Biden has been steeled by family tragedy and once said it made him understand how people can contemplate suicide.

It was 1972, the year that Biden turned 30, and that November he had just been elected the youngest senator in modern US history.

Biden told me he credits his fight against the odds to a “stubborn Irish streak”. Certainly, he has needed to be tough to survive.

In the weeks after his Senate victory, as Christmas approached, his family set off to do what many families do at that time of year — they went shopping. But the young congressman would never see his wife or daughter alive again.

His wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old Naomi were killed in a car accident not far from their Delaware home on December 18, 1972.

The following month, Biden was sworn into the US senate, at the bedside of his two injured sons, Beau and Hunter. He began to wonder, he said in his book, Promises to Keep, if “God had played a horrible trick on me”.

The accident filled him with rage.

In his anger, he roamed the streets, desolate and bereft. “I liked to [walk around seedy neighbourhoods] at night, when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight ... I had not known I was capable of such rage,” Biden said.

The pain eased over time, but it has never left him. Recalling the tragedy, 40 years later, he told a gathering of bereaved US military families: “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts [but], because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew, in their heart, they would never get there again.”

So when Biden speaks about death, he knows what he is talking about. He said to families at a 9/11 commemoration:

“No matter how many anniversaries you experience, for at least an instant the terror of that moment returns, the lingering moment of that phone call, the sense of total disbelief that envelops you.

“You feel like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest.”

That ‘black hole’ came for Biden by way of a phone call about the car accident, that fateful Christmas in 1972. “I kept telling myself that everything was going to be OK, but the minute I got to the hospital and saw my brother’s face, I knew the worst had happened.

“My three children had been in the car with my wife when the accident happened. Neilia had been killed and so had our baby daughter. The boys were alive.”

Biden contemplated leaving politics.

But five years later, he met and married Jill Jacobs and went on to become one of the longest-serving senators in the United States, before resigning his seat to be Obama’s vice-president in 2008.

Biden has run for president himself twice, faring poorly each time.

The first was in 1988. Controversy hit his candidacy and, amid accusations of plagiarising a speech by then British Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, Biden withdrew from the race.

Then, he had a brush with death. Doctors discovered he had two life-threatening brain aneurysms. Complications from the surgery led to blood clots in his lungs, which meant further surgery.

But after a seven-month recovery, he returned to the Senate, where he had a distinguished career shaping foreign and domestic policy.

He was back in the presidential ring again in 2008, among a line-up of Democratic hopefuls that included Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

He was reported, last year, to be mulling a possible run again, in 2016, when his rival would again likely be Clinton. But the word in Washington, more recently, is that he has cooled on the idea, and recent polls show him — along with other potential Democratic candidates — trailing badly against the Clinton juggernaut.

Biden is well-liked by Irish-Americans, who see him as a gritty and hard-working politician. “I like Biden,” the president of the Irish-American Democrats support group, Stella O’Leary, told me. “I think he’s a traditional politician in the best sense of that word.

He knows government and Washington very well, but has not been corrupted by it. He also has a great sense of humour and, to use the well-worn American cliché, he is comfortable in his own skin.”

Biden is known to be enormously proud of his Finnegan family roots, in Co Louth.

He also has links to Co Mayo and would like to play a round of golf there, with the Taoiseach, when a firm date is set for his visit.

That was also the plan last year, but US political demands intervened to derail that trip.

Biden frequently speaks about his Irish roots and likes to credit his toughness and resilience to his Irish background. Indeed, bouncing back seems to have been a family trait.

His father, Joseph Biden, who lived first in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before moving on to Mayfield, Delaware, cleaned furnaces for a living and was also a used-car salesman.

But he often fell on hard times and couldn’t find work, and when Biden was born, and for several years afterwards, the family had to move in with Biden’s maternal grandparents, the Finnegans.

The family circumstances improved, but Biden washed school windows and weeded gardens to help his family to pay school fees.

He’s also said that when he would come home from school in a bad mood, because he had been bullied, his mother, Catherine Eugenia ‘Jean’ Finnegan, would tell him: “Bloody their nose, so you can walk down the street the next day.”

One of the reasons Biden was bullied was because he had a stutter.

He overcame it by memorising long passages of poetry and reciting them out loud in front of a mirror.

“It’s a funny thing to say, but even if I could, I would not wish away the darkest days of the stutter,” he said.

“Carrying it strengthened me and made me a better person. The very things it taught me turned out to be invaluable lessons for my life, as well as my chosen career.”

Biden is an eloquent speaker. But he can also be gaffe-prone. He is also seen by some as egotistical.

Then again, Biden and his fellow senators belong to a pretty powerful club — there are only 100 of them in a country of 300m people.

One of Biden’s major achievements as a senator included helping to end the Balkans conflict in the 1990s. As vice-president, however, he has been far less successful in securing Obama top pledges like gun control and immigration reform.

Earlier this month, when pushing the immigration issue, he said that many Americans — including himself — are descended from immigrants who came to the US without legal papers.

“My great-great-grandparents came escaping the [Irish] famine,” he said, “and they didn’t all come here legally.”

But, today, their great-great-grandson is optimistic about the future.

He is immensely proud to be the right-hand man of the nation’s first black president.

“I genuinely find that exciting.

“It’s the reflection of a new America,” he says.