While on a trip to Ireland to celebrate the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, US President, Joe Biden revealed he may have a connection to Nottingham

Understandably the headlines from US President Joe Biden’s tour of Ireland have focused on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, signed 25 years ago. The momentous deal to bring peace to Northern Ireland is a major chapter in world history, and one which Biden, of Irish heritage, feels deeply about.

But the trip around the island of Ireland has also revealed a tantalising detail from the President’s own history books: an ancestral link with Nottingham. Speaking at Ulster University in Belfast on Wednesday, Biden, who has often spoken of his Irish roots, also revealed a local glimpse into his family connections to England.

The link, he told a gathered audience, was partly explained to him by an unnamed British ambassador to the US, whom Biden would often speak with as Vice President under Barack Obama.

Speaking at the event the President said that the ambassador “used to always kid me when I talk about the Irish, he said ‘you are English, just remember that’”.

He added: “Then I found out the name Robinette — my middle name is Robinette — I thought all these years it was French.

“It must have been Huguenots because they came to Great Britain in the 1700s somewhere along the way, and they are all from Nottingham so I don’t know what the hell is going on here.”

The President did not add any details about his family ties to Nottingham, but his accounts square with the history of the French Huguenots - a Christian protestant sect which fled to Britain and other countries to escape Catholic persecution between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Throughout this period thousands of Huguenots left France in search of safer, more religiously tolerant countries including Britain and the pre-revolutionary American colonies.

They are known to have settled and made new homes throughout England in particular. Many of the ancestors of those settlers still live throughout Britain. It was during this era that the word ‘refugee’ was first used, in reference to the Huguenots. Those who arrived in the country are known as ‘England’s first refugees’.

President Biden stayed only briefly in Northern Ireland before heading to the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday afternoon. He was set to conclude his tour on Friday with a visit to the ancestral home of one branch of his family, in County Mayo, before returning to the United States.

With tensions in parts of Northern Ireland currently running high, cautionary statements urging peace have been released by leading figures from throughout the British Isles, including Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who briefly met with President Biden in Belfast earlier in the week.