Joe Biden confused the All Blacks rugby team with the Black and Tans during his visit to Ireland in the US President’s latest gaffe. 

Mr Biden appeared to mix up the New Zealand side with former British soldiers recruited as reinforcement constables during Ireland’s war of independence.

The Black and Tans earned a reputation for violence and carrying out reprisals on Irish civilians and their property. 

Mr Biden said, “You see this tie I have with this shamrock on it?  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, oh God.”

The US President was in the Windsor pub in Dundalk, where he was paying tribute to his distant cousin Rob Kearney on Wednesday night.

Mr Kearney was a former Irish rugby player and gave Mr Biden the Irish team tie after the side beat the New Zealand rugby team at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2016 

The clanger came just hours after Mr Biden gave a speech in Belfast urging the restoration of power-sharing at Stormont. 

From Northern Ireland he travelled to Dublin, where he met Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, before going to County Louth.

Mr Biden’s great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side Owen Finnegan came from the county but fled famine-ravaged Ireland to go to the USA. 

The teetotal President, who is fiercely proud of his Irish roots, told people in the Windsor pub that he also had English ancestry.

But he added that his father’s saving grace was that a quarter of his family came from Galway. 

“That -- that had helped.  You know, Biden is English.  I hate to tell you that.  I don’t hate to -- I’m joking, but it’s true,” he said. 

Asked if it was good to be in his ancestral home, he said: “It’s wonderful. It feels like I am coming home”.

But he warned those in the pub that the “bad news” was that he would be back. 

Mr Biden will spend Thursday in Dublin. 

He will meet with Ireland’s president and prime minister before giving a speech to a joint sitting of both houses of the Irish parliament and attending a banquet dinner at Dublin castle.