Canadian Prime Minister Carney visits the Irish village of his grandparents on the eve of the G7 summit

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met distant cousins on Sunday in his grandparents’ home village in the west of Ireland. This visit was to celebrate his Irish roots while advocating for closer cooperation in light of a global geopolitical “rupture.”

Grandfather Robert Carney and Nora Moran emigrated to Canada in 1925 and married in Vancouver, where Robert secured a position with the Canadian Pacific Railway Police before later joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Carney’s father was born in 1933 and later became a professor at the University of Alberta. “I have a lot more cousins than I realized,” Carney remarked to reporters after attending mass in the Catholic church in Aughagower village, where his grandparents were born. Carney visited the family grave and planted a tree.

Carney, who was visiting Ireland on the way to the G7 meeting in France, stated on Saturday that countries like Canada and Ireland needed to join in a “dense web of connections … ad hoc coalitions” to survive and thrive in a world where the post-Cold War rules-based order is breaking down. “Ireland and Canada are navigating a global rupture, not a quiet transition,” he told students at Trinity College Dublin. “I suggest that amidst this change, and disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful, a force for good,” he said.

Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, whose country assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1, informed reporters that his government aims to “put flesh on the bone of an enhanced European Union-Canadian relationship. Canadian Prime Minister Carney visits the Irish village of his grandparents on the eve of the G7 summit.