Joe O'Biden's Irish home

County Mayo is adored by Hollywood, the US President-elect – and Dea Birkett

- Dea Birkett

Until the American election, few outside the island of Ireland could point to Mayo on the map.

Far from the maddening film crowd of West Cork, where director David Puttnam’s and actor Jeremy Irons’s crew hang out, Mayo isn’t favoured by the fashionable.

But now a spotlight has been thrown on this sprawling west-coast county, with over 700 miles of coast. President-elect Joe Biden is proud to be a Mayo man, with his roots in the small town of Ballina, where his great-great-greatgreat-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, emigrated from after the 1847 famine.

And this year’s Christmas Hollywood release Wild Mountain Thyme, filmed in Mayo and starring a red-headed, begorrahing Emily Blunt, is already causing a storm. Her accent and Christopher Walken’s have been bashed for their amateur Oirishness, as Mary Kenny writes on page 40.

Mayo also starred in The Quiet Man (1952), starring John Wayne as an American returning to Ireland.

I recognise this westerly pull. Thirty years ago, I made the four-hour journey from Dublin to the county capital of Castlebar. I didn’t drive back. Now I call Mayo my home.

So what’s so magical about this windswept corner of the Emerald Isle? The north coast, from the Bellmullet peninsula to the ancient forts of Killala, is a string of small, sandy beaches dipping between unconquerable cliffs, battered by the Atlantic. Even on a pleasant August afternoon, you can travel for over an hour without meeting another car.