An emotional high point came in the nearby crossroads village of Aghagower, where Carney’s paternal grandparents, Robert Carney and Nora Moran, grew up on adjoining farms on the lands of Lord Sligo before emigrating together to Canada in 1925.
Waiting to meet Carney outside St. Patrick’s Church in Aghagower were dozens of cousins and hundreds of people from the surrounding community, including at least one impressively articulate local boy, as well as Ireland’s prime minister, Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
Carney tried to shake everyone’s hands, all the while noting that Mass was supposed to start at 11:30 a.m.
“I don’t want to hold up the service,” he said at one point before stopping to take a picture with 17-month-old Malachy Morgan, who had arrived with his Irish-Canadian mother donning a Montreal Canadiens jersey and nibbling on a toy hockey stick. Carney told them, in French, how pleased he was to see the jersey, “particularly in the west of Ireland.”
Inside the church where his grandparents were baptized, Carney sat in the front pew beside his nearest relatives living in Ireland, Pat Carney and Maureen O’Malley, who are first cousins of his late father, Robert Jr.
After Mass, Carney popped into Aghagower’s only shop, which does triple duty as the village’s post office and pub, and toured a cemetery beside the church bearing a 10th-century round tower and more than a few headstones with the Carney name.