Although he didn’t say it in so many words, Mark Carney was helping launch another Maga movement: Make Aughagower Great Again. As he walked the tiny village near Westport, the Canadian prime minister was surrounded by evidence that, long before his grandparents emigrated from it a century ago, this had once been an important place. St Patrick established a church here, now in ruins. Later Christians added a round tower.The many other ancient monuments include a holy well, a bath where pilgrims washed their feet on the way to Croagh Patrick, and even (discretely relocated in more recent times to a safe distance from the church) a sheela-na-gig.But a sign of the village’s less happy modern history is that its living population is now greatly exceeded by the dead. There are no fewer than five cemeteries in Aughagower, of varying antiquity, whereas overground residents are fewer than 1,000, barely a tenth of the pre-Famine peak.And yet, with its small stone bridges and the babbling stream running underneath, it all made for a picture-postcard backdrop to be admired and photographed by a busload of visiting Canadian journalists.If you were designing a film set for the ancestral village of a returning Irish emigrant made good, it would be hard to improve on the real Aughagower.After attending Sunday mass and paying respects at the graves of his ancestors, Carney paused to address the media over one of the more photogenic cemetery walls.It became a trilingual press conference. While he stuck mostly to English, he was asked by one of the Quebec media if this was “un moment émotif” and agreed it was: “Oui, bien sur!”[ Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s grandfather’s heroics during the Civil WarOpens in new window ]He also demonstrated the benefits of a brief Irish lesson from Taoiseach Micheál Martin, when noting that in the old language, Aughagower meant “field of the spring”.Carney added: “From the spring springs out all these relationships and ties over the centuries.”Lamenting that Aughagower lost one-third of its population during the Famine years to death and emigration, he welcomed that 180 years later the traffic between Ireland and Canada was two-way now.One small piece of evidence to this effect had greeted him on the way to mass at the modern St Patrick’s Church. It took the form of 17-month-old Malachy Morgan, whose Mayo father Owen met Malachy’s Canadian mother Mary Rose Connell in Montreal some years ago, before the couple moved to Ireland together.Malachy was wearing a Montreal Canadiens (stet) jersey and wielding a miniature ice hockey stick, a sure-fire way to attract the attention of a Canadian prime minister in Mayo.In a similarly astute tactic, Jack Langan, a local nine-year-old, had invested the day before in a Canada soccer jersey. That also earned a brief audience with the prime minister.Carney later planted an oak tree in the village green, surprising locals with his horticultural skills. “He’s used a shovel before – fair play to him,” commented one woman.[ Mark Carney pays tribute to John De Chastelain in Dublin lectureOpens in new window ]Poet Ger Reidy, tasked with commemorating the visit, opted wisely not to attempt the task of creating a poem lovely as a tree. Instead, he struck a political note, evoking the village’s ancient history, including ruin by the Vikings, while appealing to Carney to help save the world from modern pillagers: “As democracies are subjected to coercion/we look to Canada as we’ve done before/and with pride to our cherished native son/to convene a coalition of the anti-war.”Earlier, at Westport House, the prime minster had met President Catherine Connolly, who joked about them climbing Croagh Patrick together. In fact, Carney and his wife had already climbed the Reek, in 2017, when he also visited Aughagower.But he was a mere governor of the Bank of England then, “and it rained”. Now he was back as a world leader. And much to the delight of local politicians, the sun shone on him, on the visiting international media and on Aughagower’s finest hour (for at least a millennium).