Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has urged closer international cooperation, warning of a “global rupture” as he visited his ancestral home in the west of Ireland.
Mr Carney, visiting Ireland ahead of the G7 meeting in France, spent Sunday celebrating his Irish roots in Aughagower, County Mayo.
His grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, emigrated from the village to Canada in 1925, marrying in Vancouver. Robert Carney joined the Canadian Pacific Railway Police, later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His father, born in 1933, became an Alberta University professor.
After attending mass at the local Catholic church in Aughagower, where his grandparents were born, Mr Carney quipped to reporters, “I have a lot more cousins than I realised.” He also visited the family grave and planted a tree.
However, the visit also carried a stark geopolitical message. Speaking at Trinity College Dublin on Saturday, Mr Carney argued that Canada and Ireland must form a “dense web of connections … ad hoc coalitions” to thrive as the post-Cold War rules-based order disintegrates.
He declared, “Ireland and Canada are navigating a global rupture, not a quiet transition.”
He suggested, “amidst this change, amidst this disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful, a force for good.”
Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, whose country assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1, pledged his government would work to “put flesh on the bone of an enhanced European Union-Canadian relationship.”
Meanwhile, US president Donald Trump is set to meet with Middle Eastern leaders at the G7 summit in France next week, senior US officials said on Saturday, and he is expected to speak with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump is scheduled to travel to Evian, France, for the G7 summit early Monday after attending UFC Freedom 250, a mixed martial arts event at the White House, on Sunday.
