Canadian prime minister heads west to ancestral homeland

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has travelled to County Mayo on the second day of his state visit to the Republic of Ireland.

Carney, who spent Saturday in Dublin with Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin, is due to meet his cousins on Sunday in Aughagower - the village his grandparents, Robert and Nora Moran, left when they emigrated to Canada in 1925.

Carney has said he is proud of his family heritage and described his Irish ancestry as a "big part of who I am".

Irish President Catherine Connolly met Carney in Westport House on Sunday morning.

During his Mayo visit, the Canadian prime minister and his wife Diana Fox Carney are expected to attend Mass at the parish church and visit a graveyard where some of his relatives are buried.

Carney plans to meet more than 20 of his cousins including Pat Carney and Maureen O'Malley, first cousins of his father and two of the prime minister's closest Irish relatives.

Maureen's daughter, Rosaleen Heraty, told Ireland's national broadcaster RTÉ about the family connection.

"Mam and Pat's father was John Carney and he was the brother of Robert Carney, who is Mark Carney's grandfather. Imagine, his grandson is the prime minister of Canada," she said.

"It's all we can talk about, generations of the Carney clan, and we are so excited to finally meet him.

"If you compare photos of him and his grandfather Robert, there is an uncanny likeness. I noticed it when I spotted him on the telly when he was Governor of the Bank of England. I saw the name Carney and saw the face and said it to Mam.

"She hardly missed a beat and just said 'ah yeah, we haven't seen them for years'," said Heraty.

Heraty, manager at the Townhall Theatre in Westport, said she has been busy preparing for the civic reception on Sunday evening to honour Carney.

During the ceremony Carney will be presented with a commemorative history of the Carneys, written by local Westport historian Harry Hughes, alongside fellow researchers and editors James Kelly and Micheál Casey.

The Carney and Moran families were tenant farmers on the estate of Lord Sligo.

The Carney homestead, located in the townland of Ayle, was a standard rural dwelling of the time: a thatched cottage with two windows in the front. Nine people lived in two rooms, with a third room added later.

The Moran home in the townland of Mace North was nearby.

Both Ayle and Mace were in the parish of Aughagower, where, according to local lore, St Patrick is believed to have stopped off on his way to Croagh Patrick.

The prime minister's grandparents would have faced much hardship during their life in Ireland, living through a period of upheaval and transformation that followed the Irish famine.

When they left, they would have become part of the wave of mass emigration that saw more than one million people sail from the island.

The couple emigrated to Canada in 1925, married the following year and had three sons.