AUGHAGOWER: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Sunday met distant cousins in his grandparents’ home village in the west of Ireland on a visit to celebrate his Irish roots while urging closer cooperation in the wake of a global geopolitical “rupture”.

Grandfather Robert Carney and Nora Moran emigrated to Canada in 1925 and married in Vancouver, where Robert got a job in the Canadian Pacific Railway Police and later joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Carney’s father was born in 1933 and would later become a professor at the University of Alberta.

“I have a lot more cousins than I realised,” Carney quipped to reporters after attending mass in the Catholic church in Aughagower village, where his grandparents were born. Carney also visited the family grave and planted a tree.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2026