Canadian PM Carney visits grandparents' Irish village

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
An Irish village has welcomed Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to explore his migrant roots. -AP

Canadian ‌Prime Minister Mark Carney has met distant cousins in his grandparents' home village in ‌the west of Ireland on a visit to celebrate his Irish roots.

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.

Carney, who was visiting Ireland on the way to the ​G7 meeting in France, ‌on Saturday said countries like Canada and Ireland needed to join in ​a "dense web of connections ...  ad hoc coalitions" to survive and thrive in a world where the post-Cold War rules-based order is breaking down.

"Ireland and Canada are ​navigating ​a global rupture, not ​a quiet transition," he told students at Trinity ‌College Dublin.

"I suggest that amidst this change, amidst this disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful, a force for good," he said.

Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, whose country takes over the six-month rotating presidency of the ​Council of the European Union on July 1, told reporters his government would work ​to "put flesh on ⁠the bone of an enhanced European Union-Canadian relationship".