Andy Burnham has cleared a path back to parliament.
Polling indicates many members of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party back him, and much fewer back anyone else.
That makes him the tánaiste, in the heir-apparent sense, to the taoiseachdom of the UK, currently held by Keir Starmer.
Which means it’s time to check how Irish he is. At first glance the link doesn’t seem strong: Burnham is a Saxon surname. His mother’s name, Eileen Mary Murray, is more promising, but possibly a dead end. It “came via Scotland”, per Andy in a 2013 interview with a Scottish magazine.
RM Block
The Murrays were Protestant and his father’s side of the family Catholic, which reportedly caused some tension initially, but his support for Everton apparently cleared the way. Burnham himself was raised Catholic.
He has reported some specific Irish heritage farther back. His Louth ancestry is more recent, for example, than that of former US president Joe Biden.
His family, according to his own account, left Drogheda for Liverpool “in the late 1800s”, which is decades after Owen Finnegan departed Carlingford to begin preparations for begetting a US president.
In a 2010 interview, Burnham revealed that he and his family had consulted research on their ancestry that revealed “lots of people, Finnemores and Kellys and other names, coming from parts of Northern Ireland to work in the docks in Liverpool” at the time, mentioning Donegal in particular.
Now that he has won the Makerfield byelection, clearing the path to possibly triggering a Labour leadership contest and winning it, he would possibly be in the top five most Irish UK prime ministers in history. Only the Dublin-born Duke of Wellington and a few others (Tony Blair’s Donegal mother, Jim Callaghan’s Famine-emigrant grandfather) are unambiguously ahead.
