Blewitt’s workhouse job is rather more honestly described by a website in Biden’s home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, than it is in the effusive eulogies you find in most of the Irish media: “Edward lived on Patrick Street, Ballina, and was an overseer in Ballina Workhouse – described as “the most feared and hated institution ever established in Ireland”

Dr. Ciaran O’Reilly also referred to Ballina as a “brutal regime,” and it has been mentioned by others in relation to the involuntary shipping of young girls to Australia, the separation of families, and most significantly the fact that relief was often only granted to families who agreed to surrender their plots of land.

So while there were undoubtedly decent people involved in the 1840s relief system, O’Reilly’s claim that Blewitt had personally saved people “from the dreaded workhouse system,” by running another part of the brutal British regime – the work parties where starving people were obliged to break stones for food – is at this stage either based on the reports of those who were running that system, or on his own subjective judgement or that of others.

And let’s be clear, a supervisor on a work party laying roads during the Great Hunger was not a victim of the British regime, however Biden would like to spin it.