Prime Minister Mark Carney gestures to the crowd during the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in Montreal last year.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Mark Carney didn’t just show up at the Irish ambassador’s St. Patrick’s party in March. The Prime Minister stayed and he spoke. He told a story about being grounded by his Irish roots when he held a powerful post, as governor of the Bank of England.
The governor’s office, Mr. Carney told the crowd, was arranged to impress the powerful. But when he moved in, he posted a little map of the corner of County Mayo, where his grandparents came from, to remind him, he said, of who he was and where he came from.
This weekend, Mr. Carney will retrace those roots, in a visit to the village of Aughagower which, according to its Wikipedia page, “has around 40 houses, a pub and a shop.” It’s the village that the Prime Minister’s grandfather, Robert Carney, left in 1925 to go to Canada.
“He’s going to see the graves of his great-grandparents. He’ll go to mass where his family had mass. He’ll see where they were brought up. He’ll walk the roads they walked,” John Concannon, Ireland’s ambassador to Canada, said.
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There is surely expected political public-relations value in the Prime Minister walking through his origin story. But Mr. Carney is clearly attached too: He became misty-eyed when he talked about his roots at Mr. Concannon’s residence. And he is a prime minister who likes to draw on the symbols of heritage in politics.
The business of the Irish visit, sandwiched between a trip to Paris and the G7 summit in Evian, France, is about future ties. Ireland is keen to pitch itself as a gateway to the European Union for Canadian business. Mr. Carney is keen to move Canada closer to the EU.
In July, Ireland will take on the rotating presidency of the EU. When Mr. Carney meets Micheal Martin, the country’s leader, or Taoiseach, on Saturday, the talk will be taking more steps to wire Canada closer to Europe.
That’s been a key goal of Mr. Carney’s since his first days in office. He came to power arguing that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war required Canada to expand its trade and political ties with others, starting with Europe.
Last year, in Brussels, he unveiled a “strategic partnership” agreement with the EU – not a path toward joining a bloc on another continent, but a series of smaller steps toward integration, including joining structures such as Security Action for Europe, or SAFE, a program for joint weapons purchases.
In May, Mr. Carney was a non-European guest among EU leaders at a meeting of the bloc’s political committee. Now there is talk of inviting Canadian cabinet ministers to some meetings with their EU counterparts.
And a bill to close off a long series of challenges and delays in formally ratifying the 2017 Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement passed Ireland’s senate, the Seanad Eireann, on Tuesday – and will go next to the President of Ireland, Catherine Connolly, for her formal signature.
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Now comes the question of whether those things will be translated into concrete outcomes. Mr. Carney wants trade and investment, above all. Executives from Canadian companies such as OpenText, Geotab, Constellation Software, and Canada Life are expected to be at some of the events around Mr. Carney’s visit.
Ireland is keen to position itself as an English-speaking country with a common-law system and an economy built in many ways as a base for multinationals trading in the EU market.
It’s obvious that trade with the EU isn’t going to replace Canada’s vastly larger trade with the United States. Still, Mr. Carney has shifted the country’s foreign policy closer to Europe, notably on support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. In addition, he has sought to push trade ties closer, and symbolically made Canada a plus-one at the EU party.
And he is a prime minister who favours the use of the symbols of heritage and historic affinities in politics. His first public utterances after being sworn in as prime minister in March, 2025, included a reference to Canada’s “bedrock of three peoples, Indigenous, French, and British.” Within days, he travelled to France and Britain.
When he set out steps to tighten ties with Europe last year, he declared Canadians to be the most European of non-Europeans. Mr. Carney tends to employ symbols of shared heritage as impetus for developing closer future ties. In Ireland, in a kind of homecoming to the village his grandfather left a century ago, he will be cast as the symbol.