'It feels wonderful': Canadian prime minister Mark Carney on arriving ‘home’ to Mayo
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney holds toddler Malacy Morgan, during a visit to Aughagower, in Co Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. Picture date: Sunday June 14, 2026.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney was in Westport House in Co Mayo to meet President Catherine Connolly on Sunday.
Mr Carney is the first Canadian prime minister to visit Mayo. His visit also marks the first bilateral visit by a Canadian leader to Ireland in close to 10 years.
Mr Carney arrived in Dublin on Saturday and spent Sunday in Mayo, his ancestral home.
His paternal grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, were from Aughagower in Co Mayo but emigrated to Canada on the steamship Montnairn in July 1925 and married in Canada a century ago, in April 1926.
“I don’t remember the sun here,” Mr Carney said, smiling, as he greeted locals gathered outside Aughagower church in the bright Co Mayo sun.
As he walked into the church, Mr Carney stopped to greet little Malachy Morgan, aged 17 months, who was wearing a Montreal ice hockey shirt and holding a tiny ice hockey stick. He picked the little boy up in his arms.
His parents, Mary Rose Connell, who is Canadian, and Mayo man Owen Morgan, met in Montreal but have recently moved back to Mayo.
They drove the 40 minutes from their home to witness the Canadian Prime Minister’s visit.
“We didn’t want to miss it,” Mary Rose said.
“Getting Malachy and him [Mark Carney] in a photo was the dream. It was a really cool moment when he picked him up.
“He said it was great to see a Montreal jersey, especially in the west of Ireland. We’re really proud of him [Mark Carney]," Mary Rose said.
Jack Langan and Áron Gibbons, both aged nine, shook Mr Carney’s hand in the Mayo village.
“It was a memorable day,” Jack said.
The prime minister admired Jack's sign, saying 'Welcome home prime minister Mark Carney,' which was made carefully from a Rice Crispy box and red markers this morning.
"He said it was very good," Jack said.
The Carneys and the Morans were tenant farmers on the estate of Lord Sligo, according to research by the Westport Historical Society.
“Robert and Nora were raised during an era of great upheaval and transformation in Ireland.
“Their families had lived through the aftermath of the Great Famine and witnessed waves of mass emigration,” research from the Westport Historical Society said.
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The Canadian flags lining the streets of Aughagower represent the Canadian people and the force for good that Canada is in the world, Mr Carney said.
His grandparents left that village more than 100 years ago at a time of great diffculty and poverty following the famine.
But in Canada, his father would become the first person in his family to go to university.
And Mr Carney is now leading the country, a reflection of “what’s possible,” he said.
The visit also represents what’s possible in Ireland today and celebrates the progress that has been made in both societies, he said.
And both countries now have a responsibility to promote internationally the values they share, like respect for human rights, valuing diversity, valuing freedom, he said.
Mr Carney said that it “feels wonderful” to be back in his paternal grandparents’ home of Aughagower.
“I’ve had an amazing welcome,” he said in Aughagower village.
“I have a lot more cousins than I realised. I've met many of them.”
The people of Ireland and Canada share “such strong feeling of kinship,” he said.
“President Connolly mentioned to me this morning that Aughagower means the field with the spring.
“And from the spring springs out all these relationships and ties over the years and the centuries.
“It's the 180-year anniversary next year of, unfortunately, the start of the famine. In this area, one-third of the people were lost to the famine or emigration.
“But 180 years later, the flow is not one way,” he said, with “prosperous Canada coming to Ireland and Ireland coming to Canada, everyone bonded together and bonded with the same values".
Visiting the Abbey and the burial places of his great-grandparents had been emotional, he said.
At an event at Dublin Castle on Saturday, the Taoiseach suggested that the prime minister’s historical ties to Ireland stretch back even further.
He said that after visiting the Book of Kells in Trinity College, the two men saw a page in the Book of Armagh that linked Aughagower to the country’s patron saint.
Mr Martin said: “The page opened for Tírechán’s account of St Patrick’s journey through Mayo and he visits – you won’t believe it – Aughagower before going to Croagh Patrick.”
He added: “In that paragraph, Patrick consecrates a church in that place, Aughagower, with the maiden Mathona, who’s clearly setting up, we think, a nunnery there.
“And Patrick said to the people gathered ‘there will be good bishops here, and from their seed, blessed people will come forth forever in this sea’.”
Mr Martin went on to joke: “I knew he was a visionary, but I never quite knew that St Patrick was that visionary – and he clearly had Mark Carney in mind.”
The Taoiseach also referenced the “extraordinary journey” of Mr Carney’s grandparents in search of a better life across the Atlantic.
“They could scarcely have imagined that one day their grandson would return to Ireland as Prime Minister of Canada, welcomed by the people of the country they left behind.”
He told Mr Carney that when he walks the roads his grandparents walked in Mayo, he would discover that “Ireland never forgets her own”.
Referencing the poem Thresholds by Irish poet John O’Donohue, Mr Carney told the same event: “My grandparents crossed their threshold in Mayo a century ago – into a life of a country that was still building itself, as Canada always has.
“And they were part of four and a half million Canadians who are the product of similar decisions.”
He added: “Today, half a million people who travel between our countries every year cross thresholds.
“Now, there’s one other threshold that I’ll mention at which Canada, Ireland, Europe now stand – and that’s the rupture in the global system.
“From rules-based to arms-based, from right to might, from values to vanquished.
“Where will we go, and to what purpose? And I’d suggest that the thresholds that we have crossed and those before us have crossed, the shared values that have been forged in doing so, will bring us forward.”
On Saturday, the two leaders announced a new “bilateral co-operation framework” on trade and investment, life sciences, research and innovation, and security and defence.
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