U.S. President Joe Biden made a gaffe Wednesday during remarks in Ireland when he mistakenly referred to a New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, as the Black and Tans, a British police-turned-paramilitary force known for its violent suppression of Irish rebels during the early 1900s.
While speaking at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk, Ireland, Biden began a story about his shamrock tie and how he received it from Irish rugby player Rob Kearney after his team defeated the New Zealand team at Soldier Field in Chicago in November 2016.
“You see this tie I have with this shamrock on it?” Biden said. “This was given to me by one of these guys right here. He was a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.”
Notably, the White House’s official transcript of the comment has crossed out “Black and Tans” and has “All Blacks” in brackets beside it.
The Black and Tans were constables operating as part of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which was the British police force operating in Ireland from the 1800s until 1922. They became widely known while fighting the growing independence movement in Ireland and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the country’s War of Independence in the early 1920s.
The Black and Tans and the related auxiliary recruits brought in in the early 1920s became notorious for their brutality and attacks on civilians, carrying out extrajudicial killings, arson and looting.
This is not Biden’s first verbal misstep. During his recent trip to Canada, he mistakenly praised China instead of Canada for opening up pathways for migrants before quickly correcting himself. The slip came amid recent allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian politics.
In September 2022, Biden asked where Rep. Jackie Walorski was in the crowd during a conference.
Walorski had died in a car accident in early August, and Biden later apologized to her family in a meeting in the Oval Office.