JOE Biden's victory in the US presidential race has merely opened up a new battlefield - a bun fight over his Irish roots.
Ballina set its stall out early, the Co Mayo town enthusiastically decorating its streets with so much red, white and blue bunting low-flying aeroplanes must have been frantically checking their navigation maps, worried they'd banked left too far and were passing over Belfast's Shankill Road.
It had been prepping for this day for years and didn't wait for any official confirmation of the result to get their star-spangled banners out.
And they had a secret weapon, while Mr Biden's great-great-great-grandfather Edward Blewitt, a brick-maker and civil engineer who helped to map Ireland, emigrated from the town 170 years ago, he had left some family behind.
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It wasn't hard to spot his distant cousin. The plumber drives around town with a van emblazoned with `Joe Biden for the White House and Joe Blewitt for Your House'.
Despite the surname Biden being first found in 13th century Hampshire before fanning out to Gloucestershire and Somerset and a family tree with branches in England and France, 10 of the President-elect's 16 great-great grandparents were born in Ireland - leading to more than one family homestead in the Emerald Isle.
His mother Catherine Eugenia `Jean' Finnegan's roots are a matter of inter-county dispute, with her great grandfather traced by American genealogist Megan Smolenyak to Owen Finnegan who emigrated to the US from the Cooley peninsula, Co Louth.
Owen Finnegan and Jane Boyle married on December 8, 1839 in Cooley Parish and it has been suggested that the couple could originally be from Carlingford.
Their son James is identified as Joe Biden's great-grandfather, and his son Ambrose the politician's grandfather.
Biden paid a visit to Carlingford when he visited Ireland in 2018 and stopped off at Lily Finnegan's pub.
Yesterday people in Carlingford held a parade to celebrate the election of Mr Biden.
The Carlingford pipe band played a special new anthem called Our Local Joe, as residents gathered in the town.
The president-elect's distant cousins - the Finnegans - live in the town and were part of the celebrations.
John Owen Finnegan said he wished Mr Biden "all the best and the best of health in his new post" and said "we'd like to see him back in the near future".
Andrea McKevitt, a councillor for the area and another distant cousin of Mr Biden, said the atmosphere in the town was "truly magical".
"When he got elected, everyone was so ecstatic and we are so proud of cousin Joe," she said.
However with the Cooley area's proximity to the border city of Newry has led to a fairly weak claim to be a candidate for an affiliation on a pre-partition basis.
The ships the Finnegans travelled to the US on left from Newry.
In a further twist, however, Derry genealogist identify a DuPont factory textile worker Ambrose Finnegan who emigrated to the US from the city around 1910 as his grandfather.
This one may yet go all the way to the Supreme Court of ancestry.com.
