Joe Biden to honour late son Beau on private visit to Mayo Roscommon Hospice

Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden. Picture: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

US president Joe Biden will honour the memory of his departed son, Beau, on Friday when he makes an emotional private visit to the Mayo Roscommon Hospice in Castlebar.

Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 and the hospice has previously paid tribute to the former Delaware Attorney General.

In 2017, the US president travelled to the Mayo town to turn the sod on the site for the new hospice complex. At the time he described the ceremony as “a deeply moving experience”.

And in a video message to the hospice on its official opening of the €6.3m palliative centre centre two years ago, Mr Biden congratulated its founders.

“I know this special place will bring comfort to the proud people of Co Mayo and Roscommon, and for me, it’ll always have a special place in my heart,” he said.

He thanked the hospice promoters for honouring his son, Beau, who died in 2015 after suffering from cancer.

“The fact that you have etched Beau’s name in memory into the tapestry of this hospice is something my family and I, and his children in particular, will never, ever forget”.

Joe Biden at Dublin Airport on Wednesday. Picture: Julien Behal

The Biden family over the decades have been beset by tragedy.

Just six weeks after he was elected a US senator in 1972, Mr Biden’s wife Neilia and their three children were involved in a car accident, in which their car was hit by a tractor trailer. His wife and their one year-old daughter, Naomi, died, and his two sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured.

Mr Biden’s mother and father were both cared for at a hospice and Beau had a prolonged battle with cancer before passing away in 2015.

The president will visit the hospice on Friday either before or after visiting Knock Shrine where he will be welcomed by Knock priest Fr Richard Gibbons.

On the same afternoon he will visit the North Mayo Heritage and Genealogical Centre in Crossmolina prior to a public speech near St Muredach’s Cathedral.

Details of Mr Biden’s visit to the hospice are being kept under wraps but his appearance has been confirmed by local sources.

A series of road closures and car parking restrictions throughout Castlebar on Friday also indicate that a visit is in the offing.

The Mayo Roscommon Hospice Foundation funds palliative care to people with life-limiting illnesses and their families in counties Mayo and Roscommon.

Quoting WB Yeats’s poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, on his last visit, Mr Biden said: “For all those who’ve come to this hospice in the future, I pray they and their families will find peace there, for peace comes dropping slowly, but it comes. It comes.”