He was speaking after former UK prime minister Boris Johnson claimed in his new memoir that Mr Biden had privately told him that he’s “not really Irish”.
Mr Harris is set to travel to the US next week where he will meet the president at the White House.
“There are very many pressing and serious issues that of course I want to speak to the president of the United States with, including our diplomatic relations,” he told the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
US president Joe Biden speaks at St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina, Co Mayo. Photo: Reuters
“I think one question I definitely don’t need clarity from is that Joe Biden considers himself Irish.
“I think Boris Johnson is a person who seems to be very good at selling books and I hope he is certainly much better at that than he was at being a politician.”
Biden’s Irish heritage has long been a part of his political image, with 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents originating from Ireland.
The two Irish lines are the Blewitts, who lived in Co Mayo, and the Finnegans from the Cooley Peninsula in Co Louth, with the earliest traceable ancestor being his great, great, great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, who was born in 1795 and came to the US during the famine.
In his earliest days in the Senate, playing on his Irish lineage assisted Biden in reeling in Irish Americans and white Catholics who had drifted away from the Democratic Party in the decades after both Kennedy brothers were assassinated.
Press accounts of Biden’s family-run 1972 Senate campaign used his Irishness to highlight the similarities to John F Kennedy’s own family-filled Senate bid two decades before.
Throughout his career Biden would regularly name Wolfe Tone, an eighteenth-century Protestant Irishman sentenced to death for his role leading a revolt against British rule, as one of his heroes.
Later, he began citing the Irishman Seamus Heaney as his favourite poet.
As vice president, he continued to incorporate his Irish heritage into his public image.
Just after St Patrick’s Day in 2013, Biden accepted his induction into Irish America’s Hall of Fame with a speech that alluded to his Irish ancestors’ experience of emigration.
Three years later, Biden and a group of his relatives made an official trip to Ireland to reconnect with their roots.
While there, Biden commissioned a genealogy covering his mother’s side of the family, which was released to the public.
He also gave an interview to Ancestry.com, which ran posts about the genealogists’ findings.
Left out of the press, was that most of Biden’s paternal lineage is about three-quarters English, as Biden’s father was actually of British descent.
In 2015, then Vice-President Biden, he stirred controversy when he joked with the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny that “if you’re wearing orange, you’re not welcome in here”.
He made the joke when he met Mr Kenny for a breakfast meeting at his home in Washington, ahead of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
The Democratic Unionist Party described the remarks as “disgraceful and careless” and called on Mr Biden to apologise.
At a St Patrick’s Day event in the White House last year, attended by the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and singer Niall Horan, president Biden said he is “really not Irish” as he has “never had a drink”.
While Biden was joking, experts have named him as the “most Irish” US president in history, due to his well-documented and proven family lineage.
Today’s News in 90 seconds – 4th October 2024
